Westerners Don’t Want Their Utilities Tied To California’s Power Market, Poll Shows

A federal power agency is weighing whether to join a California-operated electricity market, but most Westerners polled say their utilities should stay independent.

A draft decision on which day-ahead electricity market the Bonneville Power Administration will join is expected in December, Bonneville senior spokesperson Kevin Wingert said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. The agency had proposed in March to join a rival to the California market, Markets+.

Seventy-two percent of adults surveyed in five Western media markets said their local utility should stay “independently governed.” Just 10 percent would rather see it coordinate with a “California-run system,” the council’s slides show. The remaining 19 percent said they were not sure.

Causeway Solutions ran the poll for the Western Energy Markets Integrity Council. The advocacy group opposes putting Bonneville’s federal hydropower in what it called a “California-centric trading platform.”

“Pushing these federal assets into the hands of California will have profound adverse consequences for affordability and reliability of power in a region that can ill afford it,” the council said in an Oct. 22 statement to the DCNF.

“The council is an independent not-for-profit organization that receives contributions from power providers and consumers, and individuals. It coordinates with other public interest groups,” Scott Segal, a Bracewell LLP partner speaking for the council, said in a statement. His statement did not name any of those contributors.

“It’s good for California. It’s just bad for everybody else that joins with them,” H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, told the DCNF in a Tuesday interview.

When the DCNF asked who would get power if the whole West ran short, Burnett said, “Well, the big dog eats first.”

He compared it to fights over the Colorado River, saying California gets the most water when there are shortages.