April 10, 2008
UE-080456 & UE-080576


OLYMPIA, Wash. – Residential customers of Puget Sound Energy (PSE) and Avista will see short-term reductions on their next electric bill after the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (UTC) agreed Thursday to allow the utilities to pass through temporary federal-power credits from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA).

The average PSE residential customer will see a one-time $22.44 credit on their mid-April to mid-May bill. Irrigation customers can expect an average of 36 percent reduction in their July bills.

The average Avista residential customer will receive about $20 in credits paid out in monthly installments of $2.90 between April 11 and Oct. 31.

BPA had suspended the credits after a federal court held last year that the agency’s formula for distributing benefits of the Columbia River hydropower system violated federal law. On Feb. 22, BPA said it would restore a part of those benefits temporarily until a new long-term formula is developed later this year. In March, Avista and PSE agreed to BPA’s interim distribution plan.

At its public meeting Thursday, the UTC accepted the companies’ plans on how they would distribute the temporary payments to their customers. By law, the UTC does not determine the amount of BPA benefits.

BPA provides private utilities in the Northwest with benefits equal to the difference between the cost of the private utility’s power and that of a like amount of BPA’s power. BPA has provided the so-called residential exchange credit to private utilities since 1981 under the federal Power Act.

However, BPA stopped the payments last year in response to a federal court ruling that the formula BPA used to distribute benefits violated federal law.

The BPA interim agreements provide a one-time benefit of $53.7 million to PSE and $6.5 million to Avista.

Both PSE and Avista will use a portion of the interim BPA payments to recover benefits they advanced to customers before the BPA program was suspended.

Spokane-based Avista serves 231,300 electric customers, mostly living in Eastern Washington. Puget Sound Energy, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., provides electricity service to more than 1 million customers living in nine Washington counties: King, Pierce, Jefferson, Island, Kitsap, Kittitas, Skagit, Thurston and Whatcom.