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Resource planning for future energy sources plays a critical role in meeting future customer needs in an economical manner while minimizing impacts to the environment. The decisions we make in resource planning will impact our customers and our company for decades to come. The challenge is even greater for APS than for many other utilities due to the strong load growth that APS continues to experience. In planning for future resource needs, APS faces a number of challenges, including projecting customer and electric load growth, fuel price volatility, limited availability of regional capacity, transmission constraints, construction cost escalation and climate change issues. As a regulated utility, APS seeks to work with our customers, the Arizona Corporation Commission and our other stakeholders to develop an integrated resource plan that balances all of these issues and provides the sustainable energy future that we all desire.
To address these challenges, APS has initiated a process to involve key stakeholders in the resource planning process with the goals of both educating and seeking input from these stakeholders. This public process began in January, 2008 when APS filed its Resource Alternatives Report with the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC). This report provided information related to a host of resource planning issues such as load growth projections, potential carbon costs associated with various energy sources, technology choices, and key challenges. As a follow-up to the report, APS has initiated a series of stakeholder meetings in which the issues raised in the report can be explored in greater detail. These meetings also provide a forum for open discussion between the stakeholders and APS' experts on different topics. APS expects that these stakeholder meetings will continue through the first half of 2008. Following their conclusion, APS intends to utilize the input from the stakeholders and additional internal analyses to develop a resource plan which will present the resources that APS will utilize to meet future customer needs.
The APS Resource Alternatives Report, the APS Resource Alternatives Technical Report and the information from the public meetings on our integrated planning process are available to the public at www.aps.com/resources. This information contains detailed analysis on items such as projected customer and load growth; evaluation of different energy sources including renewables, coal, natural gas and nuclear; projected carbon emissions and potential impact of carbon legislation on each energy source scenario, and more. The interested reader should review this information for more details.
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