After 22 years of megadrought, the ability for Glen Canyon Dam to generate electricity in the coming year is uncertain. The dam may be a long way from Powell, but the city gets a small amount of its power from the Colorado River hydroelectric generators.

“This may be significant enough to impact our rates,” said Powell City Councilor Zane Logan, who chairs the Wyoming Municipal Power Authority (WMPA) Board of Directors.

The city’s power is provided by WMPA, a wholesale electricity provider for eight communities in the state that buys some of its power from the Glen Canyon Dam. Located in northern Arizona, the structure forms Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest manmade reservoir, where lake levels recently dropped to 3,535 million acre feet.

“The unit can no longer generate if the level drops below 3,490 million acre feet. So we have a little bit of space there, but … the snowpack looks dreadful right now,” said WMPA Executive Director Rosemary Henry. 

March and April are the biggest snow months, and so far they’re not producing enough to recharge the reservoir. 

The Glen Canyon Dam provides 80% of the hydroelectric power from the Colorado River Storage project. For WMPA, that’s about 8% of the authority’s energy. The Loveland Area Project, which includes power plants in Montana and Wyoming, is also impacted by the drought, and it supplies 12% of WMPA’s energy. 

If conditions don’t improve, the estimated rate increase to WMPA for those projects will be about 15%. Fortunately, 80% of WMPA’s energy comes from the Basin Electric Power Cooperative, which isn’t projecting any increases in the coming year. 

If the rate increases are passed on by the authority, Henry said it could translate to a 0.1 or 0.2 cent increase per kilowatt hour to the authority’s members.

How that plays out at the retail level in Powell — which currently charges 11.45 cents per KwH for residential customers — is hard to predict. Individual authority members set their own rates, and there’s more than just the wholesale rates on Upper Colorado River hydroelectric power that

It’s also uncertain when any rate changes would come down the pipeline, though it could be as early as July 1. 

“We’re looking through every line item to see if there’s a good way to put that off for a year,” Henry said. “We understand that inflation is affecting everybody.”

There’s another issue that could arise as a result of shutting down generation on the Colorado River. Hydroelectric provides reliable power and without that baseload energy, it can create instability. The loss of Colorado River generation won’t cause blackouts, but it could have an impact on grid resilience. 

“It’s dispatchable capacity that keeps the lights on,” Henry said. 

Precipitation could begin to fall at any time. That would bring up the level of storage in Lake Powell, and change the fortunes for the Glen Canyon Dam. In the meantime, however, the drought is presenting challenges. 

“WMPA and the Bureau of Reclamation are being really creative as we work with other stakeholders to try to come up with a way to trickle us on through to another runoff season,” Henry said. 

In addition to Powell, WMPA members include Cody, Lusk, Lingle, Guernsey, Fort Laramie, Wheatland and Pine Bluffs.