The Bonneville Power Administration reported good news this week.

For one thing, customers of Avista and other investor-owned utilities may see modest rate relief soon. Soon as in maybe February. Modest as in about $3 a month.

But here are two better reasons to be pleased over BPA’s announcement about the apparent restoration of the Residential Exchange Program.

“With the exchange program nearly settled, key players in the Northwest’s power supply – BPA, the utilities and the Northwest Power Planning Council – can return to the challenging work they had been focusing on, namely working out long-term contracts that will answer questions about who is responsible to build the generation sources that will be needed in coming decades.

“Negotiators handled the exchange program issues at the regional level. Had they called upon Congress for a fix, many powerful and envious delegations from other parts of the nation – California being one conspicuous example – would have been only too happy to revisit the 1980 Northwest Power Act, which preserves comparatively attractive power rates in this region. If legislation had supplanted negotiation, Northwest ratepayers may have wound up paying higher bills and underwriting federal expenses around the country.

By way of background, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in May that the exchange program was illegal, in essence because the rate-relief funding, once covered by the rates charged to Northwest aluminum companies, was coming from public utilities in violation of the Northwest Power Act.

It’s a complicated law and one of its most mystifying provisions is a section, known as 7(b)(2), that requires a set of assumptions about various conditions that would determine what the rates should be. Amending the act to clarify the process might have made it easier to settle the Residential Exchange Program. However, it would have risked severe consequences if it required BPA to boost rates by, say, 50 percent.

How much risk? In June, a month after the court ruled, Power Council member Tom Karrier of Pullman told The Spokesman-Review’s editorial board that the current system means $1.6 billion a year to the Northwest. That’s way too much to risk.

Meanwhile, the whole region wrestles with how to accommodate substantial growth and the increasing power demands that follow. The cheap hydropower system is under serious pressure from multiple users; thermal plants burn fuel that is costly and environmentally damaging; and nuclear power poses the daunting problem of waste disposal. Renewable resources such as wind are in vogue, but they incur problems with reliability and the need for transmission lines.

Whether BPA assumes responsibility for building the next power plants, or the utilities do, the region needs solutions that assure stability and predictability. That’s where long-term contracts come in. That’s why the utility leaders belong at the table hammering them out, without the distraction of the Residential Exchange Program.