Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative to Acquire PacifiCorp's Wallowa County Territory

Baker City's Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative has been serving just outside Wallowa County's borders for nearly four decades. Now it has a non-binding agreement to serve inside them.

OTEC announced Thursday that it reached an agreement with Portland-based PacifiCorp to acquire the utility's entire Wallowa County service territory, a transfer that would move 5,514 residential, irrigation, commercial, and industrial customers from PacifiCorp to the cooperative if regulators sign off. The Oregon Public Utility Commission must approve the deal, and finalization is expected to take 12 to 15 months after OTEC and PacifiCorp work toward a definitive agreement.

"OTEC has been providing service adjacent to our neighbors in Wallowa County for almost 40 years, and we look forward to extending those services to Wallowa County and welcoming these communities into the cooperative," CEO Les Penning said in the press release. "The geographic alignment of this transaction will allow OTEC to further bolster resources in the region supporting both our existing and future Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative member-owners."

The announcement came roughly a month after OTEC disclosed plans to purchase Idaho Power Co.'s service territory in Eastern Oregon, which covers parts of eastern and southern Baker County, including Richland, Halfway, Oxbow, Huntington, and Unity, along with customers in Malheur and Harney counties. Adding Wallowa County would extend OTEC's reach across a northeast Oregon footprint that already includes Union County and parts of Baker, Grant, and Harney counties.

The Wallowa County deal is part of a broader reshaping of PacifiCorp's rural Oregon holdings. In the same announcement, PacifiCorp disclosed plans to sell assets in the Lakeview area of Lake County to California-based Surprise Valley Electrification Corp. and in the Monroe area of Benton County to Eugene-based Blachly-Lane Electric Cooperative. Combined, those three transactions would shift 8,904 residents from PacifiCorp to local co-ops and transfer a total of 638 miles of transmission and distribution lines.

Ryan Flynn, president of Pacific Power, the PacifiCorp division serving Oregon, Washington, and California, framed the divestitures as part of a deliberate financial strategy. "These agreements represent the company's ongoing efforts to strengthen its financial position and simplify operations to ensure the continued delivery of safe, reliable electricity to our customers," Flynn said. The moves follow PacifiCorp's accumulating liabilities tied to Oregon's 2020 wildfires and come one month after Portland General Electric announced it would purchase most of PacifiCorp's Washington state assets for $1.9 billion, a deal that included two wind farms, a natural gas-fired power plant, roughly 4,500 miles of transmission and distribution lines, and about 140,000 customers.

The 12-to-15-month timeline to close the Wallowa County transaction runs through both contract finalization and the Oregon Public Utility Commission review process.