Scoop's Power Bill Shafts The No rthw es t Friends: I am a former Portlander living in Eugene, where I have the honor and responsibility of being one of the five elected commissioners that make policy decisions for Oregon’s largest customer-owned utility, the Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB). This utility is known nationally for innovative leadership in energy conservation and development of decentralized renewable energy sources— hydroelectric, geothermal, cogeneration, wind, and biomass. EWEB is also Portland General Electric Company’s silent pardner, along with the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) in the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant. I was elected to help get EWEB out of that program sponsored hy BPA, The Clinton St. Quarterly recently asked me to contribute an article about the controversial Northwest regional electric power bill currently before the U.S. House of Representatives. This bill, also known as the Jackson Bill or Grandson of Peenuck. has been introduced and successfully managed in the Senate during the present and two previous Congressional sessions by the senator from Boeing, Henry “Scoop" Jackson. This bill would allow BPA to hock the entire federal Columbia River Power System as collateral to back construction bonds sold to pay for completion of nine Trojan-sized nuclear power plants. This plan to spend at least $12 billion on these nukes and then repay it with interest by soaking the ratepayers of the Northwest through the wholesale rates of BPA would be enforced by the federal government if this bill is passed. This vast conspiracy to put the electric utility ratepayers of the Northwest into billions of dollars of debt that would mean electric utility rates so high we cannot even imagine them now. This plan was hatched up by BPA. its “direct service" aluminum company customers, and the Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee (PNUCC) in a high-pressure atmosphere of thinly veiled economic blackmail where the publicly owmed and investor-owned utilities were brought together for shuckin’ and jivin’ by BPA and the Atomic Energy Commission about everything from construction costs to disposal of high- level radioactive waste. But that’s also another story. By John Bartels Here is my testimony before the House Water & Power Subcommittee at their hearing on the Jackson Bill on September 8, 1979. I also describe here an ongoing movement toward utility reform that has been called the “ unfinished agenda” of the 1979 Oregon Legislature. It would create an Oregon alternative to the federal model of electric power ownership and control BPA has cooked up in the Jackson Bill. I’ll also discuss Oregon's new' law on formation of customer-owned “ People’s Utility Districts,” and the comic opera that accompanied the successful formation election campaign that created the Emerald People's Utility- District in November 1978, Pacific Power & Light, the investor-owned utility the committee of rural Lane County people sought to take over, spent $300,000 on the campaign. The Emerald PUD Committee spent $3,000 and won, creating the opportunity to make Lane County an allpublic-power county when the Emerald PUD energizes. If you arc interested in bringing our energy future under democratic control, please contact the Ratepayers’ Union in Portland. In the next issues of The Clinton St. Quarterly’ I’ll go into the Oregon model of local democratic control of our energy systems and supplies, and the vision of an energy future they see for us in Washington, D.C. The Testimony Members of the Committee, my name is John Bartels. I am one of five elected commissioners of the Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB). EWEB has not yet taken an official position on these bills. I speak today as a single publicly owned utility commissioner representing part of the second largest urban area in Oregon. This area is experiencing rapid growth of both population and demand for electric power. In 1970 the ratepayer-owners of EWEB responded to an initiative campaign by voting in a four-year moratorium in nuclear power investments and set EWEB on its present course of bringing on decentralized and renewable sources of generation that are cost effective, environmentally acceptable, and acceptable to our customerowners. We are successful and will continue to be successful in achieving these difficult standards for new electric power generation if and only if such federal legislation as you are considering today is laid to rest. These bills, and indeed all bills introduced in earlier sessions, would expand the authority of the Administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration to allow him to rewrite all the long-term BPA contracts for federal hydropower with the investor-owned utilities and the large industrial customers—mainly aluminum companies. In addition, these bills would allow this federal marketing agency to contract to purchase power from plants that are not built and thereby assume the financial responsibility to pay the debts incurred in construction of very large steam electric power generating plants, either coal or nuclear fired. S 885, the Jackson Bill, would make the ratepayers of the Northwest, who ultimately assume the debt, pay even if the plants never work. BPA was created to perform a limited function; that was to sell the power generated at federal hydroelectric projects in the Northwest to publicly owned utilities to provide an economic “yardstick” by which to judge the rates charged by the investor- owned utilities and to build electric power transmission facilities in such a manner as to expand the electrification of the Northwest in the rural areas and in the industrial and agricultural sectors. During the era of plentiful hydroelectric power supplies, the BPA Administrator wrote 20-year contracts with both the aluminum industry and the investor-owned utilities. Now BPA intends to rewrite these contracts for federal hydropower on the basis of promises to increase the power supplies by adding nuclear and coal-fired plants. These plants, however, are years behind schedule, and the cost overruns are gargantuan. All this cost has been mixed in with the federal hydropower. Although this has been going on for years, these construction costs are just going to hit the BPA wholesale power rates in January 1980. The effect of this has been to mask the true EDIBLES LIVE MUSIC SPIRITS MONDAY Coffee Lolita and Kamora $1.50 Russell Street Special $1.95 (Our Giant Hamburger loaded with everything starting at 6:30 PM THE BEST IN LIVE MUSIC every thursday, friday and Saturday TUESDAY Buck Night Well Drinks Only Steamers Speca' $3.25 Bucket of Steamed Clams starting at 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY Tequila Night All Tequila Drinks $1.50 THURSDAY Ladies Night Cover $1.50 Ladies $.50 1st. Drink For Ladies Free Mile North of the Coliseum - 1 Block off Interstate Avenue 8
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