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.

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Don and Melinda Crawford

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Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

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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

California’s High-Speed Rail Authority failed this year to push through most of the state legislation it deemed necessary to keep construction of the 171-mile rail line connecting Merced and Bakersfield on its current schedule.

In August 2025, authority Chief Executive Ian Choudri urged state leaders to commit stable state funding and cut red tape that he said had long stalled the project. He pitched several legislative ideas that would allow the agency to tap into local tax revenues and fast-track court disputes, environmental reviews and negotiations with utility companies in the rail line’s way.

“State action is critically needed to maintain the cost & timelines of the program,” he wrote in a January presentation to authority board members.

But only one of Choudri’s essential policy proposals became law. Senate Bill 1425, by Senate Transportation Committee Chair Dave Cortese, a San Jose Democrat, allows the authority to grant permits to outside entities such as utilities, local governments and private developers that want to build on authority-controlled land. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law Sunday.

Most of Choudri’s other pitches remained “concept-level ideas” that the high-speed rail authority never developed into written proposals, said authority spokesperson Micah Flores. When asked why, Flores told CalMatters that the agency is not tasked with writing laws.

“Legislators who learn about the concepts may choose or author legislation independently to help the project,” he said.

Many of those ideas faced fierce opposition from local governments. One proposal — vaguely mentioned in Choudri’s August 2025 report — would have allowed the authority to collect sales and property tax revenues within a half-mile of the rail line, alarming local officials who say it would divert essential funding local governments rely on for social services and road repairs.

“This proposal … is fiscally reckless, legally vulnerable, and fundamentally unfair to the communities expected to host High-Speed Rail facilities,” 11 mayors in the Central Valley and Southern California wrote in a June opposition letter. “Simply put: the state cannot solve a state funding problem by raiding local tax bases.”

After this story was published, Flores told CalMatters that the agency is still talking with local governments and is not proposing any policy, “particularly not one that would override local land-use or tax authority.”

The high-speed rail project is already long delayed: In 2008, voters approved a $10 billion bond to build a high-speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles by 2020 for an estimated $45 billion. The project is now estimated to cost between $126 billion and $231 billion, with a full buildout expected by 2040, according to the authority’s latest business plan. Current plans call for building a first leg linking Merced to Bakersfield.

The project is set to receive $1 billion each year from the state’s carbon market auction proceeds until 2045, a deal Newsom championed last year. But the funding could be in jeopardy under new climate rules from the Newsom administration, which threaten to cut carbon market revenue by half.

The authority’s legislative losses this year could further stall the project, but it’s unclear by how much.

The agency’s business plan calls for the authority to complete the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment by 2033. But that timeline largely relies on the “overly optimistic” assumption that state lawmakers will approve the agency’s legislative priorities into law “almost immediately,” according to a review of the plan issued in July by the Office of Inspector General that oversees the authority.

The authority declined CalMatters’ multiple requests for interviews with Choudri or the chair of its board of directors, Steve Kawa. In a statement, Flores said the agency plans to push for similar legislative concepts next year and provide project cost and schedule updates in March.

It’s unclear what the next governor makes of the high-speed rail project. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra said in May he would “scrap the current configuration” but provided few details, whereas Republican Steve Hilton would cancel the entire project.

Other proposals died

Sen. Henry Stern, a Sherman Oaks Democrat, authored the only other proposal related to high-speed rail this year. His Senate Bill 1411, which had bipartisan support, would have allowed the rail authority to spend more state funds outside the Central Valley segment of the rail line, but the legislation was shelved in May during a process known as the “suspense file” hearing, where lawmakers rapidly kill or approve proposals without explanation.

Under current law, the authority can only spend up to $500 million from its share of the state climate fund on high-speed rail projects outside the Merced-to-Bakersfield portion. Stern’s measure would have lifted that cap and allowed the authority to use the money for early designs, engineering and land acquisition elsewhere along the planned rail route from the Bay Area to Southern California.

Stern said the flexibility would help the authority build “bookend” rail line projects across the state and attract investors from private companies while still building in the Central Valley.

“If you are not unlocking private dollars in those demand centers … you are then leaving money on the table that could otherwise accelerate the entire project. It can lift those boats in the valley,” he said.

But doing so would divert dollars from the Merced-to-Bakersfield project and contradict state lawmakers’ intent just four years ago to keep the funds in the Central Valley, legislative staffers warned in a May analysis of the measure, shortly before it died.

A top priority for the authority this year was to speed up the relocation of overhead power lines, water pipes and other infrastructure that is in the rail line’s construction path, Choudri said at an August board meeting. Utility companies have no incentive to move their lines and the agency does not have authority to compel them or bind them to a deadline, Choudri said.

“We are talking about utilities that were identified in 2017 that are still there in the way,” he said at the meeting. “Minus the legislative action, I just don’t know how else we can solve this.”

Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, authored Senate Bill 445 last year to address the issue. But the measure went through several last-minute overhauls amid opposition from local governments and utilities and also died in the suspense file.

