Westerners Don’t Want Their Utilities Tied To California’s Power Market, Poll Shows

A federal power agency is weighing whether to join a California-operated electricity market, but most Westerners polled say their utilities should stay independent.

A draft decision on which day-ahead electricity market the Bonneville Power Administration will join is expected in December, Bonneville senior spokesperson Kevin Wingert said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. The agency had proposed in March to join a rival to the California market, Markets+.

Seventy-two percent of adults surveyed in five Western media markets said their local utility should stay “independently governed.” Just 10 percent would rather see it coordinate with a “California-run system,” the council’s slides show. The remaining 19 percent said they were not sure.

Causeway Solutions ran the poll for the Western Energy Markets Integrity Council. The advocacy group opposes putting Bonneville’s federal hydropower in what it called a “California-centric trading platform.”

“Pushing these federal assets into the hands of California will have profound adverse consequences for affordability and reliability of power in a region that can ill afford it,” the council said in an Oct. 22 statement to the DCNF.

“The council is an independent not-for-profit organization that receives contributions from power providers and consumers, and individuals. It coordinates with other public interest groups,” Scott Segal, a Bracewell LLP partner speaking for the council, said in a statement. His statement did not name any of those contributors.

“It’s good for California. It’s just bad for everybody else that joins with them,” H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, told the DCNF in a Tuesday interview.

When the DCNF asked who would get power if the whole West ran short, Burnett said, “Well, the big dog eats first.”

He compared it to fights over the Colorado River, saying California gets the most water when there are shortages.

“They have the representatives in the House. They have the biggest population. They get it first,” Burnett said of California.

“California’s disastrous energy policies should serve as a warning to every Western state and no state should allow Sacramento to export its failures across state lines,” Oliver McPherson-Smith, vice chair for energy and environment policy at the America First Policy Institute, said in a statement to the DCNF.

“Customers in other Western states have good reason to resist putting their electricity bills and reliability under the influence of California politicians they didn’t elect and cannot hold accountable,” Jason Isaac, founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute, said in a statement. “Accountability should stay with the people who pay the bills.”

“The Department of Energy is committed to ensuring that American families and businesses, including those across the Pacific Northwest, have access to affordable, reliable, and secure electricity,” a department spokesperson said in a statement to the DCNF.

“Markets+ provides independent governance today,” the Southwest Power Pool, which would run Markets+, said in a statement. “More than one market in the West promotes choice and competition, which enables better outcomes for all participants and states.”

The California Independent System Operator did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Independence came out ahead in each market. Support ran from 64 percent in the Billings, Montana, area to 81 percent in the Tri-Cities of Washington.

Those two results carry margins of error of 4.7 points in Billings and 4.9 points in the Tri-Cities, per the slides.

Among the 1,733 people who picked a side, 88 percent chose independence and 12 percent favored coordinating with California.

Eighty-four percent of those surveyed were at least somewhat worried about their electric bills.

Causeway surveyed 2,095 adults, not registered voters, from Sept. 21 to 25 in the Boise, Idaho; Tri-Cities, Washington; Medford, Oregon; Gilbert and Mesa, Arizona; and Billings, Montana, media markets, the council’s polling page says. The text-to-web survey has an overall margin of error of 2.1 percentage points.

Bonneville’s March proposal set a target start date of Oct. 1, 2028, for Markets+. That came after a May 2025 Bonneville policy that put the agency on a path toward Markets+.

That plan is now under review. Bonneville Administrator and CEO Travis Kavulla wrote in a Sept. 3 letter that he had committed to reviewing that course “with fresh eyes.”

He would propose a change in Bonneville’s next draft decision if the agency sees “concrete actions” on governance of the California operator’s market, he wrote. Independent board leadership topped his list.

California revised its laws in 2025 so a separate regional body could govern that market with a board “appointed through an independent process rather than by state actors,” Kavulla noted.

That body, the Regional Organization for Western Energy, is set to interview candidates for its first CEO in December, RTO Insider reported Nov. 11.

“A more unified grid in the West with greater scale, market depth, and more contiguous corridors may alleviate operational and economic risks that would persist in a more fragmented market footprint,” Wingert, Bonneville’s senior spokesperson said.

Size is the draw. Leaving out Bonneville’s balancing area, the California operator’s market averaged 39 gigawatts of net generation, against 19 for Markets+. Kavulla cited federal Energy Information Administration data.

The Southwest Power Pool’s website lists an address in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Lawmakers from the Southwest Power Pool’s home state want Bonneville to stay the course. Republican Arkansas Sens. Tom Cotton and John Boozman wrote to Kavulla on Sept. 25 backing Bonneville’s “timely participation” in Markets+.

“The importance of independent governance cannot be overstated,” they wrote. The senators added that the California operator “is and remains statutorily beholden to the interests of the State of California.”

Western Montana’s electric co-op managers said in an Oct. 1 letter to Kavulla that their co-ops “strongly favor SPP.”

Advanced Energy United, which represents clean energy businesses, backed Bonneville’s review in September. The group’s senior director, Brian Turner, said the agency “recognizes the important strides that have been made around governance,” Utility Dive reported.

Bonneville has a workshop on its choice scheduled for Nov. 19, Wingert said.

Kavulla asked the regional body to adopt a framework that lets market participants “initiate and evaluate major market proposals,” with the end of November as his target.

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