West battles power crisis on many fronts

Effects of California energy crunch ripple into other states Northwest lawmakers

By Mike Madden Gannett News Service Idaho Sen. Larry Craig

WASHINGTON -- With the nation transfixed by California's rolling blackouts and power shortages, Northwest lawmakers and utility representatives had a message for their southern neighbor Wednesday: Shape up -- you're dragging us down with you.

As a Senate committee considered the causes and solutions to the Western energy crunch, experts and senators from Oregon, Washington and Idaho argued that emergency orders sending hydropower to California were wreaking havoc on the region and setting the stage for more problems.

They joined a growing clamor here and in California for the Golden State to fix what critics say are severe flaws in how it deregulated its energy markets.

"I'm suggesting to my consumers in Idaho that they send the bill to California," Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, said of electricity rate hikes announced recently by Bonneville Power Administration. "The virus in California is affecting the Pacific Northwest dramatically."

A combination of unusually dry weather and the emergency orders to ship power south has shaken Northwest utilities, experts told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. In most years, California sells extra power to the Northwest in the winter, just as the Northwest often sends electricity to California in the summer.

Instead, generators and utilities in the Northwest are raising rates to help deal with the unprecedented market conditions. BPA plans to raise prices by 60 to 90 percent in the next year; that could have a broad impact on the region's economy, which has been accustomed to cheap, reliable energy.

In Tacoma, Wash., the utility has instituted a 50 percent surcharge, making it much more expensive to heat buildings and keep lights on, the director of Tacoma Public Utilities, Mark Crisson, told the panel.

Rates for Idaho Power Co. consumers may go up 24 percent, Utah Power & Light has proposed a 19 percent increase, and Vancouver, Wash., ratepayers were hit with a 20 percent hike, said Tom Karier, a Washington state representative of the Northwest Power Planning Council, which oversees electricity policy in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.

It's not just residential customers who will feel the pain of soaring electricity prices. Many technology firms have set up along the I-5 corridor specifically because they could run their intricate computer systems cheaply, said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who spent five years as vice president of Real Networks Inc., a high-tech media company, before being elected in November.

"The rates really do transform into an impact on paychecks and the economy of the Northwest," she said.

Low-tech industries have been hit, too. In Bellingham, Wash., Georgia Pacific's large paper mill shut for weeks because it could not afford the electricity it needed

Meanwhile, Northwest lawmakers charged, ratepayers in California have seen almost no change in their electricity bills -- in part because plenty of energy is being shipped in, by order of the federal government.

That isn't the only problem for the region, lawmakers argued.

Between the extra energy sent to California and the dry winter, water levels in the Columbia River federal hydropower system are much lower than they should be, which could wind up hurting returning salmon in the spring, Craig said.

Oregon Sen. Gordon Smith, a Republican, warned that BPA might have trouble making its required payments to the federal treasury because California utilities have been slow to repay it for the power it has sold -- a total of $130 million worth of energy.

And Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden charged that ratepayers and other utilities across the West know too little about what is going on in California's turbulent power market.

"I think it's important for people to get some reliable data about what's going on in this field," Wyden said. "It would provide some real assurance to people in my part of the world that we aren't seeing some real money-laundering schemes."

http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/daily/20010201/LocalNews/77523.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 01, 2001