379 



Good Cents program and incentives for single-family housing be- 

 cause of concerns that we would effect customer fiiel choice. 



We offered that program only in the multi-family sector where 

 about 98 percent of the market is choosing electricity and where we 

 didn't think that there was a noticeable chance of imperiling cus- 

 tomers' market-driven fuel choice. We think that that was the right 

 decision to make and we hope that Bonneville is going to exercise 

 a similar discrimination in reviewing the cost-effectiveness of the 

 long-term Super Good Cents program. 



The second issue I want to talk about is regionaUsm. I think it 

 is fair to say that one of, if not the most fundamental assumptions 

 of the Regional Act was that there were major benefits to the co- 

 ordinated regional development of resources to meet growing de- 

 mands for electric power throughout the region. 



It was based on a couple of premises, premises which Seattle be- 

 heves are still valid. And I should add here that the Mayor is par- 

 ticularly emphatic in his support of this piece of my testimony. 



The first of those premises which we believe is still valid is that 

 the Pacific Northwest is a genuine economic region and that eco- 

 nomic growth and the associated growth in demand for electric 

 power anywhere in the region ripples out throughout the region 

 and benefits the entire Pacific Northwest. 



I recently had a confirmation of the continuing vaHdity of that 

 assumption in a negative example when one of my colleagues at 

 Grant County PUD said to me, **You can bet your life that when 

 20,000 Boeing jobs disappear fi*om Seattle, it is going to be felt in 

 Grant County." And I think that the reverse continues to be true, 

 that when new jobs are created, whether those happen in Seattle 

 or Euphrata or Pendleton or Coeur d'Alene, the entire region even- 

 tually benefits. 



So that those who would divide us into growers, into non-growers 

 and set growers and non-growers against each other are doing this 

 region no service, in our view. More specifically, I think that the 

 Regional Act assumes that there were particular benefits within 

 the electric power industry to the coordinated regional development 

 of resources and pooling of risks and pooling of costs and in draw- 

 ing up the unique capabilities of the system that we had already 

 established. 



Randy referred this morning to some of the resource development 

 opportunities that Bonneville and only Bonneville has available to 

 it by virtue of the system that it has available. You referred a little 

 earlier, Mr. Chairman, to that 1991 Power Planning Council study 

 which examined the question of whether those benefits still existed, 

 whether a truly coordinated regional development of resources had 

 financial advantages. 



And the Coimcil's conclusion was that if Bonneville and the pri- 

 vate utilities were jointly and cooperatively developing resources, 

 developing the least-cost resource, wherever it is located, to serve 

 the first load growth to occur, wherever it is located, that the mean 

 v£ilue of the net present value of that coordinated development 

 would be $3.6 bilUon; that there would be positive benefits to co- 

 ordinated resource development under every load growth scenario, 

 fi*om the lowest to the highest, and that the greatest value of co- 



