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The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) has signed up to begintesting 3 KW home fuel cell units which it expects will sweep themarket much like the home computer in just a few years.

Due to expected high storage injections over the Memorial Dayweekend, Columbia Gas Transmission is not accepting SIT or ISSinjections, imbalance paybacks or Maximum Daily Injection Quantityoverruns today through Monday. Upstream affiliate Columbia Gulf,which has no storage facilities, said Thursday it is not acceptingany payback gas through June 30. The pipe is finishing pigging oflaterals and preparing to begin mainline pigging operations, aspokesman said, so it wants to avoid any problems with excesssupplies.

“Orderly” and “quiet” are not words that typically describe thenatural gas futures market-especially during hectic expiration-daytrading at Nymex. However, yesterday they were fitting descriptionsof a market that was only able to inch higher amid light commercialshort-covering. The June contract closed out its tenure as theprompt month with a 2.6-cent gain to settle at $2.226.

FERC shot down one major Midwest-to-Northeast pipeline projectyesterday but gave another competing project a final green light.The $447 million Vector Pipeline emerged victorious, receivingFERC’s final approval and a presidential permit in a draft order,while the $400 million TriState Pipeline was sent back to thedrawing board to redesign the pipeline-lease portion of itsproposal.

In an effort to improve its power market monitoring capabilitiesin light of the price spikes and market disruptions that occurredlast summer, FERC yesterday changed the reporting requirements for600 power marketers. The Commission said it intends to remove awaiver of its rules that was granted to power marketers and powerproducers with market-based rates that allowed them to refrain fromfiling their long-term contracts with their customers. The changeputs power marketers on a more level playing field with traditionalutilities, which currently have to file their long-term agreements.

CMP Natural Gas, a joint venture between Energy East Corp.(formerly NYSEG) and Central Maine Power Group, started servingcustomers in Windham, ME, yesterday, giving CMP Natural a bigadvantage over Bangor Gas, the other company vying to distributegas in the state.

Avista Energy, emphasizing people power in its drive to become anational energy marketing and technology company, has just namedsix new vice presidents, picking up talent from IllinoisPower/Illinova Energy and Enron Capital and Trade among others.

PG&E Gas Transmission-Northwest now expects Unit 5-C toreturn to service for June 1 operations, raising Kingsgate capacityto 2,360 MMcf/d. The return of Unit 7-C is scheduled for June 10,with Kingsgate reaching 2,520 MMcf/d.

The cash swing market kind of “muddled around” Tuesday,unimpressed by a small screen uptick or anything else for thatmatter, according to a Midcontinent trader. Nearly all points wereflat to barely a penny or two lower. The big drop of a nickel or soat Sumas likely was due to a three-day outage of Jackson Prairiestorage operations starting today, causing Northwest to get strictabout banking gas on the system, one source said.