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by reducing demand on the electric system of the region. There 

 have been half a dozen or more studies that have looked at the 

 magnitude of this potential. The conclusion that we in the 

 natural gas industry have reached (conservatively) , is that 

 somewhere between 1,000 and 1,600 average megawatts of electric 

 generating capacity could be saved by shifting residential space 

 and water heating customers from electricity to natural gas. 

 Some studies have shown that the peak capacity savings could be 

 as high as 6,000 megawatts. 



Fuel switching is a resource that is readily available. On 

 our own system at Northwest Natural Gas we have about 100,000 

 customers who use natural gas for space heating, but who use 

 electricity for water heating. Converting those water heating 

 customers to natural gas could be accomplished relatively 

 inexpensively and rapidly. Those 100,000 water heaters represent 

 an average demand of about .56 kilowatts each and total about 140 

 megawatts at peak use. If those customers were completely 



reimbursed for their cost of conversion to natural gas, the total 



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