BPA brings the Northwest hydro system into the workspace
Bonneville now has its own map, operating desks, hydro-project readings, and transmission evidence alongside the seven organized US markets.
Start with Bonneville’s balancing area and follow the operating picture from demand and generation to the dams and transmission paths behind it. BPA now has a dedicated map and Radar workspace, bringing the Northwest hydro system into the same research flow as ERCOT, CAISO, NYISO, PJM, MISO, SPP, and ISO-NE.
The workspace keeps the region’s sources in view. BPA publishes balancing-area operations and transmission information; USACE supplies project-level water readings; CAISO publishes the WEIM prices at Bonneville locations. Their units, coverage, and update times travel with the readings, so a five-minute price and a daily transmission workbook can be interpreted on their own terms.
A balancing area on the map
Choose BPA from the balancing-area section of the grid switcher. Its map brings together utility territories, regional transmission and substations, generation, river gauges, and operator events. Named interties put the Northwest’s connections to neighbouring systems into geographic context.
BPA is a balancing authority. WEIM price locations retain CAISO as their publisher, while BPA’s own load, generation, and transmission feeds describe its operating footprint. That distinction remains visible as you move between a map selection, its source, and the agent.
An operating desk built around hydro
Radar opens with demand, a real-time price reference, generation, renewables, and net load. Supply and demand charts sit beside the generation mix, allowing a reader to see how the current balance is being met and when each source last updated.
Use the Transmission and Events desks to continue into published transfer interfaces and scheduled outages. The event record carries the affected facility and the operator’s reported status, linking the broad operating read to a named piece of infrastructure.
Follow the water through named projects
The Hydro projects panel gathers outflow, spill, forebay elevation, and the reporting hour for named projects along the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Expand it to compare Grand Coulee, Chief Joseph, McNary, Bonneville, and the other available projects in one table.
Outflow and spill are reported in thousand cubic feet per second; forebay elevation is in feet. These are project-operation readings from the publishing agency. Their timestamps let you compare the hydro system without treating every row as a simultaneous sample.
Read each path against its limit and its plan
An intertie card shows how the path has run over the trailing week, each hour drawn against the transfer limit that governed the direction it flowed, because BPA restates its limits through the day. The card also lists the work booked against the path from BPA's rolling-year outage plan, under the path names the map already uses.
Radar raises an interface-loading finding when an AC path runs at 80% or more of its directional limit, and a critical one at 95%, and Alerts can follow it. Three BPA Views open the region's transmission map, its power outages, and its interconnection queue.