19-A-1 - Atty's Report - CAPP - Laserfiche WebLink

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electric supplier arrangement to a new REP. ► Statewide, TXU won the bid through the Public Utility Commission (PUC) to be what is called the "provider of last resort" for residential and small non-residential users in the long term. That designation means when residential users begin to leave their current provider (and they have protection for some period of time), but fail to make a timely election as to who will be their REP, state law mandates TXLT as the winning bidder will become the provider of last resort. This arrangement assures there will be no interruption of power. However, the rate for electric service by the provider of last resort will also presumably be much higher than could be found by purchasing the power from one of the other competitors. ► There was discussion about the impact of this process on the cities' pending budget process. The question was what sort of power cost do cities budget for their ensuing fiscal year. Special counsel for CAPP, Mr. Geoffrey Gay, and the consultant, R. J. Covington Consulting, offered to provide a formula based on what is called the "price-to-beat" for cities to calculate a cost to put in the budget. In doing so, this price will probably be very conservative, and hopefully this price will be improved by the competitive process, but it will give cities a factor to use in the budgetary process. This formula was promised within the next thirty days. ► The question of street lighting was raised and how that billing would be handled following deregulation. Street lighting will probably continue to be part ofthe transmission/distribution service provider's (TDSP) responsibility on the basis of the price-to-beat for the next five years. This basically reflects the fact that under the current regulatory scheme, nobody has yet figured out how to handle the responsibility for maintaining the street lights, a responsibility previously assumed by the power companies. Originally, the PUC was looking at street lighting as a so-called competitive service, but fortunately that perspective was changed either during the legislative or administrative process. As a consequence, street lighting will probably continue to be handled much the same way as it is now for the near future. ► All the cities were asked to request from TXLT data for the last fifteen months, including the last quarter for comparison purposes to the data that each of the cities generated. ► It was also pointed out that during the ensuing year and perhaps for quite sometime thereafter, cities will need to continue to have someone track their electric consumption data in the format recently used to provide it to the CAPP consultants in order to continually update the consumption package for purposes of bidding. What the consultants are most interested in is kilowatt hours, total kilowatts, and dollars in expenditure for all city accounts.