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Doug Bechtel
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A couple of different things to talk about this week.
Every once in a while something that I say in an OPALCOGRAM results in a lot of interest from our members. Last time I talked about the new Bonneville rates that would go into effect in 1996 and the Residential Exchange payments that Pacific Power and Light and Puget Power received from Bonneville. Several of you asked me for more information about the Residential Exchange.
The Residential Exchange dates back to the early 1980's and the adoption of the Northwest Power Act. Since only non-profit public power utilities are eligible to receive power from the Columbia River hydro electric systems, congress felt that the consumers of the region's investor owned utilities should receive some benefit from them also. The exchange was intended to be a method to equalize residential and farm rates between the inves-tor owned utilities and public power utilities like OPALCO. Currently 10¢ out of every dollar we pay Bonneville (thus 5¢ of every dollar you pay us) goes into this fund. This amounts to about $4 per month on the average OPALCO residential bill. This money is then reallocated to the investor owned utility based on their cost to provide service to the residential ac-counts.
Puget Power has made what many consider to be unwise power supply decisions over the past decade and this has driven their cost of power up and the money that OPALCO and others pay to BPA helps offset these bad decisions. Puget Power residential customers cur-rently receive slightly less than 1¢ per kWh or $10 per month off of a residential bill of 1,000 kWh per month.
In this time of competitive pressures Bonneville is finding that customers, like OPALCO, are no longer willing to pay higher rates so the neighboring utilities can charge lower rates. Don't forget that our rates are higher than theirs to start with. This looks like it is going to be one of the most hotly contested issues in the upcoming rate case.
On another topic, we had an outage on Lopez a couple of weeks ago where a very tall, very spindly tree, far away from the transmis-sion line, fell over and pushed a 14,000 volt power line into a 7,000 volt power line. Our system protection worked properly -- the fuses blew and our circuit breakers tripped, but not before most residences in the area received a very short burst of high voltage. A lot of electronic equipment was damaged by the voltage surge (microwaves, TVs, stereos, etc.). Those people who fared the best had surge suppressors protecting their equipment. In most of these cases the surge protector failed but protected the electronic device. There are many sources of surge protec-tors available and let me suggest that you get them for your fragile electronic equipment.
We continue to work to reduce all of our outages from all causes, but problems like these will occur from time to time and you really need to protect your electronic equipment.
Doug Bechtel
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