MAYOR'S PLAN TO REWARD ENERGY SAVERS BAD IDEA.

Byline: RUTH GALANTER 

AS California's energy crisis deepens, elected officials are fighting to be first in line with conservation programs. Let's at least be grateful that in California the fight is over how best to conserve, even as Washington attempts to force offshore oil drilling and nuclear power back onto the table.

But just because the program says ``conservation'' doesn't necessarily mean it's good for you.

Take, for example, Mayor Richard Riordan's latest call for the Department of Water and Power to throw (your) money at customers who use 20 percent less power than they did last summer.

The mayor's proposal assumes that customers must be paid if they are to conserve and that we would pay our customers to use less and sell the saved energy to the state, to recover the cost of the rebates.

In fact, Los Angeles residents are already conserving energy. In the first four months of this year, DWP customers have reduced energy consumption by nearly 4 percent, without any rebates and with relatively little information on how to do more.

Unfortunately, Riordan sent his program to the DWP Commission and to the news media before anyone looked at the cost.

When the DWP staff finally checked out the cost, here's what it found:

When we sell excess energy to the rest of the state, we will not be able to include the cost of rebates for conservation as part of the costs of making that power available to the state, so we will have to make up that outlay some other way. In short, this cash rebate program could cost us somewhere between $20 million and $50 million.

That's in addition to the revenue we forgo by selling to the state at less than the market would allow us to charge other energy buyers. And it is in addition to our tax money the state is using to purchase power for the people who are not DWP customers.

The financial problems are only part of why this is a bad deal for DWP customers.

We have already seen that the mayor's assumption that people conserve only if you pay them is incorrect. The proposal also discriminates against those already conserving and against new customers who can't prove they are using less energy than they did a year ago.

A serious effort at voluntary conservation would offer consumers information and the names of relevant vendors for energy-saving pool heaters, solar panel manufacturers and installers, a list of common household electric appliances and how much juice they use, and sources of further information.

It should not be difficult for the DWP to generate the information consumers need to use less energy.

If after all the useful information not currently available is supplied and even more conservation is still necessary, the DWP should make sure its programs do not reward those who previously wasted and omit those who've been conserving all along.

And remember: Using less energy provides a built-in rebate. If you consume less energy, your electric bill will be less.

The DWP won't have to give it back to you because you won't have had to pay it to the DWP in the first place.

Yes, of course we need to conserve energy; yes, of course we need to move quickly. But, no, we don't need to act recklessly, and we don't need to endanger the DWP's financial stability which we've worked so hard to attain.

It is not worth jeopardizing our future just to be first in line or first in the headlines.