Portland General Electric Company (PGE) (NYSE:POR) today filed a comprehensive resource plan with the Oregon Public Utility Commission, outlining proposed strategies to meet its customers’ electricity needs over the next 20 years. The plan is the result of many months of analysis and research, including a half-dozen day-long public workshops held over the course of the planning process to solicit input from customer advocates, regulators, energy experts, and other key stakeholders.

“We’ve engaged customers and stakeholders in an 18-month planning process to help us identify the best way to continue supplying Oregonians with reliable electricity at a reasonable cost,” said Jim Piro, president and CEO of PGE. “PGE has 120 years of experience in this business, but planning for energy needs over a 20-year horizon into the future is a major challenge. We work hard to weigh all of the costs and risks to achieve the most responsible balance possible for our customers.”

PGE projects that demand for electricity in the area it serves will increase by an average of 2.3 percent per year or 20 percent by 2020. PGE’s plan includes a four-year strategy for acquisition of new resources and a 20-year strategy that outlines long term expectations for the utility’s resource needs and portfolio performance.

The four-year resource acquisition plan targets:

• All energy efficiency measures identified as achievable by the Energy Trust of Oregon – which PGE expects would meet nearly half of PGE’s load growth from now through 2020.
• New renewable resources to meet Oregon’s renewable energy standard requirements on or ahead of schedule.
• Demand-side resources – measures that can reliably deliver short-term reductions in customer demand to help manage loads during peak periods.
• New, efficient natural gas-fired generation with state-of-the-art turbines and pollution controls to serve existing load, meet additional load growth and maintain reliability standards. This would include 300 to 500 megawatts of baseload capacity and 100 to 200 megawatts of flexible peak load resources.
• Short- and mid-term market purchases.
• Installation of major emissions control retrofits on PGE’s coal-fired generating plant near Boardman, Oregon, to comply with rules adopted by the state Environmental Quality Commission last spring. The controls would enable continued operation of the plant with an estimated 80 percent reduction in haze-causing emissions and an estimated 90 percent reduction in mercury emissions – aggressive reductions that reflect some of the most stringent standards in the country.
• New transmission capacity to help meet growing energy needs, enable development of more renewable power projects, and enhance reliability of the electrical grid.

The integrated resource planning process, with guidelines established by the Oregon Public Utility Commission, is designed to identify a future portfolio of resources that offers the best combination of cost and risk, taking into account factors such as environmental impacts, fuel supply availability, price volatility, resource diversity, and the ability of available resources to reliably meet demand.

Utilities issue resource plans roughly every two years to reflect new technologies, market conditions, and regulatory requirements.

“Our goal is to help Oregonians fulfill their goals for our state’s energy future with a practical plan that tends to the basics as well,” said Jim Lobdell, PGE’s vice president for power operations and resource strategy. “We need a plan that we can actually implement, and that will realistically provide the level of service our customers deserve and expect.”

Now that PGE has officially submitted its plan to the commission, commission staff members and other interested parties have up to six months to review the plan and provide comments and recommendations to the commission regarding acknowledgement of the plan.

More information is available on www.PortlandGeneral.com.

About Portland General Electric Company

Portland General Electric, headquartered in Portland, Ore., is a vertically-integrated electric utility that serves more than 818,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in Oregon. Visit our Web site at www.PortlandGeneral.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

All statements contained in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. They are not guarantees of future events. Rather, they are based on current expectations, estimates, beliefs and assumptions and are subject to uncertainties that are difficult to predict. As a result, actual events or results may differ materially from the statements made. Forward-looking statements made in this press release include statements regarding the company’s energy strategy for future periods, the effectiveness of energy efficiency initiatives in decreasing energy consumption, the anticipated increase in demand for electricity in the Company’s service territory and the acquisition of additional capacity to meet such demand. These forward-looking statements are based upon our assumptions about and assessment of the future, which may or may not prove true, and involve a number of risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, risk factors detailed in the Company's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, the Company’s reports on Form 10-Q and other filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Source: Portland General Electric Company