Conservation goals are plan for success

Northwest utilities and their customers have reduced projected demand for electricity by 2,500 megawatts over the last 20 years. That’s enough juice to light up two and a half cities the size of Seattle. And it’s almost exactly the amount of conservation the Northwest Power and Conservation Council called for in a regional power plan drafted in 1983.

So you have to give the council, composed of two representatives from each of the four Northwest states, some credibility when it calls for another 700 megawatts of conservation over the next five years. Conservation, along with more wind farms and better management of the region’s transmission grid, is expected to help satisfy the region’s electricity needs up to 2010.

Sometimes goals set are goals met.

“I don’t think we would have gotten anywhere near that much (conservation) without the council,” says Tom Karier, Eastern Washington’s council representative. It helped that members were strong advocates for the first plan, he adds, and that the Bonneville Power Administration embraced its objectives.

The federal legislation that established the council says Bonneville must consult the council plan as it goes about obtaining the resources the Northwest needs to keep the lights on.

Council members will take testimony on their latest blueprint tonight in Coeur d’Alene and Wednesday night in Spokane. The hearings will be the last in a series begun in October. So far, attendance has been sparse, a shame considering how important these plans are to the region’s economy. This version is the first prepared since the electricity rate shocks of 2000 and 2001, which devastated the aluminum industry and others heavily dependent on cheap power. The council had anticipated energy shortages before that crisis, but not as soon or as severe as was the case.

The new plan gives more weight to risk created by each potential solution to meeting the region’s energy needs. And that’s why conservation was the No. 1 resource. Spending money on winterizing older homes or improving construction codes may cost slightly more money up front than other alternatives, but the risk of losing that resource later is small.

The plan estimates utilities will spend $1.2 billion on conservation measures over the next five years.

So-called “demand-response,” second on the resource list, would provide a quicker fix. The concept was a success — at least for the short term — during the worst months of the 2000-2001 crisis. Bonneville repurchased hundreds of megawatts from the region’s aluminum smelters, which consumed huge amounts of electricity. The buybacks made that electricity available for other users, but put many plants on the road to permanent closure.

Smaller, short-lived buybacks are envisioned for the future, as are incentives that would encourage consumers to shift some uses of electricity to hours when demand for power falls off, and supplies are available at less cost.

Further down the list of resources are an improved transmission grid, wind, natural gas, and — deeper into the future — coal and power from generating plants near the tar sands in northern Alberta. Extracting that oil takes lots of steam that could also be put to work driving a turbine. But that resource is distant, coal still has pollution issues, and gas, once everybody’s first choice for new generation, has been compromised by the extreme volatility of fuel prices. If you are trying to avoid risk, the natural gas market is a good place not to be.

More utilities have tilted toward windmills as a new resource. Technology improvements have lowered the cost of wind energy, for which the fuel is always free.

The latest plan not only comes in the wake of the energy crisis, but also in the midst of regional deliberations on Bonneville’s future. Many in the Northwest think the federal agency should just allocate among the region’s utilities what resources it has today — mainly federal dams and the Columbia Generating Station at Hanford — and let each fend for itself if that is not enough to meet its needs.

In other words, the council may craft a fine plan, but for whom?

The Coeur d’Alene hearing starts at 4:30 p.m. at The Coeur d’Alene Resort. The Spokane hearing gets under way at 6:30 p.m. in the Riverfront Ballroom at the Red Lion Inn at the Park.