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Show UTAH WILL BE HUB OF NINE-STATE REGIONAL ELECTRIC POWER POOL Formation of the largest regional electric power development de-velopment program ever planned was announced Tuesday Tues-day by E. M. Naughton, president of Utah Power & Light Company. Members of the organization, known as WEST a contraction of Western Energy Supply & Transmission Assoc.ates, will spend $10 billion in the next 20 years, Mr. Naughton said, adding that the money will come irom the investing public with no federal tax funds involved. watt pool. The WEST program, Mr. Naughton said, will be equivalent equiva-lent to 18 Grand Coulee dams and will be eight times the size of Russia's largest development, devel-opment, the Bratsk project in Siberia. The program, he explained, covers all or part of nine states, an area roughly equal to one-fifth of the continental United States. WEST Is presently pres-ently composed of 10 investor-owned investor-owned utilities, including Utah Power & Light Co., operating in California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming and Idaho. Mr. Naughton said the WEST program is an extension to a regional basis of the interconnecting intercon-necting and power pooling which UP&L has been carrying on with neighboring utilities for over 50 years. It calls for long-range joint planning of some 36 million kilowatts of new generating capacity and an extra-high-voltage transmission transmis-sion system interconnecting member power suppliers. The joint approach, he said, will make possible use of latest technological , advances and lowest cost fuel . sources be they coal, oil, natural gas or the atom, and will save several sev-eral billion dollars in construction con-struction and operating costs over the next 20 years. Mr. Naughton pointed out that because of its geographical geograph-ical location Utah Power & Light Co. actually is the eastern east-ern hub of the integration of power facilities in all of the Western states. UP&L's new high voltage facility to the Arizona line will tie the Northwest North-west and Southwest power pools together later this year into a single 86 million kilo- |