Randy Knowles, Businessman
PUD Board Secretary
P.O. Box 73
Bingen, WA 98605
509-493-2052
First Elected: December 1994
Current term expires: December 2012

Meditations on a New Year, by Randy Knowles, PUD Board Secretary.
Could you end up paying 90 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity? A special message from Commissioner Randy Knowles.

Changes in the way public power will be distributed are on the horizon, and utilities with energy-generating options for their customers will have a decided advantage over those without.

"Utilities with generating resources will control their own destinies," says PUD Commissioner Randy Knowles. "With the McNary Dam Hydro Project and the Roosevelt landfill methane gas-to-energy project, we have a say in our future. We're no longer solely dependent on BPA."

Randy is serving his third term as commissioner of District 1. He first took office in 1995 and says the look of Klickitat PUD is vastly different from what it was just a few years ago. "There has been a quantum shift since I came on the board," he says. "We've become a generating utility for the first time in the PUD's history."

The McNary hydro facility has been online since 1997 and the PUD uses its share of the output to serve about 13 percent of its electricity needs. "McNary is performing better than anticipated," Randy adds. "It's producing more net energy than we originally calculated."

Power from the Roosevelt generating facility is being sold at a premium, as a "green power" resource. The PUD is using revenue from sales of the power to buy less expensive power on the open market, creating a net return that can be re-invested into system upgrades and keeping local rates down.

When he first joined the board, Randy says changes in the power industry had him asking the same questions other people were asking: How would the PUD fare in a deregulated environment? He saw an opportunity to address those issues and immediately began working toward creating long-term stability for the PUD.

"We made huge investments with the people's money and they were willing to support those projects," Randy says. "It was a pure business decision: Short-term pain for long-term gain." Randy is quick to add that decisions to invest the PUD's money in generating projects were made jointly by himself and the other two commissioners, Dan Gunkel and Ray Mosbrucker.

"We work out issues as a board and stand behind our decisions," Randy says. "There's no acrimony among board members. If I get voted down on something, that's okay. I consider this a 'Ferrari' of a board. How can it get any better?"

Randy first got involved in public service during the planning stages of Skamania Lodge in Stevenson. A lifelong resident of Klickitat County's west end, he pushed to have the facility built at Bingen Point, fully understanding the importance of economic development as a tool for attracting new business to the region.

Although he considers himself semi-retired, Randy still manages a variety of business ventures. A logger by trade, he still deals in timber land and occasionally heads to the woods to do some logging himself. "I enjoy doing it," he says. "It's kind of my exercise and it's fun."

Much of his time these days, however, is spent keeping up with changes in the power industry. Randy considers the White Salmon library his "single greatest resource" for doing research and calls himself and his wife, Miriam, "bibliophiles" because of their exhaustive reading habits.

"I spend a fair amount of time fussing with PUD issues," he admits. "Are we done with generating projects yet? I doubt it. We're interested in any project that has value to our customers."