PUD eyes refined rates for 'core customer' power preference

EPHRATA — Grant County PUD officials say they are continuing to refine rate policy to ensure that “core customers” received first access to the utility district’s lowest-cost power generated by its Priest Rapids and Wanapum hydroelectric dams.

Core customers are defined as residential, agricultural, and small business/general service electric users.

The PUD’s latest rate schedules took effect April 1.

But in a summary of their May 19 workshop, the district said its rate team is proposing several adjustments that PUD commissioners may consider for approval.

Among them is a “public service-focused” rate that would provide “core customer” rate status for some public buildings, including public schools, hospitals, and government facilities.

Several months ago, Ephrata was among area school districts which expressed concern after discovering that recent PUD rate changes resulted in their buildings being placed separate tiers, one most costly than the other.

Other rate refinements under consideration include:

• A “rate-stabilization” mechanism to recover costs resulting from negative conditions on the energy market or a major weather event.
• A pilot project to create a “capacity reservation charge” levied on Grant PUD industrial customers who don’t yet require the full portion of power they’ve been allocated. To keep the still-unused portion in reserve, those customers would have to pay a fee until their energy use grows into their full portion. “This is a common practice at other utilities, commissioners heard,” the district said in its workshop summary. “Grant PUD has approximately 25 megawatts of underused capacity. That’s enough to power about 10,000 homes, according to industry estimates.”
• A new “high-density” computing rate for data centers, including cryptocurrency, cloud computer services and artificial intelligence.

Data centers and other industrials with higher-energy usage comprise 48% of Grant PUD’s retail electricity sales, Jeremy Stewart, the district’s manager of rates and pricing, told commissioners last week. That percentage is expected to “grow substantially” in the coming decade.

Stewart said the proposed revisions would simplify the PUD’s current rate structure and help ensure that rates paid by core customers and smaller industrials are less affected by increasing business costs pushed primarily by the biggest energy users.

In other presentations during their May 19 workshop, commissioners were informed that “high-tech” improvements to Grant PUD’s substations will give power grid managers greater ability to identify and diagnose problems remotely, which is expected to reduce outages and shorten response times.

The district’s project is intended to upgrade or install “Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)” technology at 50 of the PUD’s 60 substations by late 2030. The other substations already have modern SCADA systems.