Other priorities Choudri identified included:

• Expedite environmental review for facilities that will provide renewable energy for the rail line;
• Speed up resolution of court disputes over property acquisition, and
• Exempt the authority from paying sales tax on construction materials.

Cortese, a champion of high-speed rail, told CalMatters the rail authority is partly to blame for the legislative losses.

“The governor’s office and the high-speed rail [authority] haven’t asked us to write any bills,” he said. “Have they contributed to these bills not getting passed by simply not providing enough help? Sure, absolutely.”

Still, he said his fellow lawmakers also need to better advocate for the project.

“We can’t have bills like Stern’s bill and Sen. Wiener’s bill just completely stalled out,” he said. “That’s not on the authors as much as it’s on the legislative process that those bills can disappear without a debate.”

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

The city of L.A. has spent around $27 million on the Olympic and Paralympic Games, less than two years out from the summer of 2028.

That’s according to numbers crunched by City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who says he’s tracking city funds used for the Olympics and where they're going.

The tally for now includes $13 million in financing for police vehicles and an additional $14 million in other city departments. The majority of that — more than $11 million — is to pay workers in the City Administrative Office, Public Works and the L.A. Department of Transportation, among other city departments.

Mejia says he’s tracking the spending through the city’s accounting system, logging anything that is marked as an Olympics expense. His office noted that the tally is likely an undercount, since it doesn’t include LAPD expenses beyond the vehicle order.

“The city's trying to make it a no-cost Olympics, right? But we all know that's not true,” Mejia told LAist. “Because they’re spending a lot preparing for it and accelerating a lot of spending.”

Other noteworthy line items flagged by the controller include around $460,000 for “international affairs” within the mayor’s office and more than $3.2 million for a Recreation and Parks program called Universal Play.

A spokesperson for L.A. Mayor Karen Bass did not respond to emailed requests for details about the “international affairs” expenses.

Recreation and Parks spokesperson Rose Watson told LAist via email that Universal Play was the precursor to PlayLA, the youth sports program that private Olympics organizing committee LA28 has dedicated $160 million to.

Despite that, L.A. won’t be reimbursed for the $3.2 million it cost to staff and implement the program, Watson told LAist.

The Bureau of Street Services and the L.A. Department of Transportation did not respond to questions about their Olympics expenses in time for publication.

Paul Krekorian, the former L.A. City Council president who now leads the city’s office on major events, said in an emailed statement that most of the projects listed by the city controller were “key infrastructure improvements that Mayor Bass would deliver with or without the Games.”

He added that requests for city services by LA28 that go beyond what’s deemed “normal and customary” will be reimbursed.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation Wednesday that would have penalized Californians for using smart glasses to record people without their permission in changing rooms, doctor’s offices and other spaces people generally consider private.

The legislation also would have required companies making smart glasses or other wearable devices, starting in 2028, to include a light or some other feature that indicates that the person is video or audio recording. It would have banned the sale of technology designed to help people conceal a recording light or sound on a smart device.

Newsom wrote in a letter explaining his decision that the bill’s definition of a wearable recording device was too broad. He noted that the state already bars people from recording someone without their consent in spaces generally considered private.

Meta Ray-Bans, smart glasses that were rolled out in 2021, have especially grown in popularity, with more than 7 million of the AI-powered devices being sold last year. State Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, who wrote the bill, said it would’ve helped the state respond to the technology’s rapid growth.

“Whatever we can do to protect an individual’s right to privacy, we have to do,” she said.

The bill would have been the first of its kind in the nation and built upon the state’s extensive privacy protections. California is one of about a dozen states that already requires both parties’ consent before a conversation can be recorded via audio or video.

Reyes’ proposal was designed to clarify that it applied to smart glasses and make it easier for someone to tell when those devices are recording. Any person who violated the bill by secretly recording someone would have faced prison time or fines of up to $1,500. A company that made devices that didn’t comply with the bill would’ve faced fines up to $2,500.

But TechNet, a group of executives from companies including Meta, Google and Amazon, said the legislation, known as SB 1130, would have been unfair to businesses and customers.

“California already has extensive laws governing unlawful recording, and as currently written, SB 1130 is not the right approach to addressing these concerns,” TechNet Executive Director Robert Boykin said in a statement.

Meta touted the benefits of its smart glasses in response to Newsom’s veto, including an initiative providing the devices to blinded veterans to help them read documents and identify objects.

“We’re still in the early days of building this technology and we’re committed to continuing prioritizing privacy as we build,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

About a dozen states, including California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, require someone who wants to record a conversation to get the other person’s permission.

It’s important to strengthen privacy laws for these wearable smart devices because it’s not as obvious to tell when a person is using them to record compared to when someone is filming with their phone or a camera, said Justin Brookman, the director of technology policy for Consumer Reports.

