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a partial customer or wants to be an unbundled customer or if they 

 want to access anything from BPA, there is one set of rates for peo- 

 ple who conform with the plan and there is another set of rates for 

 people who do not. And if they want to come back at a future date 

 and they have departed from the plan, they cannot get back to that 

 first schedule. There is going to be a little penalty. So, at least, 

 they might think at the outset before they make some of these ir- 

 revocable decisions and saddle their ratepayers or the region with 

 unneeded, unwanted, inefficient generation or whatever else, that 

 there is an irrevocable decision beyond just that little acquisition 

 in terms of the condition that they are never going to be able to 

 get back quite to the status they had before because they chose to 

 go outside the path which has been chosen for the region. 



Have you got a comment on that? 



Mr. Duncan. Yes We cannot get a willing buyer, willing seller, 

 arms length, not using any of the region's goods kinds of trans- 

 actions, nor should we. If a utility wants to cut a deal with an IPP 

 and to own its own generation, it is entitled to do that. But it has 

 to carry some commensurate risk. It is pretty clear that a 28 mill 

 resource that an individual utility buys is not necessarily a lot 

 cheaper than a 35 mill resource that Bonneville buys and can 

 shape and manage and dispatch in economical ways to distribute 

 risk and so on. That more expensive resource is not necessarily 

 more expensive. So a utility that buys a 28 mill resource is almost 

 certainly going to come knocking on the door. There may be a few 

 transactions that can be done independently. But I think most of 

 them are going to come knocking on the door because of the eco- 

 nomic value of the other goods, if you will, that Bonneville has to 

 sell. There certainly is not closure on what kind of reciprocal obli- 

 gations there ought to be or what kinds of mechanics you use to 

 implement those reciprocal obligations. You know, you have men- 

 tioned one which I have certainly heard characterized as a different 

 price mechanism. Another one is, you know, first in line. A pref- 

 erence which is a little less onerous, but it says that if you do not 

 have a least-cost plan that has been found consistent with the re- 

 gional least-cost plan or certified by Bonneville or something like 

 that, that you can always be bumped out of line by someone who 

 has. You know, there may be a mechanism that says if you develop 

 your own resource and it turns into a turnkey and you want to 

 bring it back to the region, and right now you have a right to place 

 a load on Bonneville, you will not necessarily have a right to bring 

 that resource in at the price that makes you whole again. 



Mr. DeFazio. We could deal with this in tiered rates, too. 



Mr. Duncan. You could deal with it with tiered rates as well. 



Mr. DeFazio. You could subtract that from the tier that they 

 would have had. 



Mr. Duncan. Yes. But I think, again, you want to deal with this 

 question in two separate chunks. One is, you want to establish con- 

 ceptually whether there ought to be that kind of reciprocal obliga- 

 tion if you are sharing in the region's goods. And second, how me- 

 chanically do you implement that obligation and how forceful or 

 how weak do you want that mechanism to be? But there is a spec- 

 trum of mechanisms that you could use. 



