Full Steam and Hydro Ahead

Since the end of May, when Franklin Roosevelt invited competent businessmen to help him arm the U. S. against war, many a bloodstained hatchet in the New Deal's feud with business has been quietly buried. Most unobtrusive burial: utility men (once the President's most truculent foes) have begun to work alongside public-powerites (some of the toughest hatchetmen in the New Deal) for the mutual good of preparedness. To the Defense Advisory Commission have come two key ambassadors of the power industry: Charles Wetmore Kellogg, president of Edison Electric Institute, and Gano Dunn, president of construction-engineers J. G. White Engineering Corp. To work with them, the President assigned quiet, round-cheeked, scholarly Leland Olds, Chairman of the New Dealish Federal Power Commission, who has been running the National Power Policy Committee analysis of emergency power needs which Assistant Secretary of War Louis Arthur Johnson got started a year and a half ago (TIME, Nov. 7, 1938).

Last week this team began to get production. Their first deal: an immediate expansion of capacity in the controversial domain of TVA, which sought and got a new hydro plant (90,000 kilowatts) and a new steam plant (120,000 kilowatts), plus transmission facilities and generators, all to cost $65.000,000. These will give TVA 25% more capacity (by 1942) than its normal building program.

Utilitarians Kellogg and Dunn had good reason to agree with New Dealer Olds in giving TVA a green light. TVA's sales--both residential and industrial--have been soaring. More than one power-hungry chemical company on TVA's lines feared the growing load might cause a shortage, hamper defense. The steam plant is to insure against a repetition of last fall's hydro shortage, when the valley was visited by a combined boom and drought (TIME, Nov. 6, 1939).

One of TVA's best customers is Aluminum Co.. of America, whose big mill at Alcoa, Tenn., is loaded with orders for aircraft parts. Alcoa, watching TVA's firm-power sales expand, feared it might be elbowed out of the TVA reserve power on which it relies for peak-season production. (TVA withdrew 30,000 kw. from Aluminum Co. on July 1.) Alcoa welcomed TVA's promise of new capacity, but wanted still more. Proposing to build two hydro stations of its own (90,000 kw.) on the Little Tennessee, Alcoa asked the Federal Power Commission whether it claimed jurisdiction over them (as it can over all dams affecting navigation). Last week FPC, to speed the job and make things easier for Alcoa, waived jurisdiction.

Next happy-family gesture came from North American Co., utility holding company. Wrote North American President Edward L. Shea to Defensemen Dunn and Olds: "The North American Co. and its operating companies expect to meet with their own resources all of the obligations arising out of any national defense problems. . . . This will require as never before the use of all resources of capital and man power. . . . We will use them fully." Utilitarian Shea laid on the line a $29,000,000 addition to a $61,000,000 construction program announced in January. The new items: 60,000 kilowatts for Cleveland, 50,000 for Washington (D. C.).

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