39 



Mr. Thomas. All of it? 



Mr. Hardy. Most of it does. In the case of some fish enhance- 

 ments that are done by the Corps and the Bureau, some portion 

 of that, but usually a pretty small portion, comes out of appro- 

 priated funds, but typically anywhere from 70-90 percent comes 

 from Bonneville funds, and then almost all the other fish program 

 measures are ones that we directly fund. So probably 90-plus per- 

 cent of all of it comes out of power revenues. 



Mr. Thomas. Do you have full supply contracts with all these 

 people? 



Mr. Hardy. Yes, we do. 



Mr. Thomas. If you were a regular commercial utility — of course, 

 the drought is a problem, but you have more problems than 

 drought — what would you be doing? In other words, you don't have 

 the power supply now, do you, to meet the needs of all these cus- 

 tomers? 



Mr. Hardy. Right now we do, but we have interrupted the top 

 25 percent of the aluminum company loads, which contractually we 

 are allowed to do to try to preserve our ability to serve the firm 

 loads of all the rest of our customers. We have enough power to ba- 

 sically keep the lights on and meet the loads, but we have only 

 been able to do that this year because of a significant amount of 

 out-of-region spot market power purchases that we have made from 

 California. 



Mr. Thomas. I guess I am interested philosophically in whether 

 or not a public entity like Bonneville has an obligation to meet the 

 needs of all these folks and whether or not over a period of time 

 you are generally a hydro producer and that is what you sell, or 

 do you intend to go back into coal generating and those kinds of 

 things? 



Mr. Hardy. We have the obligation to meet all of our customers' 

 electric load low growth requirements, and in that respect we are 

 fundamentally different from other Power Marketing Agencies. 



Mr. Thomas. Why do you? 



Mr. Hardy. Because the Northwest Power Act that passed in 

 1980 gave us the obligation to meet the load requirements of all 

 of our current customers, we are in the business of acquiring re- 

 sources to meet those load requirements. 



Mr. Thomas. Have you acquired new customers since that hap- 

 pened? 



Mr. Hardy. We have acquired a few minor new customers, some 

 small public agency customers that have formed, but no significant 

 new customers. Our typical customer base of our firm power cus- 

 tomers is about 155 customers: roughly 120 public agencies, t3rpi- 

 cally small utilities that take all of their power fi*om us; 6 investor- 

 owned utilities, which typically don't take a lot of bulk power from 

 us but take a variety of transmission services; and, finally, 15 di- 

 rect service industrial customers, primarily aluminum companies, 

 that take all of their power directly fi"om us. 



Mr. Thomas. I see. 



As you know, we have just one of your customers in Wyoming, 

 Lower Valley Power and Light, and they are interested in provid- 

 ing gas utility service to their area. Do you have any role in that? 



