Federal Electric Power

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the effects of the Bureau of Reclamation's and the Department of Energy's (DOE) exclusion from the hydropower rate of irrigation construction costs for certain projects within the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP).

GAO found that: (1) the exclusion of participating projects' costs resulted in lower CRSP power rates and revenues than would otherwise exist; (2) such exclusion would not materially affect the required repayment of CRSP costs or the ultimate development of water resources within the Upper Colorado River Basin; (3) rescheduling the indefinite projects did not affect the cost recovery of the remaining participating projects, and the U.S. Treasury would recover its investment within the required 50 years; (4) 13 of 19 participating projects, and portions of another project, were or would be constructed; (5) irrigation construction costs for the indefinite participating projects totalled about $1.24 billion, a cost excluded from the power rate calculation; (6) the estimated irrigation construction cost of all authorized Central Utah Project (CUP) units was $1.1 billion; (7) the Bureau and DOE excluded the cost of indefinite participating projects from power rate calculations because power users were concerned that they were paying for projects that would never be built; (8) excluding the estimated costs of indefinite CRSP projects from the power rate calculation was not precluded by law; and (9) none of the information provided to Congress identified which CRSP participating projects were included in the current electric power rate calculation or why some projects were excluded.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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