The Brief

In Washington, a dozen dams dot the Columbia River — that mighty waterway carved through the state by a sequence of prehistoric superfloods. Between those dams and the hundreds of others that plug the rivers and tributaries that lace the region, including California and Nevada, the Western United States accounts for most of the hydroelectric energy the country generates from the waters flowing across its landscape. Washington alone captures more than a quarter of that; combined with Oregon and Idaho, the Pacific Northwest lays claim to well over two-fifths of America’s dam-derived electricity. So when a drought hits the region, the nation takes notice.

That happened in 2023 when, according to a recent report, U.S. hydroelectric power hit its lowest level in 22 years. While the atmospheric rivers that poured across California provided the state with abundant energy, the Pacific Northwest endured low summer flows after a late-spring heat wave caused snowpack to melt and river levels to peak earlier than normal. Though dam turbines kept spinning throughout the year — proving that even during a drought the nation’s hydro system remains reliable — last year offered energy providers in the West a glimpse of the conditions they may need to adapt to as the world warms and seasonal weather patterns shift.

While models predict climate change will plunge California and the Southwest deeper into drought, what awaits Washington and Oregon is less clear. The Pacific Northwest will get warmer. That much is certain. But in terms of the rain that places like Seattle and Portland are known for, things get fuzzier.

“Whenever you bring in water precipitation and you’re looking at climate model results, they go in all directions,” said Sean Turner, a water resources and hydropower engineer with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Evergreen and Beaver states could get drier or wetter — or both, depending on the time of year.

Nathalie Voisin, chief scientist for water-energy dynamics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said much of the latest research suggests an increase in total annual hydroelectric power in the region, but, as Turner noted as well, uncertainties remain. “So as a trend, we see an increase” in annual precipitation, Voisin said, “but we also see an increase in variability of very wet years and very dry years.”

Even during wet years, however, the water won’t fall in a gentle mist evenly distributed from new year to year end. The bulk of it, Voisin said, is expected to come from atmospheric rivers streaming overhead between fall and spring, with rivers running low in late summer as the snow and ice in the mountains that rim the region melt ever earlier and no longer keep the waters as high as they historically have.

These are things that the Bonneville Power Administration — the federal agency responsible for selling energy from the 31 federally owned dams along the Columbia and its tributaries to utilities throughout the region — has a keen eye on. In a fact sheet detailing the agency’s plans to ensure its hydropower resources remain resilient, the administration wrote, “By the 2030s, higher average fall and winter flows, earlier peak spring runoff, and longer periods of low summer flows are very likely.” Those times of lower hydroelectric generation will coincide with periods when rising temps are expected to drive people to demand more from their thermostats to keep comfortable.

The Grand Coulee Dam is seen through the windows of the dam’s visitor center.

(

Don and Melinda Crawford

/

Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

)

Given this, if Western states like California, Washington, and Oregon are to meet the 2045 goals for 100 percent clean energy they’ve set, their utilities are going to have to get creative. As it is, when hydropower fails to meet demand, methane, also known as natural gas, tends to fill the gap — even if power companies can’t say for sure that that’s their backstop.

Seattle City Light, for instance, which provides electricity to over 900,000 people across much of the Seattle area, reportedly has been carbon neutral since 2005 thanks in large part to an energy mix that is nearly 90 percent hydropower — around half of which is supplied by Bonneville Power. But with its standard fleet of hydroelectric plants generating below average, Siobhan Doherty, the utility’s director of power management, said it has had to procure new sources of energy to ensure it can comfortably meet customers’ needs. A fair portion of that power comes from other dams in the area, but some of it is also provided by what Doherty called “unspecified” sources purchased from other providers.

Across the West, when utilities like Seattle City Light purchase energy to cover hydropower shortfalls, most of it comes from gas-powered peaker plants, according to Minghao Qiu, an environmental scientist at Stanford University. As a result, emissions rise. Over the 20-year period examined in a study of how droughts impact grid emissions, Qiu and his colleagues found that temporary prolonged hydropower declines led to 121 million tons of carbon emissions. Qiu also found that the plants belching all that pollution often lay far from where the energy is needed.

While the seemingly obvious solution to this challenge is to rapidly deploy wind and solar, Qiu found that this didn’t actually solve the problem.

“So what really happened there is an implicit market that whoever can generate the electricity with the lowest costs are going to generate first,” Qiu said. This means that solar and wind will send all the energy they can because they’re by far the cheapest; hydropower then provides what it can, followed by fossil fuels like methane to plug any holes. “So when hydropower sort of declines,” Qiu said, “the wind power and solar power is already maxed out,” typically leaving gas plants as the remaining option.

