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to the second level when the Regional Power Act was passed. The 

 fundamental insight of the framers of that Act, on both the con- 

 servation and the generation sides, was that there were regional 

 interests and regional opportunities that no single utility or consor- 

 tium of utilities could capture. 



We needed a regional acquisition mechanism, a publicly account- 

 able one, operating under rigorous and objective decision rules, and 

 we got one in the partnership that is represented by the Bonneville 

 Power Administration and the Northwest Power Planning Council. 



Where we have fallen short in the years since, and we have, it's 

 because we fell short of the model, not because the model itself was 

 flawed, and the task now is to get on course again. We have in our 

 testimony outlined a number of detailed recommendations, some of 

 which are duplicative of what youVe already heard. 



I'll just make a few brief points here. NRDC feels very strongly 

 that we need to set our sights higher in the Northwest for both 

 conservation and renewable energy. And when we say we, we don't 

 just mean Bonneville and this hearing shouldn't just be about Bon- 

 neville. It really is addressed to the utility industry as a whole. 



And we need to set our sights higher not because it's somebody's 

 social agenda, but because right now we're missing out on large 

 cost-effective opportimities to add to the region's inventory of con- 

 servation and renewable energy, and the price of doing that, the 

 very real price in the near term, is writing big checks to California 

 and Canadian utilities. 



And if there's a more unappealing social agenda than that, I 

 don't know what it is. K.C. Golden, who follows me, will address, 

 I think in some detail, our reasons for believing that the region is 

 falling short on conservation acquisition. I think one number helps 

 me put it in perspective. 



Last year we hit our all-time record as a region, Bonneville and 

 the utilities combined, in our conservation acquisitions and we got 

 about 90 average megawatts. Mr. Chairman, 90 average megawatts 

 represents less than one- half of one percent of regional electrical 

 consumption, and that is nobody's definition of knocking the cover 

 off the ball, nobod/s definition of all cost-effective conservation, the 

 goal that all of us are embracing now. 



Even if we were only looking at lost opportunities, and certainly 

 we should be doing more than that at a time when the region is 

 substantially in deficit, we should be doing better. I'll join the ear- 

 lier witnesses in agreeing that we should be doing better on indus- 

 trial and commercial, in particular. 



My guess is that both John Carr and Ken Canon and their con- 

 stituents could make very productive use of increased investments 

 right now, that we need to find a way to get to them. Not, again, 

 because it's a social agenda, but for the competitiveness of this re- 

 gion and some of its most critical constituencies. 



I don't have to, in any way, at this point, reiterate the issue of 

 the targets for the region being floors and not ceilings. Angus Dun- 

 can and Randy Hardy have done that and I welcome it. But I think 

 how short we are right now, less than half a percent of annual con- 

 sumption, marching as if we were meeting the region's targets or 

 the Council's targets only to about 1 percent of consumption, again 



