While water levels in the Pacific Northwest, remaining winter weather in the East and even the advent of war with Iraq all could impact this summer’s natural gas and electricity prices in Nevada, Las Vegas-based Southwest Gas Corp. officials indicated Monday they are not overly concerned. They do admit the short-term future is unclear because of the many widely diverse variables involved.

“What the future will hold, we don’t know,” said Roger Buehrer, a Southwest Gas spokesperson, adding that the gas-only utility has protected itself against short-term price spikes by purchasing about half of its supplies in fixed-price longer term contracts of a year or more.

Mild weather in southern Nevada with Las Vegas experiencing its warmest January ever has helped, too. “There were many days in January when we didn’t have to buy any supplies on the spot market,” Buehrer said.

Buehrer discounted reports in local news media that speculated last weekend that the same conditions that prompted the 2000-2001 wholesale energy price spikes in the West were shaping up again this year, and would cause rate increases this summer from the two Las Vegas-based private sector utilities, Southwest Gas and Nevada Power Co. Southwest Gas plans no rate increase filing at this time, he said.

Southwest’s executive in charge of gas supplies told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that so far the company hasn’t “seen the huge (price) swings that we saw in the 2000-2001 period throughout the West.” His counterpart at Sierra Pacific Resources, the holding company for Nevada Power and Sierra Pacific Power Co., said the biggest driver for western purchased power prices is hydro-electric supplies and after that, wholesale natural gas prices.

Like Southwest Gas’ fixed-price supply contracts, Nevada Power now is using more hedging in its power purchases to try to lessen the volatility of prices, according to John Young, Sierra Pacific Resources senior vice president for power supply in the Review-Journal report.

Ultimately, there could be power shortages and/or price spikes this summer, but the utility officials are not ready yet to say there is a high probability of that occurring.

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