PacifiCorp is asking the Utah Public Service Commission to slash its recently ordered rate cut almost in half, from $85.3 million to about $44.3 million.
The parent company of Utah Power filed a reconsideration request Wednesday, asking the PSC to look again at several issues that involve about $41 million in the March 4 rate reduction order.
"We are seeking a fair resolution of issues for both customers and shareholders," said Richard T. O'Brien, PacifiCorp's executive vice president and chief operating officer. "We are focusing our request on issues we believe most deserve another look from the commission."
The Utah Committee of Consumer Services, which is designed to represent the state's residential, agricultural and small commercial utility users, also filed a request for reconsideration of some issues Wednesday.
PacifiCorp is not asking the PSC to reconsider the ordered reduction of the company's authorized return on equity to 10.5 percent. And Utah Power spokesman David Eskelsen said the request will not affect plans to start refunding $40.2 million to customers to make up for two years of overpayments.
"That process of counting and returning the retroactive piece is already in motion," Eskelsen said Thursday. "Those refunds will start to be posted to customer bills around the 12th to 15th of April. Whatever changes may happen as a result of the petition, they'll be handled in a later accounting."
The refund is necessary because several parties asked the PSC to open a PacifiCorp rate case in 1997, but the Legislature froze rates and put the case on hold while it studied possible deregulation of the electrical industry. The freeze ended last year, allowing the case to move forward.
PSC Chairman Steve Mecham said the consumer committee's request asks the PSC to look again at the interest PacifiCorp is paying on the refund, especially considering the delay between when the rate order was issued and when the refund will appear on customer bills.
Mecham said the commission has 20 days to judge the reconsideration requests. If commissioners take no action after 20 days, he said, the requests are considered to be denied.
"These are significant issues . . . ," Mecham said Thursday. "We'll look at them and make some judgment as to whether or not we'll move forward with them."
Eskelsen said the largest portion of PacifiCorp's reconsideration request, accounting for about $35 million, deals with the implementation of a previous PSC order on a "fairness adjustment" that started after the 1989 merger of Utah Power and PacifiCorp.
To help ease the way for the merger, the PSC had allowed Utah customers to be charged slightly more than they would have been paying had the two utilities' costs been immediately combined.
The PSC's original plan was to phase out, over a five-year period, the difference between what PacifiCorp's Utah customers and its customers in the Northwest paid for their power.
Commissioners changed their minds in the new rate order and decided to eliminate the adjust- ment right away. PacifiCorp would like a return to the five-year plan.
"Any time you have an impact of that magnitude and of that complexity, I think that it's incumbent upon the utility, in the interest of its shareholders, to try and examine any possible avenue that might cause the commissioners to reconsider portions of their order," Eskelsen said. "We argued for these things in the original case, and we felt like we made a good case for it."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.