In a letter to lawmakers earlier this year about the bill, Consumer Reports referenced a TikTok in which a woman recounted her experience getting a wax when she realized her technician was wearing smart glasses. The technician told the content creator, Aniessa Navarro, that the glasses weren’t on, but the experience was still unnerving, she said in the TikTok. The Consumer Reports letter cited a separate event in which a woman said she was secretly filmed with smart glasses at a gym and harassed online after the video was uploaded to social media.

“The stories are enough to cause alarm, and we need to do something as soon as we can,” Reyes said at the end of the legislative session.

Angelenos are being asked in the November election to make a big change to one of L.A.’s most important agencies, the city’s Department of Public Works.

But even the most plugged-in L.A. voters could be forgiven for having a hard time understanding how exactly the measure, Charter Amendment LA, would do that.

As a reporter trying to explain it, I did too.

I was able to wrap my head around most of what the measure would do with a little research and a few interviews. (We have a detailed breakdown of Charter Amendment LA in our voter guide.)

But one of its most significant pieces — one that would change who leads the Department of Public Works — took some serious digging to fully understand. And I wasn’t alone. It turns out that quite a few officials and experts in L.A. were also puzzled.

Who will run Public Works? Who runs it now?

L.A.’s Department of Public Works manages city facilities and infrastructure, including streets, bridges, sewers, storm drains and treatment plants, as well as City Hall and parts of Los Angeles International Airport. At the top of the department’s current power structure is a five-member Board of Public Works.

Charter Amendment LA would transfer power from the board to a role called the director of Public Works, who would report to the mayor, City Council and city controller.

At first glance, that seemed simple enough.

That is, until I asked what I thought was a straightforward question: “Who is the current director of Public Works?”

I did not get straightforward answers — from multiple city officials, supporters of the measure and its opponents.

• Some said the director of Public Works is the president of the Public Works board, who is generally considered the head of the agency.
• Others said the position has just never been filled. 
• The Public Works Department’s own public affairs representative simply didn’t know. 
• And Mayor Karen Bass’ office didn't respond to LAist’s two requests for comment this week.

Eventually, two current city officials pointed me to the person who’s overseeing these responsibilities.

There’s a backstory.

The disappearing director

The director of Public Works position was created through an amendment to the L.A. City Charter, essentially the city’s constitution, in 1999.

In 2005, the City Council transferred the director’s role and responsibilities to the board’s secretary, which was renamed “executive officer.”

Since then, the Public Works Department effectively hasn’t had a person with the title “director.”

Today, the executive officer position is held by TJ Knight, a longtime city employee. Knight’s official title is acting executive officer of the Board of Public Works.

“The director position has remained in the City Charter but has not operated as a separate position since [2005],” Knight said in an emailed statement to LAist. “Charter Amendment LA would revive and increase the authority of the director.”

If the measure is approved, however, it’s unclear who would become the director.

“Any next steps regarding the position will depend on the outcome of the election,” Knight said.

Calls for change

Overall, Charter Amendment LA aims to streamline how the city of L.A. plans for, budgets for and prioritizes infrastructure maintenance and repairs.

There's wide support for improving how the city handles these projects. The city struggles with aging infrastructure, a huge backlog of projects and a steady stream of complaints about delayed work and deteriorating conditions.

Many of those projects fall under the Department of Public Works. A chorus of officials and public infrastructure advocates, including supporters of Charter Amendment LA, blame the agency’s current structure, at least in part, for the city’s inability to address infrastructure projects in a timely fashion.

They say the board’s bureaucracy slows down infrastructure projects and makes it more difficult to hold a single person accountable for delays. On top of that, they argue the commissioners do not necessarily have extensive experience in public works or engineering. A director would be expected to have a background in those areas.

“If you look at how that impacts service and delivery of their tasks — which is everything from streetlights to curb ramps, to bike lanes, to sidewalk repair — it's very fragmented because there's no one person in charge of overseeing all of it and making sure that it's coherent in terms of its service delivery,” said City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who is backing the measure.

The Public Works Department is also divided into bureaus responsible for managing different sectors, such as sanitation, engineering, street lighting, street services and contract administration. Critics of the current system argue they also have no central leadership to turn to.

Yaroslavsky and other supporters say the answer is putting a strong director in charge rather than the board.

Charter Amendment LA would also give the City Council the power to change or eliminate the Board of Public Works altogether, a prospect that has sparked the measure’s main opposition. Opponents are concerned eliminating the board would do away with an important check and balance on the department at a time when public trust in City Hall has been damaged by corruption and other scandals.

“The Board of Public Works provides essential, open-meeting scrutiny over multibillion-dollar city contracts that Los Angeles taxpayers cannot afford to lose. Charter Amendment LA weakens accountability by consolidating power under a single position,” said City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez.

Other city departments have boards, including the Department of Recreation and Parks, the Harbor Department and the Department of Water and Power. One major difference is that members of the Board of Public Works are the only commissioners in the city who are paid a salary. Some make around $200,000 a year.

It’s not clear what the director position would be paid if the measure is approved by voters in November.

If it does pass — and now that I understand the inner workings of the Public Works Department so well — let’s hope they don’t ask me to apply for the position.