Avista Utilities' customers in Washington and Idaho far exceeded the Spokane-based company's goals to save energy through its rebate and other incentive programs last year, and that success is being mirrored across the Pacific Northwest.

The Portland-based Bonneville Power Administration says that the more than 140 utilities it serves saved an average 76 megawatts of electricity—roughly three-fourths of the average generation of the five hydroelectric facilities licensed as Avista's Spokane River project. A megawatt is enough electricity to meet the needs of 750 homes.

"It was a banner year," says Mike Weedall, BPA's vice president of energy efficiency.

Avista's Washington and Idaho electricity customers reduced their consumption in 2008 by more than 66.5 million kilowatt-hours through customer improvements covered by the company's rebate and incentive programs. Meanwhile, natural gas customers in the two states cut their fuel use by more than 1.9 million therms through such programs.

"Customer response to our energy-efficiency programs has been strong, exceeding 2008 electric saving targets by 40 percent and natural gas goals by 34 percent," says Bruce Folsom, Avista's senior manager of energy-efficiency programming. Combined, those savings would provide enough energy to serve more than 5,500 Inland Northwest homes and businesses, Avista says.

Final figures aren't available yet for energy conservation in the entire region, which includes many utilities besides Avista and those served by BPA. The Northwest Power and Conservation Council said last May that the region saved a record 200 average megawatts of electricity in 2007, or one-fifth of the amount needed to power the city of Seattle.

The goal had been to save 140 average megawatts.

For 2008, Avista had set goals of saving 53 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 1.425 million therms of natural gas in Washington and Idaho through its rebate programs. Avista spokeswoman Debbie Simock says the Spokane utility believes its customers surpassed the programs' goals because of rising energy prices and growing customer awareness of the need to conserve.

For 2009, Simock says, Avista has set goals for its rebate and incentive programs of saving 94 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, or 17 percent more than the savings achieved in 2008, and 1.6 million therms of natural gas, or 12 percent more than the 2008 target.

Meanwhile, Avista says it has asked the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission to increase its electric rates by 1.68 percent and its natural gas rates by 0.95 percent to raise a total of $9.38 million a year in additional funds for energy-efficiency rebates and incentives. The rate boosts would equate to increases of $1.35 for residential customers who use the monthly average of 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity and $1.08 for residential ratepayers who use the monthly average of 70 therms of natural gas. The company has requested that the increases go into effect Feb. 3. It plans a similar filing in Idaho.

Avista says it budgeted more than $15 million to pay rebates and incentives in 2008—and exceeded that amount.

The energy savings Avista is reporting don't include savings achieved by customers who took steps for which there is no rebate or who didn't apply for available incentives for some reason, Simock says.

"Customers probably are doing a whole lot more" to save energy than the efforts that Avista is able to report, says Simock. "Customers who take steps and don't apply for a rebate, we have no way of tracking that."

The goals for savings through rebate and incentive plans are set in Avista's Integrated Resource Plan, which the company develops to help it reach future goals, including meeting energy demand.

In 2008, customers upgraded to Energy Star refrigerators and clothes washers, installed high-efficiency natural gas furnaces, upgraded windows, and, on the commercial side, installed variable speed electric motors, Avista says. It paid more than 18,000 rebates to residential, commercial, and limited-income customers. It says more than 13,500 rebates went to Washington residential customers, and 4,800 rebates went to Idaho residential customers.

The average residential rebate for customers who live in single-family homes was $200, Avista says. Almost 4,900 multifamily housing units in Washington and Idaho received upgrades through the program, and Avista also provided $1.5 million to six community action partners to assist low-income customers in making energy-efficiency improvements to their homes, the utility says.

For BPA and its utility customers, a massive, 18-month campaign to encourage ratepayers to buy and install compact fluorescent lightbulbs—at subsidized prices of close to $1 a bulb—resulted in almost half of the 76 average megawatts of electricity that were saved last year, says Weedall.

"It was just an example to me of what a success story we can create by working with the marketplace," he says.

Even though the Northwest's use of energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs now is close to twice that of the national average, there's still plenty of potential in the region to achieve additional savings by encouraging more widespread use of the bulbs, Weedall says.

"There's still areas and groups that we haven't been able to get to yet," he says, including young people who rent rather than own their homes and ratepayers in Idaho and Montana "where there are not as many big-box stores to move product through."

That potential also will be enhanced when legislation will end the era of the incandescent lightbulb in a couple of years, Weedall says. Also, he says, good "dimmable" compact fluorescent bulbs are just beginning to come on the market, fluorescent technology is making inroads in light fixtures, and choices should improve for lighting products, such as sconces, that homeowners use, all of which could spur savings.

Three to five years from now, light-emitting diode bulbs that will yield far greater savings than compact fluorescents will be prevalent in the market, leading to additional savings, Weedall says.

Light-emitting diode technology already is saving energy in streetlights, and it has begun to show up in such non-grid electricity uses as in flashlights and in the taillights of automobiles, signaling its coming maturation as a technology, he says.

Agriculture also shows a lot of promise for energy savings, says Weedall, a self-described "city boy" who was stunned to learn that some Eastern Washington irrigators have achieved more efficient pumping by giving each sprinkler head in their systems a geographic information system address.

Such data-rich systems tell farmers which heads are putting out too much or too little water and need to be adjusted, and which arms in a pivot-irrigation system are putting out the wrong flows of water, he says.

Agricultural improvements in the Northwest saved an average of 6 megawatts of electricity in 2008 and have the potential to save more, he says.

"One thing that we look at is to try to find big industrial facilities" where power savings can be achieved, he says. "A lot of megawatts can add up from just a couple of measures in a big industrial facility."

Meanwhile, so-called two-tiered rates are creating new incentives for BPA's utility customers to conserve, Weedall says. Under those rates, which will go into effect in 2011, BPA's customers likely will pay separate—and almost certainly higher—rates for electricity the agency must obtain in addition to that generated by the Northwest's federal system of 31 hydroelectric dams and one nuclear power plant.

For 2009, the conservation goal for BPA and its utility customers is the same, 52 megawatts, but this is the last year of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council's fifth energy-supply plan, and when the council's sixth plan goes into effect, "we know that the targets are going to be up," he says.

BPA was to begin a public process Tuesday, Jan. 27, at its headquarters in Portland to enhance its energy-efficiency programs.

It says that new state regulations requiring energy efficiency, a need to meet increasing electricity demand, and a national focus on energy independence are driving its efforts. It says its focus on energy efficiency also supports the Obama administration's goals of securing energy independence, reducing greenhouse gases, and enhancing the economy by implementing new energy-saving technology.

For BPA, its customers, and investor-owned utilities such as Avista, efforts to spur conservation are undergirded by a simple reality: It's two to three times less expensive to augment energy supplies by conserving energy than it is to build new generating plants fired by natural gas or coal.

"It seems counter-intuitive to pay customers to use less of your product," Avista's Folsom says. "While renewable energy will continue to play an increasingly important role in our energy future, creating new sources of generation is costly. That's why Avista is committed to the lowest-cost 'new' source—energy efficiency."

Plus, Avista says, there's an environmental benefit. It says the energy savings achieved through its programs last year were equivalent to removing more than 20,000 tons of carbon emissions from the environment or taking 3,400 cars off of the road.