181 



PREPARED STATEMENT OF JAMES M. BAKER 



Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and Senators. For the record, my name is 

 Jim Baker, and. I serve as Northwest Salmon Campxaign Coordinator for the 

 Sierra Club, staffing our Columbia Basin Field Office in Pullman. Washington. 

 Over the past seven years, 1 have held similar positions with two other 

 organizations, Friends of the Earth and Northwest Conservation Act 

 Coalition, thereby receiving the opportunity to serve as a seated participant 

 in the regional Salmon Summit which you organized, Mr. Chairman, in the 

 winter of 1990-91. 



Then and now I have remained confident that the Columbia River can 

 produce both abundant salmon and low-cost electricity, sustain both the 

 fishing and the hydropower industries of our region, meet our legal 

 requirements to save salmon runs while keeping the Bonneville Power 

 Administration viable and competitive, maintain a high standard of living and 

 the high quality of life that salmon not only symbolize, but actually embody, 

 in the Pacific Northwest. I remain confident that our region can enjoy both 

 fish and power for four reasons. 



1 .) Salmon recovery costs are actually workable and affordable. 



If BPA applies some creativity and business acumen, the agency's costs for 

 salmon recovery will not become a fatal burden. 



As this committee has heard again today, the majority of Bonneville's salmon 

 costs are lost revenues due to shifting hydroelectric generation from the 

 winter to the spring in order to provide fish flows. Every competent 

 economist and realtor will tell you that the value of anything, whether a 

 home or a kilowatt-hour, is what a willing buyer will pay for it. By definition, 

 BPA's lost revenues for fish flows have not undergone this simple test of the 

 marketplace. So any dollar value attributed to fish flows is guesswork, which 

 depends entirely on the assumptions going into the estimate. 



Last year the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and American 

 Rivers published Changing the Current in which, among other topics, we 

 reviewed Bonneville's estimates of its costs to meet power demands while 

 implementing a salmon recovery similar to that adopted by the Northwest 

 Power Planning Council. Attached to my testimony please find a copy of the 

 executive summary of Changing the Current. 



In our report, we specifically looked at three different estimates for power 

 costs provided by BPA itsell" in the Co!umbia JRiuer System Operation Review 

 (SOR). These three different methods are: the CT Replacement in which 

 Bonneville builds and maintains combustion turbines (CTs) to fill any energy 

 deficits, the Power Purchase in which the agency buys replacement power 

 on the open market, and the Power Market Decision Analysis Model 

 (PMDAM) in which BPA purposefully works with British Columbia and the 

 U.S. Southwest to supply all power requirements with the lowest possible 

 costs. 



In the SOR, BPA gave the following estimates of power system costs in order 

 to implement salmon recovery: 



Estimate Method Total BPA Cost (1993 $ million per year) 



