The 2 cents are what you get when you run the power plant or what you pay including the fee for the network, taxes etc?
That is what you pay as an industrial customer. I also guess fish ladders were planned for those plants from day one.
Regarding the fish ladders: I guess the dams in Washington state are all huge, the area where I live and Austria in general is full of small privately owned power plants, I guess most in the 10kW to 50kW capacity range. For them fish ladders are often very difficult to integrate. There is anyways little option because if you don't build the fish ladder you have dismantle you power plant and build back the river to it's shape before the plant, which is often even more expensive.
I've heard of that. It makes even less sense for cases where the river was diverted (not entirely) to the plant many decades ago. So the water to the plant is in a separate channel and the fish can go through the old river bed. But even those channels apparently are required to build fish ladders.
It's a pretty sad story - many power plants in Austria stand still because the ROI times for investing are >50 years.
I think if you can convince them to sell their power for 0.05 US cents or less, you'd find some interested people in this space.