Water district weighs building power plant

Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2000 | 11:13 a.m.

Southern Nevada's largest power consumer is planning now for future shortages.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority is weighing whether to build its own generating plant, General Manager Pat Mulroy said Tuesday on the Sun's news discussion television show "Point of View Vegas," which airs on Las Vegas ONE, Cox cable channels 1 and 39.

The authority's choice is to either build a plant or pay two or three times the current price of power, she said. And that does not take into account the possibility that demand will outstrip supply.

The authority's board will look at the options next month. Building a power plant could take years.

Seven power outages throughout California in the past week, the latest one in Southern California on Monday, have driven the point home. A lack of new power plants and population growth combined with power plants shut down for repairs and colder-than-normal temperatures caused shortages, California officials said.

The stakes are high in Southern Nevada, because a power shortage would slow or stop the pumps that bring water uphill from Lake Mead to the 1.4 million Clark County residents served by the authority, creating a water shortage to compound a brownout or blackout.

Even spiraling prices, such as have occurred in Southern California since deregulation of power in that state, would leave Las Vegans feeling the double whammy of rising water and power bills through next summer, when demand for both is highest.

The going rate for electricity in Las Vegas is 7 cents per kilowatt hour. In Los Angeles, it's 11 cents a kilowatt hour and in San Diego, 19 cents.

Nevada was scheduled to deregulate the power industry March 1, but Gov. Kenny Guinn has delayed that move until next September.

This year the water authority paid $32 million for power. Next year that is expected to reach $42 million.

Since the Southern Nevada Water Authority buys electricity on the Western grid -- the same network that supplies power to California and other Western states -- a regional outage could affect the ability to deliver water here, the water authority's Chief Engineer David Donnelly said.

While Las Vegans sleep, a single operator sitting at a computer can run the entire water delivery system, from filling reservoirs with Lake Mead water to adding chemicals, Donnelly said.

"We're dependent on thousands of pieces of data coming to that one man in the control booth, but not without power," he said.

By 2004 the water authority will need the equivalent of three Hoover Dam hydroelectric generators just to pump extra water.

Since 1996 the water authority has worked with the Colorado River Commission to supply new power sources, saving 40 percent of the costs through tax-free financing, Donnelly said.

But nobody seems willing to coordinate efforts to ensure the future supply of power or water, Donnelly said.

Nevada Power Co. isn't worried about the future. Spokesman Thomas Moore said wintertime demands for electricity are low. And when California had blackouts and brownouts last summer, Southern Nevada wasn't affected, he noted.

"Nevada has more resources than we need at the moment," Moore said.

Rather than open the state to supplying power on the free market the way California did, Guinn created the Nevada Electric Energy Policy Committee to examine future options.

Mulroy said she was "grateful" that the Republican governor had formed the committee to shape a statewide energy policy.

The 17-member committee, chaired by former utilities commissioner JoAnn Kelly, is preparing a report and a policy for the governor by Jan. 15.