Dear Editor,

Great interview with J. LaMont Keen in the February edition of nwcurrent. It is interesting to note how proud Keen is of Idaho Power's Irrigation Peak Rewards program. This program has switches on the pump controllers that don't allow the pump to turn on during the pre-arranged days of the week for which the farmer signs up. The system does not fit the realities of either the electric power market or crop irrigation requirements.

I think a price signaling system would have been far better, adjusting to both electric markets and crop water needs, but I have had not been able to influence Idaho Power to consider this approach. I ran across a couple of sentences from "Ordeal by Planning" by John Jewkes, which compares free market to centrally-planned economies that I think fits Idaho Power's mindset:

"There is, in the first place, the almost instinctive opposition of many planners to the price mechanism itself. The type of mind which is drawn toward central planning seems to be strongly attracted to quantitative, physical controls: they are simpler to understand, and convey to those who operate them a more immediate sense of the use of power over others."

The people who came up with the switch idea are engineers who generally like physical controls also. It is not surprising that a monopoly would think far differently from those who believe in free markets.

Sincerely,

Gerald Fleischman
Idaho Department of Water Resources