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Resource Planning
Resource Planning

Load Forecast

Benton PUD prepares an annual Load Forecast to estimate its future customer count and energy sales for at least the next ten years. The Load Forecast is a key input into Benton PUD's power supply planning, budgeting, rate analysis, and capital improvement plans.

Clean Energy Implementation Plan

Clean EnergyIn 2019, Governor Inslee signed the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) into law. The Act established milestones for utilities to be greenhouse gas neutral by 2030 and carbon free by 2045. Benton PUD’s electricity supply is already over 90% carbon free primarily due to hydroelectric and nuclear power. The first milestone requests a utility to prepare and publish a four-year clean energy implementation plan (CEIP) by January 1, 2022 with specific targets for energy efficiency, demand response, renewable energy targets and any additional actions to support an equitable transition to the state's clean energy goals.Benton PUD held two public meetings to provide an overview of the CEIP requirements and to solicit community input into the development of the CEIP. To hear and read more about Benton PUD’s adopted 2022 CEIP, click on the links below:

Resource Plan

Benton PUD prepares a resource plan every two years in accordance with Revised Code of Washington (RCW) 19.280. As described within RCW 19.280.010, “It is the intent of the legislature to encourage the development of new safe, clean, and reliable energy resources to meet demand in Washington for affordable and reliable electricity. To achieve this end, the legislature finds it essential that electric utilities in Washington develop comprehensive resource plans that explain the mix of generation and demand-side resources they plan to use to meet their customers' electricity needs in both the short term and the long term.”

RCW 19.280.020 defines two types of resource plans, as described below:

  • Integrated resource plan means an analysis describing the mix of generating resources, conservation, methods, technologies, and resources to integrate renewable resources and, where applicable, address overgeneration events, and efficiency resources that will meet current and projected needs at the lowest reasonable cost to the utility and its ratepayers and that complies with the requirements specified in RCW 19.280.030(1).
    • Required by utilities with more than 25,000 customers that are not full requirements customers.
  • Resource plan means an assessment that estimates electricity loads and resources over a defined period of time and complies with the requirements specified in RCW 19.280.030(5).
    • Required by all other utilities that have not voluntarily elected to develop a full integrated resource plan.

Effective October 1, 2023, Benton PUD became a full requirements customer, as defined by RCW 19.280.020—meaning an electric utility that relies on Bonneville Power Administration for all power needed to supply its total load requirement other than that served by non-dispatchable generating resources totaling no more than six megawatts or renewable resources.

Benton PUD’s recent resource plans:

Conservation Potential Assessment

Conservation

The Washington State Energy Independence Act requires electric utilities serving 25,000 or more customers to pursue all conservation that is cost-effective, reliable, and feasible. By January 1 of each even-numbered year, a utility must identify its achievable cost-effective conservation potential for the upcoming ten years and a biennial target.

The Benton PUD Board of Commissioners held a public hearing on April 23, 2024 to accept public comment on Benton PUD’s 2024 Conservation Potential Assessment (CPA) – Final Report (for the period 2024-2043) and adopted the CPA on April 23, 2024. The CPA identified Benton PUD’s ten-year cost-effective conservation potential as 8.36 aMW and established the two-year biennial target at 1.11 aMW.

Surplus Energy

When Benton PUD has surplus energy resources, we are required to offer it into the region before selling out of the region pursuant to the Bonneville Power Administration’s policy on Determining Net Requirements of Pacific Northwest Utility Customers and the Northwest Power Act, sections 5(b)(1) and 9(c). Information regarding available surplus electric energy is available from The Energy Authority (TEA), a power management organization for public power utilities.