Just days after Enron Corp. ended a bid to sell Portland General to Sierra Pacific Resources Corp. (see Daily GPI, April 27), Scottish Power Plc apparently decided to fling in an offer for the Oregon-based power utility. The West Coast utility would be fit geographically with Scot Power’s PacifiCorp, which is headquartered in Portland and operates in six U.S. states.

Enron would have received $2 billion from Sierra Pacific, which also would have assumed $1 billion in debt. That deal was first set up in late 1999 but started to fall apart as West Coast power problems continued (see Daily GPI, Nov. 9, 1999). Terms for a Scot Power deal were not disclosed.

Portland General has about 700,000 customers and has 2,000 MW of generating capacity. Scot Power’s PacifiCorp is now paying about $1 million a day for buy-in costs that resulted when one of its generators failed in the power crisis. For the past two years, the share price of Scot Power has registered 5% United Kingdom sector underperformance.

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