105 



actively negotiating with five of those contractors now and hope to 

 finish that up within the next several months. 



Mr. DeFazio. We'll hear fi-om at least one of those later. Do you 

 have any point at which you discriminate between, say, a short- 

 track process — I'm thinking of the PURPA and the fact that when 

 we have projects, that there was sort of a short-form process for re- 

 view by FERC for smaller megawatts, I can't remember what the 

 cutoff was — and then a more comprehensive review process, higher 

 megawatt. 



Have you contemplated an3rthing like that? Because, again, his 

 complaint is that Bonneville does not differentiate the amount of 

 oversight involved with the 1-megawatt demand side residential 

 bid or 220-megawatt combined cycle combustion turbine. Bonne- 

 ville needs to offer short-term, simplified standard-offer acquisition 

 contracts for small less than 30-average megawatt research acqui- 

 sitions. 



Ms. HiCKEY. That's exactly what we're doing in the most recent 

 round of billing credits, and we need to move to do something like 

 that on the conservation side. 



Mr. DeFazio. Just to follow up a little bit. Just one other ques- 

 tion on the smaller negotiating teams. They gave one example 

 where you had a number of negotiating teams who were working 

 in different areas. Then as you moved through the process and, 

 say, certain areas were signed off on, those people get added to the 

 mass. So ultimately we ended up with 40 or 50 negotiators. 



What I heard from a lot of the utilities and other providers was 

 it wasn't clear who could make the decision, but there were a lot 

 of people in the room. 



Ms. HiCKEY. That's right. In addition to lowering the team 

 size 



Mr. DeFazio. My colleague used the said example at Congress 

 today. 



Ms. HiCKEY. And it's interesting to note that it wasn't at all clear 

 that that was what was going on until we had some early informa- 

 tion from the report. But we've also changed the decision-making 

 structure. So there are two layers of a four-layer structure that are 

 now gone and it goes straight from the team to the decision-maker. 

 So, yes, we have addressed that problem. 



Mr. DeFazio. In the Snohomish testimony, I thought there was 

 something interesting. It goes to the question I asked in the last 

 hearing — I just received the answer recently — which was about the 

 whole issue of curtailment. 



This is perhaps to the Administrator, but either of you who wish 

 to may address it. I asked the Administrator about this pre- 

 viously — and we got into a discussion of testimony, too — on the 

 issue of the curtailment and the reimbursement to the utilities. 

 Yet, on the other side, Snohomish, part of the problem, I under- 

 stand, in their negotiations was that BPA would not compensate or 

 discuss compensation of a utility for its lost revenues with success- 

 ful major conservation measures. 



Now, on the one hand, we won't go out and ask people to curtail 

 power and we'll go outside the region and buy very expensive 

 power to supply our demands. That's in the contracts. We do that 

 because otherwise we'd have to reimburse them if they curtailed. 



