Court won’t hear challenge to electricity regulation

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a federal appeals court ruling upholding the state’s 2000 emergency law blocking backdoor deregulation of Idaho’s electricity system.

Without comment, the high court declined to consider the appeal of eastern Idaho irrigators, ending the attempt to circumvent the regulated power system and thwart a decade of efforts to block deregulation in a state that has among the lowest power rates in the nation.

Charles Wheatley, the Maryland attorney who represented the 900 irrigators making up the Snake River Valley Electric Association, said he had not seen the court order and declined comment.

Last February, a three-judge panel for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the law, passed during an emergency one-day special legislative session, effectively closed a loophole in the state’s Electric Supplier Stabilization Act.

Legislators and regulators feared that loophole could have allowed independent power suppliers to commandeer power customers from the regulated utility that had been serving them, essentially introducing an unregulated power source into Idaho’s regulated system.

The court found that the state had legitimately promoted a policy that restricts competition in the area of electricity supply.

The irrigator association had battled PacifiCorp, operating in eastern Idaho as Utah Power & Light Co., for eight years for the right to buy power at cheaper wholesale prices and funnel it to its irrigation members. PacifiCorp customers, about 60,000 of them in eastern Idaho, generally pay the highest electricity rates in the state.

PacifiCorp had maintained that the association was a sham set up by the irrigators to claim a right to wholesale power when they legitimately should be paying retail power prices as set by the Public Utilities Commission.

To clear the question, the irrigators went to federal court and managed to deflect PacifiCorp’s claim that it could not be sued on the issue. At one point in the 1990s, the association claimed to have had a deal with Enron Power Marketing in Houston for power at 40 percent less than PacifiCorp was charging but Wheatley said it fell through because of the lengthy court battle.

Then when the irrigators finally got the green light to press their claim in federal court, the Legislature reacted with the emergency law.