http://www.kgw.com/print-ready/story.html?StoryID=20869 Power Watch: BPA Hopeful it Can Keep Prices Down
June 5, 2001, 08:30 AM
By AP Staff

With utilities promising to curtail power purchases and aluminum smelters shut down for two years, the Bonneville Power Administration may be able to keep its wholesale price increases below 100 percent when rates go up Oct. 1.

The BPA had warned utilities that wholesale rates could soar by 250 percent to 300 percent when the five-year electricity rates goes into effect, but CEO Steve Hickok says the fall rate hike "will be substantially less than triple digits."

The final figure depends on ongoing negotiations with the aluminum companies and local utilities, he said. Local utilities have been asked to cut their BPA power purchases by 10 percent.

A 70 percent wholesale rate increase would translate to about a 35 percent increase for most residential and business customers.

Bonneville sells electricity produced at 29 dams and one nuclear power plant to six private, investor-owned utilities. It markets nearly half of the power consumed in the Northwest.

Hickok said he expects all but one aluminum company to sign two-year deals in which the BPA would pay the companies to shut down so the agency can avoid having to buy expensive electricity on the open market.

Bonneville spokesman Ed Mosey said a rate forecast to be announced Wednesday will likely be higher than the increase this fall.

"The number you hear Wednesday still might make the hair stand up on the back of your head, but we think we'll get quite a bit more" in demand-reduction agreements by the end of June, when the BPA must officially set its Oct. 1 rates, he said.

The BPA is contractually obligated to provide utilities, aluminum companies and other users about 11,000 megawatts of electricity 3,000 megawatts more than it can generate at the 29 federal dams and one nuclear power plant.

That power is produced at a cost of $24 per megawatt.

Unless it can close the megawatt gap, the BPA will be forced to buy the other 3,000 megawatts on the open market at $300 to $500 per megawatt.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2001

Answers

Alcoa has a long term contract with Bonneville with set rates.

Alcoa will make more of a profit by shutting down their industry and selling the contracted power back to Bonneville then they would make by staying in production.

NorthWest residents have cut back on their power consumption by at least 20% in the past5-6 months. Thats the kind of people we are, we prefer to use preventitive measures instead of waiting until too much damage is done and being forced to act. Have YOU hugged your tree today?

Bonneville is selling thet 20% plus the power that was contracted to Alcoa at up to 300% profit to California, just like the rest of the power industry is. Windfall profits, the whole time increasing the cost of power to the NorthWest consumer by up to 125% (all total-already increased and projected increases).

So I sit here in the dark and cold, paying twice as much as I did during the same time last year while using less than half of what I used last year.

If Bonneville is making such big Freekin profits fromselling power to California, why are we getting these price increases?

Simple, it helps back up the spin about power shortages here, justifying the rate increases, while also forcing people to use less, so there is more to sell down south. What about the 40,000 jobs lost in the aluminum industry? Too bad.

At the mment I have one light, my computer and my refrigerator going. Wonder how much highter my electric bill will be next month? Who's brokering the power industry?

The newly seated senate majority is now looking into FERC not doing their job to find out who is behind it.

I now understand why the Democrats shut up and let so many things slide from the election until now. They were giving them all enough rope to hang themselves, since no one wanted to believe what damage could be done, they had to wait until it was done for people to open their eyes.

The only question now is, how muchof that damage can be undone. Bush really is dense, he actually thought his threats, coercion, and blackmail would work on a national level as it did in Texas. He really did not realize the rest of the country does not have his mentality. His people even threaten reporters who ask questions they dont like. Free press when a reporter is told that "the administration has a long memory". There has been an awful lot of that sort of thing going on up until now. Such as trying to force senators to vote their way or their state programs will be slashed or dropped. Excuse me but isn't the government supposed to do what the people who elected them want it to do, and not tell the representitives who we voted in under conditions of them working to forward OUR agenda, that they HAVE to blindly do as ONE person (Bush) tells them to do?

His agenda, these things he has already shoved down our throats and is attempting to force on us, these were NOT what he told the American people he was going to do while running for office. He LIED about his agenda, he had no intention of doing what he said he was going to do. He gets into office and starts stripping the government of all of our safeguards in health, industry, polution and security. The man must be insane to think that saying one thing and doing the opposite will not be noticed! No one but his administration and the oil concerns wants us to drill in Alaska. Not even most republicans, yet he walks and talks as if that were a campaign promise the majority of Americans were begging him to fullfill. Is it possable that his keepers don't let him know otherwise? Are they so intent on telling him that their agenda is that of the country and hiding the facts and truth from him?

What ever is going on is pretty off the wall. The funniest thing I have heard lately was the republican senaters asking that the Democrats treat them with as much respect and fairness as they were giving to the Democrats before last week. If only *grin*. If they did, the republicans would run crying to anyone who would listen.

We cannot have a government that is run by force by a few over the many. That is a dictatorship.

To use what the republicans said when they didn't get their way "The American People Have A Long Memory".

And the republicans had better remember that, starting now.

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2001