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ExpectMore.govExpectMore.gov home pageEXPECT FEDERAL PROGRAMS TO PERFORM WELL, AND BETTER EVERY YEAR.
Program Assessment

Program

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Western Area Power Administration

This program markets and delivers electricity generated at 56 Federal hydropower plants in the central and western U.S., and is the mainstay of the national grid in this area with a 17,000+ circuit mile transmission system.

Rating

What This Rating Means

PERFORMING
Moderately Effective

In general, a program rated Moderately Effective has set ambitious goals and is well-managed. Moderately Effective programs likely need to improve their efficiency or address other problems in the programs' design or management in order to achieve better results.
  • The program effectively delivers power through customer and industry coordination, and the use of alternative financing methods to achieve reliability and power provision objectives.
  • The program's ambitious, long-term reliability goals reflect effectiveness in operating, maintaining and modernizing the system to ensure reliable operations and support for the integrated power grid.
  • The program is constrained through legislative and budgetary limitations which restrict agency efforts in addressing regional and industry issues and concerns.

Improvement Plan

About Improvement Plans

We are taking the following actions to improve the performance of the program:

  • Exercising expanded authority under energy legislation to use non-Federal funding to construct new transmission infrastructure to relieve constraints and accommodate need for increased capacity.
  • Pursuing funding alternatives (net zero, receipt financing) to reduce program appropriation requirements while creating a stable budgetary resource for annual operating costs.
  • Adopting consistent performance measures for use and reporting by the power marketing administrations to ensure opportunities to benchmark and identify best practices for Program operations.

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