He and thousands of Idaho farmers sank their deep wells or pumped water hundreds of feet up canyon walls directly from the Snake River and turned more than a million acres of desert into cropland beginning in the 1950s. Now Utah Power Co., which provides power to Holm's 5,000-acre farm, is offering to buy back the electricity he ordinarily would use for this growing season. If the price of electricity doesn't drop back down to the rate Holm paid last year, he'll have to quit pumping, and much of his land and the surrounding farms will dry up and return to desert. The end of an era Already Astaris LLC has shut down two of the four furnaces it has used to melt rock into elemental phosphorus in Pocatello, because of the high cost of electricity. The Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency organized to market power from the federal dams in the Snake and Columbia rivers, has told aluminum smelters it won't be able to supply them cheap hydroelectric power after 2006.
Every manufacturer depends on electric power to different degrees.
If they're being pushed to the market, they're going to have a hard time competing. Increasingly, the economy of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest depends on high technology industries like Micron, Intel and Microsoft. These companies also use large amounts of electricity. But unlike for the smelting and high-lift pumping irrigators, low electricity prices are not critical. The customer has fundamentally changed.