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agriculture in the Columbia Basin 



The importance of energy policy planning in relation to 

 irrigated agriculture in the Pacific Northwest was recognized by 

 congress in 1980 in the Pacific Northwest Power Plan, wherein BPA 

 was expected to develop conservation programs which would induce 

 more efficient delivery and application systems, water scheduling 

 and deficit irrigation in agriculture, thereby reducing power 

 consumption in the industry by 30% by the end of the decade. 3) 

 BPA has not achieved that goal. The Plan also discussed the value 

 of hydropower generation losses generally due to irrigation water 

 diversions, but gave no explicit consideration to the linkage 

 between firm and nonf irm hydropower production and irrigation water 

 conservation in the Columbia River system. It is notable that ten 

 years later, BPA still has not established such linkages; neither 

 in its cost calculations of the depressing effects of its irrigator 

 discount on recovery of generating capacity through decreased water 

 consumption from the system's hydropower base, nor in the 

 establishment of its conservation goals in the Water Wise program, 

 where after ten years the agency still has not established linkages 

 between the power and water conservation payoffs available through 

 various conservation methods. 



With the advent of the 1993 and 1995 Rate Cases, in which BPA 

 proposes to continue the irrigator discount at increased costs to 

 the agency's revenue base and, in the 1995 Rate Case, consider 

 questions of rate design and their relation to conservation, it may 

 be useful to review the history of the discount and some of the 

 issues which have received less than full discussion in previous 

 Records of Decision on the discount. 



A related issue is generated by a current proposal by 

 Northwest Irrigator Utilities (NIU), the historical advocate of 

 subsidized pumping rates, to assume administrative control of BPA's 

 irrigator conservation program. NIU's success in this endeavor 

 would, in our view and for the reasons we outline below, exacerbate 

 the difficulties currently faced by BPA in implementing its 

 irrigation conservation program — difficulties further exacerbated 

 by the pumping discount — and compound BPA's failure to establish 

 the crucial linkages between power and water savings and the 

 hydropower capacity recapture potential currently imprisoned by 

 irrigated agriculture in the Columbia Basin. While it is probably 

 within the scope of the agency's authority to delegate programmatic 

 responsibilities to independent entities, we believe it is 

 questionable whether the agency can fulfill its statuatory 

 conservation duties under the 1980 Regional Act on the basis of 

 such a demonstrably flawed and inadequate plan as the one recently 

 proposed to the agency by NIU. And the importance of this question 

 goes beyond matters of agency protocol and the minutae of industry- 

 specific conservation programs. Proportiate to its vinanalysed 

 contribution to the regional economy, irrigated agriculture 

 currently asks that we bear a significant burden of external costs 



