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- 3 - tion is akin to that of the johnny-come-lately home-buyer who would like to avoid today's high housing prices by evicting owners from homes they financed and built at 1960 prices. Like the cost of owning a home, the cost of owning new electric generation has risen at least ten-fold since CRSP power was first delivered in the 1960's - from less than three tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour to over three cents per kilowatt hour today. UP&L is simply trying to force consumer-owned utilities to shoulder the cost of developing new electric resources it will eventually need. In hoping to take CRSP power away from consumer-owned systems, UP&L also hopes to reap the benefits of the investment these systems have made to date in the CRSP. By 1989, when current contracts expire, consumer-owned systems are scheduled to have repaid $405 million of the $725 million federal investment in CRSP. They first undertook this repayment obligation in the 1960's when their option was to build power plants which would have been cheaper that CRSP - the kind UP&L and other private power companies actually did build. By opting for CRSP, consumer-owned systems paid a heavy price for their decision to buy CRSP power. In fact, the cost of CRSP power averaged until recently about 20% more than power from plants similar to those built by UP&L in the 1960's. It is a bitter twist of events indeed for UP&L's management to argue now that the electric customers it profits from serving should all of a sudden be subsidized to the tune of up to $100 million per year by the customers of non-profit, consumer- owned utilities because their existing power resources are cheaper now than UP&L's future resources will be. UP&L also uses its "fairness" argument to attack the laws which for over three-quarters of a century have directed that federal power be distributed first to public bodies rather than private cbmpanies. Referred to often as the