Whoops! WPPSS "customers will continue paying for those uncompleted plants through 2021"

What a boondoggle.

http://www.crosscut.com/energy-utilities/12625/Changing+and+challenging+winds+in+the+power+industry/

Mar 17, 2008 5:00 AM | last updated Mar 16, 2008 7:55 PM

Changing and challenging winds in the power industry

It's an awkward time in the energy business. Coal is plentiful, but coal-gas generation is carbon-spewing, and the body politic won't tolerate that. Wind is promising but might not be enough. In the midst of this transition is Energy Northwest, the public-utility consortium whose customers are still paying for nuclear plants that were never built.

By Daniel Jack Chasan

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If the Pacific Mountain Energy Center goes down in flames, it won't be the first power plant that the joint operating agency now known as Energy Northwest has failed to build. Once upon a time, doing business as the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS), the organization gained national notoriety for a quixotic attempt to build five big nuclear plants — Three at the federal Hanford nuclear site in Eastern Washington near Richland, and two near Satsop, Wash., west of Olympia. Construction costs mushroomed, demand for power shrank, the well of Wall Street capital ran dry, and only one of those plants was finished. (As the Columbia Generating Station, it currently contributes 1,157 megawatts to the Northwest power grid.) The other four were abandoned, triggering the largest municipal default in American financial history.

WPPSS itself may have receded into the dim recesses of the region's consciousness, but WPPSS payments continue to show up every month on the region's electric bills. The Bonneville Power Administration had guaranteed nearly all the bonds sold to finance the first three plants. BPA customers will continue paying for those uncompleted plants through 2021. Currently, the annual debt service tab runs to roughly $311 million.

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council's first big job was deciding whether to bail out the WPPSS projects. It decided not to. The council's current plan, drawn up in 2004, foresees no new nuclear plants. It does foresee up to 5,000 megawatts of wind capacity by 2025.

The council seems to have guessed wrong about wind. Wind planning in the Northwest is "going crazy," says the council's John Harrison. The Pacific Northwest is awash in proposals for new wind farms. The region seems likely to reach 5,000 megawatts by the end of 2012.

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none of it paid for by the abandoners or cancelators...