Comment by toast0

> WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power.

Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.

From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.

Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.

Especially at a time when electrical power use was trending down due to efficiency gains and offshoring manufacturing, and samon fisheries were in danger of failing, it made sense to remove dams that weren't terribly productive. And start considering actually doing the work to make the larger dams fish friendly, eventually.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161221064310/http://www.water....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam