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. '. . I . I I . I . ~I I I I I I I I I oa0223 Three Forks conditional right is the purchase by the State of Wyoming of the conditional water right for Middle Fork Reservoir on the Powder River. The State paid about $50 per acre-foot of firm yield for the right. Other prices varied from $18 per acre-foot to $2,000 per acre-foot. Net Financial Return The present value of potential future project revenues, less development costs, must be estimated since there are no customers signed up to purchase water at a set price. The approach taken to estimate what the revenues must be in order to make the project viable was to estimate the value of water to a producer of electric energy. The most readily identifiable use of the water would be for steam generation using the coal resources in the area. An estimate of the value of the water may be arrived at by capitalizing the difference in construction cost of wet versus dry cooling processes. The justification of this concept is that the small amount of water necessary for a dry cooling process would be available without storage whereas the wet cooling process would involve a guaranteed source such as from storage. It would not be reasonable to assign the entire cost of the powerplant to water. For a fairly large powerplant, e.g. 500 to 1,500 megawatts, the differential construction cost can be grossly estimated at about $60 per kilowatt (SWEC,1990) or $30,000,000 for a 500 megawatt plant. The annual amortization payment of $30 million at 4 percent over 30 years would be about $1,700,000. A 500 megawatt plant would require about 7,000 acre-feet of water using the wet cooling process. Thus the annual cost per acre-foot would be $245 if the project were to be constructed 13