Nonetheless, in a bid to keep its grid carbon-free in the long term, Seattle City Light recently signed agreements to buy energy from two independent solar projects, each with at least 40 megawatts of capacity, and is negotiating other, similar arrangements. The fact Bonneville Power has seen a sharp rise in requests from renewable energy developers to connect to its transmission lines suggests other utilities in the region are exploring similar deals.

While those solar farms, in a sense, address the demands that hydro alone can’t meet, the West’s dams help make utility-scale renewables work. Regardless of the inevitable expansion and improvement of turbine and photovoltaic technology, wind and solar will always be intermittent and weather-dependent. In those moments when the gusts stop blowing and the sun stops shining, something has to top off the grid. “Hydro does that better than anything,” Turner said.

Many of the dams administered by Bonneville Power are already equipped to spin up or down as demand dictates, and their ability to meet these moments was perhaps no more apparent than during the lethal heat dome that gripped the Pacific Northwest for one blistering week in June 2021. As streets cracked and power lines melted, the region’s homebound populations drove electricity demand to record levels. To keep the grid going, Bonneville Power relied on the controversial dams along the lower Snake River. The agency released a statement a month after the heat wave, revealing how critical the four lower Snake River dams were during that disaster. At times, they provided well over 1,000 megawatts of power, which is roughly the average draw in Seattle. And while there are credible reasons to remove the dams, Bonneville Power said that without those resources it likely would have had to resort to rolling blackouts to ensure the system wasn’t pushed past its limits.

That experience, and the many more like it that are sure to come, suggest that even as year-to-year dips impact the nation’s dams, the power they provide will long remain a critical component of a carbon-free future.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/drought/rivers-are-the-wests-largest-source-of-clean-energy-what-happens-when-drought-strikes/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

A new exhibit in L.A. — Vehicles of Expression: The Craft of the Skateboard — arrives this weekend, highlighting the cultural impact, history and artistry of handmade skateboards.

It’s the latest exhibit at Craft in America Center, a museum and library that highlights handcrafted artwork.

Todd Huber, skateboard historian and founder of the Skateboarding Hall of Fame, said before 1962, it wasn’t possible to buy a skateboard in a store.

“Skateboarding started as a craft,” Huber said on AirTalk, LAst 89.3’s daily news program. “Somewhere in the 50s until 1962, if you wanted to sidewalk surf, as they called it, you had to make your own out of roller skates.”

What to expect

Emily Zaiden, the director and lead curator of the Craft in America Center based in Los Angeles, told LAist’s AirTalk the exhibit was tricky to curate.

“What we wanted to do was focus on both the history and then expand into how this has been an object that people have interpreted in so many different ways since the very beginning,” Zaiden said.

Artists who craft skateboards not only think of design, but also of the features that give riders the ability to do tricks, such as wheelies and kickflips.

“The ways that people have constructed boards, engineered boards, design boards … people are really renegade, which I think is really the spirit of skateboarding overall,” Zaiden said. “This very independent, out-of-the-box approach and making boards that allow them to do all kinds of wacky tricks and do all kinds of things that no one imagined possible physically with their body, but through the object of the board.”

Know before you go

The exhibit at Craft in America Center opens to the public on Saturday. Admission is free. The museum is open from noon to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Plans to redesign a stretch of Pico Boulevard with protected bike lanes are moving forward, with construction expected to begin later this year. The lanes are slated to open in spring 2027, just in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics. 

The project would reconfigure about 3.4 miles of Pico between Crenshaw Boulevard and Figueroa Street, adding protected bike lanes, new crosswalks and other street improvements along a major east-west corridor through central Los Angeles.

Drivers and pedestrian would notice some important changes to the street when the project is complete. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s changes will allow cyclists to ride in lanes separated from traffic by barriers or curbs. LADOT will also install new traffic signals at Manhattan Place and New Hampshire Avenue, while also shortening the distance pedestrians need to travel to cross Pico Boulevard.

Additionally, sidewalks and curb ramps that are in poor condition will undergo repairs.

City officials say the changes are aimed at improving safety along the corridor.

Between 2014 and 2023, authorities reported 75 crashes on Pico Boulevard that resulted in severe injuries or deaths, according to city data. Pedestrians were involved in 52 of those crashes, and all 11 fatalities along the corridor during that period were pedestrians.

Plans to redesign a stretch of Pico Boulevard with protected bike lanes are moving forward, with construction expected to begin later this year.

About 12% of injury crashes involved cyclists, according to the latest data.

The bicycle lane proposal would also bring changes to parking along the corridor.

