Too Much At Stake For Politics To Reign

After last year’s ice storm, few of us take our usually reliable electricity for granted. We shouldn’t take the affordability of our region’s electricity for granted, either.

Hydroelectric dams made our electricity cheapest in the nation. This affordable power is an economic asset of national significance. It supports the aluminum industry, aircraft manufacturing, leading high-tech corporations, paper manufacturing and irrigated farming. These industries support good-paying jobs, a thriving regional economy and the nation’s balance of trade.

Yet the same federal government whose vision helped create this asset has the power to destroy it.

One little-known agency sits at ground zero of the Northwest’s economic future: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC is a five-member board, appointed by the president.

Not one of this board’s members resides west of the Mississippi River. This fall, when President Clinton filled two vacancies on the board, the appointees were from Kentucky and Mississippi. And yet, in the next several years FERC will decide two issues crucial to the survival of our nation’s low-cost hydropower:

FERC will decide whether to re-license many of the Northwest’s dams, including those that made Washington Water Power Co. one of the nation’s most competitive private suppliers of low-cost power.

If Congress succeeds next year in deregulating electrical utilities, FERC will write and administer many of the implementing rules. Some of those rules will affect the current efforts to reorganize and save the Bonneville Power Administration, distributor of electricity from the federal government’s Columbia River dams.

In several years when BPA’s debt from four never-finished nuclear plants is paid off and scientists settle on salmon-restoration strategies, BPA again could become what it was at its creation: a supplier of very inexpensive, stable, nonpolluting electricity.

But, BPA and the dams that await re-licensing can survive the transition to a promising future only if FERC makes decisions informed by a familiarity with the unique complexities of the Northwest’s public-private power system.

It is an outrage, given all that is at stake, that FERC seats have all gone to political appointees from the Eastern Seaboard.

However, the White House reportedly has been sending signals that it will consider a northwesterner for the next FERC vacancy, expected in the coming year. If true, that is good news.

At least two respected northwesterners have been mentioned this year as candidates for a FERC post: Marsha Smith, a member of the Idaho Public Utilities Commission; and Angus Duncan, a former member of the Northwest Power Planning Council.

The criteria for a FERC seat ought to value depth of knowledge and balance in judgment more highly than a partisan or ideological slant. Power issues are politically polarized, so a calm, fair mind is required to settle them.

But FERC could make damaging mistakes and lose credibility, if it wades into these complex matters without at least one member who knows the West and the dynamics of its industrial and environmental heritage.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board