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Power-Sharing Pickle by Editorial Board Spokesman Review, June 3, 2007

"Residential exchange program" was worth $300 million to the private utilities' customers
(bluefish notes: $300 million is roughly equivalent to the annualized gross power sales from four Lower Snake River dams and reservoirs.)

If you buy electricity from a private utility in the Pacific Northwest, your bill is going up this month.

OK, your bill is always going up, but this time it's different. This time, none of the extra goes to salaries for utility executives or dividends for investors or upgrades to power plants.

It goes to the Bonneville Power Administration - which doesn't want it.

For this, thank a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court, which last month invalidated the plan that lets BPA share low-cost hydroelectric benefits with investor-owned utilities, such as Avista.

Unfortunately, the court told BPA only what it can't do with the fund; not what BPA can do.
(bluefish notes: $300 million is roughly equivalent to the annualized gross power sales from four Lower Snake River dams and reservoirs.)

Just about everyone who knows anything about a kilowatt in the Northwest is urging the affected parties to work out a resolution within the region. Don't, don't, don't toss it into the unpredictable congressional maw.

Seventy years ago, under the New Deal, the Bonneville Project Act was written, leading to a system of federally owned dams that produced plenty of electricity. For the 1930s.

For decades, BPA could electrify everyone - public utility districts, investor-owned utilities, aluminum plants. By the 1970s, though, population growth and advancing technology had gobbled up BPA's abundance.

Congress responded with what's now called the Northwest Power Act, a mechanism that would let public and private utilities cooperate in the generation and transmission of electricity while sharing the economies of those federal dams. The public utilities would continue to enjoy the power preference that was promised to them in the '30s, and so long as public utilities weren't worse off with the law than without it, BPA would enter agreements with the private utilities to send them payments that would lower ratepayers' bills.

That so-called "residential exchange program" was worth $300 million to the private utilities' customers until the court said BPA had exceeded its authority. The court didn't say the residential exchange program is invalid, just the expenditure level - even though BPA has estimated that a challenge by the private utilities could more than double it.

BPA - which reportedly is looking for a way to ease the short-term impact on affected ratepayers - has urged negotiating a settlement here in the region. So has the Northwest Power Council's executive director, Scott Corwin. So have all six senators, Republicans and Democrats, from Washington, Idaho and Oregon.

And although the region's public utilities seem to enjoy added leverage as the parties who sought the 9th Circuit's ruling, even they have an incentive to bargain at home so they can take a settlement rather than a quandary to Congress for final approval.

In the era leading up to the Northwest Power Act of 1980, the Northwest enjoyed a congressional all-star team featuring such names as Magnuson, Jackson, McClure, Church, Hatfield and Foley, a daunting ring of defense against perennial Eastern assaults on Northwest power.

That threat remains, but the line of defense isn't as stalwart as it once was.

When it comes to solving the problem caused by the 9th Circuit Court ruling, there's no place like home.

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