About 270 of the roughly 480 existing street parking spaces along Pico Boulevard would be removed to make room for the protected bike lanes, most of them on the north side of the street. LADOT officials plan to add some parking on nearby side streets where possible and extend parking hours for about 95 existing spaces along the street.

Drivers could see slightly longer travel times, according to officials. LADOT spokesperson Colin Sweeney said the new configuration could add roughly one to two minutes of travel time per mile during peak traffic periods. 

“The department does not expect significant spill-over as a result of these changes but will evaluate the corridor following the project and can respond to such activity with signal timing adjustments and turn restrictions to prevent cut through activity,” he said in a statement.

The transportation department conducted outreach last year with an online survey that received more than 1,100 responses. According to the department, 74% of respondents said they preferred a protected bike lane over a standard painted lane.

The department said an updated project fact sheet and a feedback form in English, Spanish and Korean will be posted on its website later this month. 

The post A dangerous stretch of Pico Boulevard is getting a major redesign appeared first on LA Local.

The apartment building planned on East Morris Avenue in Modesto is exactly the kind of thing that California’s political leaders want to see a whole lot more of: The project promises 44 units of affordable housing — half reserved for people without homes. It’s received zoning approval, weathered public feedback, earned the support of local elected officials and sits beside a busy bus line. Once built, the project promises on-site mental health services, job training and Zumba classes.

What the project lacks is money.

Having quilted together a financial patchwork of local government and corporate grants, private debt, and a plot of land donated by a foundation, it remains just shy of the total needed to break ground.

Six years and 13 funding applications after it was first proposed, the Morris Village project sits ready, but waiting.

An estimated 39,880 affordable units across California are stuck in financial purgatory, according to a new report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit that funds, consults and advocates for affordable housing. That’s 461 “shovel-ready developments” that, like the one on East Morris, are fully designed, legally green-lit and backed with a significant — but still insufficient — amount of money.

Many have “been sitting for a year or two waiting for funding,” said Justine Marcus, policy director for Enterprise’s Northern California office and one of the report’s co-authors. “There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”

For many developers and affordable housing advocates, that bottleneck represents an especially frustrating inconsistency of California public policy. Lawmakers are desperate to see the state build more homes — of all kinds, but especially for people with the least ability to pay the state’s exorbitant rents. State housing regulators have ordered local governments to plan for the construction of an additional 2.5 million units by the end of the decade. One million of those are supposed to be for people making less than 80% of each region’s median income.

As a general rule, that’s a population of hard-up renters that the private market has been unable to profitably serve at scale. To fill that gap, non-profit low-income housing developers typically turn to taxpayer-funded support. At the moment, according to the report, there isn’t enough of that to go around.

Enterprise took publicly available but hard-to-parse applicant lists from seven subsidy programs administered by various wings of California’s state government going back three years. With a combination of number crunching and a little inference, the report estimates that clearing the current backlog would require an extra $4.1 billion, split between state administered grants, low-cost loans and tax write-offs.

Once awarded, this final layer of state subsidy has to be spent in relatively short order. That means this list of 39,880 units comprise a group of affordable housing projects that are all but ready to go, said Marcus. “They kinda have to have their (stuff) together.”

Case in point: Two-thirds of the projects on the list have already received support from at least one other state program. Those dollars aren't awarded to just any developer, said Betsy McGovern-Garcia, vice president of Self-Help Enterprises, one of two non-profits behind Morris Village.

“These are all projects that are close to amenities,” she said. “These are all projects providing resident services. These are all projects that are financially feasible...They are all meeting the bar for what we want to see as a state out of our affordable housing community.”

In February, McGovern-Garcia and her colleagues applied for a final round of financial support from the state “to close the gap” and finally start construction.

“We are optimistic this might be our round,” she said in an interview, her fingers crossed.

A moving bottleneck

California has seen gridlock in affordable housing production before, but the precise location of the traffic jam has changed over time.

When Nevada Merriman was leading a team of affordable developers in Silicon Valley a decade ago, she said local approval was the major hold-up. Getting the legal okay to build low-income housing on a particular site in a particular town required developers to run a gauntlet of planning department and city council meetings, win over hostile neighbors with costly concessions, community meetings and design revisions and to fend off the ever-present possibility of litigation. Because relatively few projects survived that ordeal, the competition for funding on the other side wasn’t especially stiff, said Merriman, who is now policy advocate for MidPen Housing, an affordable developer in San Mateo County.

That began to change earlier this decade. California lawmakers began passing laws overriding these local impediments — especially for affordable projects. All of a sudden more projects were clearing those early regulatory hurdles and competing for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, the federal government’s signature affordable housing construction subsidy. The bottleneck moved further up the road.

