Idaho Power Seeks Rate Bump to Finance Coal Plant Retirement

The Idaho Public Utilities Commission is taking comments on a proposal by Idaho Power for a uniform increase to all base rates of 0.11 percent in order to finance the retirement of the North Valmy generating station, a two-unit coal-fired power plant with a capacity of 522 megawatts.

• The utility’s proposal calls for additional retirement costs to be recovered from all customer classes, leading to a 10 cent per month bump in the electricity bill of an average consumer.
• Idaho Power and co-owner of the plant NV Energy decided in 2016 to close North Valmy by 2025, about a decade earlier than originally planned. The following year, the commission approved a settlement agreement which called for shuttering Valmy’s Unit 1 in 2019 and Unit 2 in 2025. The settlement agreement led to a base-rate increase of approximately $13.3 million, or 1.17 percent, effective June 2017.
• As part of the settlement, Idaho Power created a balancing account to track incremental costs and benefits associated with the plant’s closure and created a process to review expenditures. Changes in these costs since 2016, along with other expenses outlined in the proposed North Valmy Project Framework Agreement that Idaho Power reached with NV Energy in early 2019, have led to a bump in the revenue requirement assigned to Idaho customers of $1.21 million.