PacifiCorp had warned since an unplanned power-generation unit shutdown in November that customers would be asked to pick up the tab for replacement power.
The amount it will seek from Utahns was unveiled Thursday: $103.5 million.
Utah will be one of several states where customers will be asked to pay for the power-replacement costs associated with the shutdown. The overall total is $270.1 million.
If approved by the Utah Public Service Commission, the costs of the outage at the Hunter power plant unit in Emery County from late November to early May will add $3.57 per month to the typical Utah residential customer's bill for one year.
PacifiCorp operates as Utah Power in Utah and Idaho. It has about 645,000 customers in Utah.
The outage came at a time when replacement power on the wholesale market was extremely costly.
"We have had generator failures in the past that have produced costs that have found their way into rate cases, but this was out of the ordinary, because it was an outage of a complete unit and came at time when wholesale prices were extremely volatile," said Dave Eskelsen, a spokesman for Utah Power.
"For the past 15 years, wholesale prices had been very reasonably priced and an attractive resource option. The failure could not have come at a worse time."
Dee Jay Hammon, chairman of the state Committee of Consumer Services, said the PSC's hearing process will "filter out" whether the company was prudent in its handling of the outage and the aftermath.
"A $100 million is a lot of money. I didn't think it would be that much," Hammon said today.
"I do think they did a good job, once they had the trouble with the unit, to get it online. It was a tough job, because they had to rebuild that generator on the floor. You have to ask whether they could have done a better job working on the machine, and frankly I doubt that.
"They didn't want this to happen any more than we did. When a machine goes out like that, it's a disaster for everyone."
Hammon noted that the outage came after PacifiCorp had sold its Centralia generation plant and had relied on the wholesale market for power purchases, which later rose to extremely high price levels.
"The hearings will be a matter of prudency of how they managed all that and how they planned to deliver electricity to customers," he said.
In February, the company said the shutdown — caused by a power short at the core of the 430-megawatt unit — was costing $1 million per day. A megawatt is enough electricity to power about 500 typical homes.
ScottishPower, the parent of electric utility PacifiCorp, had warned last week that it would file for the cost recovery in Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming. Proceedings already are under way in Oregon and Wyoming, and a filing in Idaho is likely to occur in December.
PacifiCorp is in the midst of a rate case in Utah stemming primarily from its costs in buying power last year. The utility is seeking $118 million. That would cost the typical Utah customer about $7 per month, although $3.85 of that amount was added to bills when the commission granted the company a $70 million interim rate increase in February.
About $95 million of that request is related to costs in buying power on the wholesale market to augment company resources during peak usage periods.
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