But then that too began to change late last year. Buried in President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill from 2025 was a significant boost to the tax credit program. (Specifically, the law increased the total supply of one type of credit while allowing another kind to be spread out over twice as many projects).

Which brings us to the latest bottleneck.

Now projects can get through local approval. They can more easily acquire the final and most important layer of federal financing. But project sponsors typically can’t apply for that until all other financial holes are plugged.

“We’re looking for state sources to fill that gap,” said Merriman. “We want to make sure we don’t leave those federal sources on the table.”

MidPen currently has 1,198 units spread across seven developments waiting for that last bit of funding, she said. “Should there be a source…there’s a pipeline that is ready to go.”

“There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”Justine Marcus, Northern California policy director, Enterprise Community PartnersCalifornia’s last major infusion of public affordable housing dollars came in the form of a voter-approved bond in 2018. That well has run dry. A hodgepodge of funding streams remain.

Adding together funding that has already been approved by legislators but not yet spent and a variety of other state and federal sources, California’s Housing and Community Development department says at least $1.8 billion should be available for affordable developer applicants this year. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal for the coming fiscal year doesn’t include any new discretionary spending beyond that.

Boosters of more funding have reasons to be optimistic. Newsom has taken such an austere posture in early budget negotiations before only to have the Legislature successfully pour hundreds of millions of dollars of affordable housing subsidies back into the final budget agreement.

California lawmakers are also considering a record-breaking $10 billion affordable housing bond for the 2026 ballot. If a majority of voters go for that, “we’d be off to the races,” said Merriman.

Cutting costs

One way to get more affordable housing built is by spending more money. The other is trying to make the existing money go further by cutting costs.

The cost of affordable housing construction is notoriously high in California: A 2025 study estimated that tax credit-financed projects here cost two- to four-times the amount of comparable projects in Colorado and Texas. There is no single reason for this disparity. Land costs in California are significantly higher. So too, often, is the cost of labor. Regulatory barriers like restrictive zoning, slow permitting and stiff impact fees are frequently named as culprits. Sometimes old-fashioned construction methods and materials get blamed.

But there’s also the cost of just waiting around.

A typical affordable development in California will have two or three public funding sources, with some drawing on six or more. Many of these sources are awarded on their own timelines. Each has its own program-specific requirements that can take time to meet. Some are conditional on the receipt of another. As time goes by, developers still have to make payroll, pay interest on pre-construction loans and watch as inflation drives construction costs up further. As delays compound, funding sources that have already been secured might expire, setting things back further.

Each additional funding source delays the start of construction on a project by an average of four months, adding an extra $20,460 per unit, according to an analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.

The Newsom administration is currently tinkering under the hood of California’s affordable housing finance system in an effort to speed things up.

Last year, the governor proposed the creation of the state’s first ever cabinet-level housing agency. The California Housing and Homelessness Agency is scheduled to take over the state’s disparate housing loan and grant programs. The governor’s office also proposed legislative language that would force the new agency and the Treasurer’s Office to operate in tandem, giving affordable housing developers a single place to apply for the state’s various funding programs — and to cut out some of the time they spend stuck in line.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

President Donald Trump threatened to withhold his signature on all bills until Congress passes stricter federal voting requirements — a move that escalates his efforts to change election rules ahead of the 2026 midterms.

In a social media post Sunday, Trump said he won't sign any bills into law until Congress passes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act.

"I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed," Trump wrote.

If passed and made law, the measure would transform voter registration and voting in the U.S. It would require eligible voters to prove their citizenship with documents like a valid U.S. passport or a birth certificate and a valid photo ID. It's already illegal for non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections.

Trump said the legislation should "go to the front of the line." He also praised a guest on Fox News who pressed for changes to Senate rules that require 60 votes to advance most legislation. Trump has previously asked senators to abandon the filibuster in order to avoid the need for Democrats to back bills he favors.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has consistently pushed back on that pressure, saying any plans to change the filibuster do not have support in the GOP conference.

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., reiterated that Democrats will not support the SAVE America Act.

"If Trump is saying he won't sign any bills until the SAVE Act is passed, then so be it: there will be total gridlock in the Senate," Schumer posted on X Sunday. "Senate Democrats will not help pass the SAVE Act under any circumstances."

The GOP-controlled House has passed a few versions of the legislation, but Democrats and some voting rights activists have argued the measure would make voting harder for eligible voters.

The impact of Trump's threat to withhold his signature on all bills remains unclear. If the House and Senate advance a bill and Congress remains in session, any bill would become law within 10 days even without a signature from Trump.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Trump would sign a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security or a supplemental military package paying for the Iran war.

The offices of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Thune did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Copyright 2026 NPR