The Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation clashed for decades over control of western rivers, a rivalry the New Deal finally channeled into the Columbia River Project. President Roosevelt, a hydroelectricity advocate since his New York governorship, authorized Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams in 1934 to generate surplus power beyond irrigation needs. The Depression-era program aimed to tame flooding, enable irrigation, and electrify the rural Northwest.

Congress chartered the Bonneville Power Administration in 1937 to market that power on an equitable "postage stamp rate," letting rural co-ops pay the same as urban utilities. Administrator J.D. Ross designed the BPA Master Grid, a 230 kV ring connecting dams across eight states. By 1945 it spanned three thousand circuit miles, becoming the nation's first integrated regional grid and seeding the modern Western Interconnection.

Cheap, reliable electricity sparked an industrial boom. The Columbia Gorge produced roughly one-third of U.S. aluminum through the 1970s, anchoring Boeing's aerospace dominance. Today that same infrastructure powers hyperscale data centers; AWS us-west-2 sits near the Dalles, John Day, and McNary dams, direct beneficiaries of a transmission network conceived in the 1930s.