192 



Mr. DeFazio. Okay. Does anybody else want to comment? 



Mr, Golden. I would just say briefly that, particularly in the 

 context of pubUc power, I'm always a little astonished that we re- 

 flexively accept the idea that lost revenues are a problem. 



From my perspective as a consumer, lost revenues to the utility 

 look like dollars in my pocket, and that's exactly what we were try- 

 ing to achieve by getting a least-cost energy program up and run- 

 ning. 



Now, having said that, I understand that utilities that actively 

 invest in energy efficiency still have meter readers to pay and lines 

 to keep up and bottom Imes to maintain and I think the lost reve- 

 nue problem is a real problem for them in running their operations, 

 a problem, incidentally and ironically, that we've dealt with more 

 successfully for investor-owned utilities than public utilities. 



But I wouldn't, on its face, conclude that because utilities are los- 

 ing revenues, we're on the wrong path in terms of our energy re- 

 source choices. 



Mr. Cavanagh. Mr. Chairman, K.C. is absolutely right to raise 

 it. The same corrective that the investor-owned have applied would 

 work for the publicly owned utilities. That is, they could make 

 small automatic adjustments reflecting fluctuations in SEiles, which 

 are the basic solution that the investor-owned utilities use, and 

 they can solve their own lost revenue problem that way without 

 trying to push it over to Bonneville. 



Mr. DeFazio. When we get into either tiered rates or if I were 

 looking at a tiered rate and a point at which the rate begins to 

 apply the next tier, or you're looking at curtailment and a target 

 for curtailment, part of the problem in establishing equity with 

 these issues, to me, is essentially sunk efforts. 



That is some utilities have gone a long way towards conserva- 

 tion. So, say, if you took a utiUty that has done exceedingly well 

 in terms of reducing demand and you said, okay, your last year's 

 December 28 consumption minus 5 percent is your curtailment tar- 

 get, how do you create equity in the situation where you take an- 

 other utiUty that's done absolutely nothing on demand side and 

 given essentially the same peak date? 



How do you get equity? 



Mr. Golden. First of all, I guess I think that it's still early 

 enough in the regional energy conservation campaign that there 

 isn't so much effort sunk on anyone's part, that this is a huge prob- 

 lem. There's a long way to go for all the utiHties. 



But second of sdl, I think it would be perfectly possible, in deter- 

 mining the allocation that each utility gets under the first tier of 

 the less costly resources, to take account for past conservation 

 achievements. I would think that would be relatively straight- 

 forward. 



Mr. DeFazio. There's a lot more to discuss about tiered rates and 

 I don't want to get too much into that now. We'll be talking about 

 this in the next hearing. But things that have occurred to me are, 

 for instance, you have an area that's growing versus an area that 

 isn't growing and then, well, you don't want to discover its growth. 



If we're going to allow growth, what kind of assumptions do you 

 make about growth or economic development and these sorts of 

 things. I have yet to see a really great tiered-rate model. I'm look- 



