Utility Overhaul Bill Scaled Back

You know what a kilowatt costs the amount is on your monthly electricity bill but you don’t know how much of that is the juice, the wire to bring it to your home, or administrative expense.

By October of next year, you could have that information, if a bill before the state Senate survives review by the House and Gov. Gary Locke.

“Unbundled” bills could be the first step toward giving consumers a choice of electricity suppliers.

Sen. Bill Finkbeiner, R-Redmond, said Tuesday he had hoped consumers could shop for power as soon as July 1999. But opposition by Puget Sound Energy forced him to replace his plan for extensive deregulation of the utility industry with the scaled-down proposal for unbundled bills.

Over the weekend, Finkbeiner had convened major players in the deregulation debate to explore ways to getting his original proposal through the Senate, where he chairs the Energy and Utilities Committee.

Participants were near agreement on three major issues - reliability, bypass of local utilities and public utility ability to sell bonds, he said.

But Puget, with several expensive generating facilities, was concerned competitors would under-cut its prices, Finkbeiner said.

Washington Water Power Co. was a strong supporter of the original bill, said Tom Paine, the Spokane utility’s director of government affairs.

The substitute proposal will at least give customers a breakdown of costs so they get used to identifying the component that represents the electricity itself, he said.

With that information, Paine said, they will be able to comparison shop when competitors are allowed into the market.

“We supported moving the process forward as much as possible,” he said, in order to get full-scale deregulation in place as soon as possible.

, DataTimes