Brownout

Into Manhattan's Commodore Hotel last week trooped 4,000 bronzed and weatherbeaten farmers and farm administrators. Delegates of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, they were there to plump for more and bigger TVA-like projects. They wanted dams and power plants along the St. Lawrence, Missouri, and Columbia Rivers. They wanted the federal government, which had spent $375 million in rural electrification last year, to spend $450 million more this year.

The keynote was set by Secretary of the Interior Julius A. ("Cap") Krug, who snorted: "Some high-priced lobbying talent and some vicious propaganda have gone into . . . hampering and hamstringing . . . the Government's electric power projects." The N.R.E.C.A.'s President T. E. Craddock declared that the shortage of electric power had reached a state of emergency.

These blasts against the utilities evoked some sympathetic echoes in many U.S. towns and villages. To conserve power, some companies have called for voluntary brownouts. In other areas, notably the Northwest and Southeast, where the power shortages are gravest, residents have been asked to cut down their use of electricity or go without. New Englanders had a different problem. There, power was so expensive that it tended to drive industries away. Were the utilities to blame for the shortage?

Single Shift. The power shortage was born during the war, when private utilities had to cancel their expansion programs. It became worse under the demands of the postwar boom. Not only did private industry step up its power consumption by 13%, but householders increased their demands with the installation of new washing machines, television sets, and a dozen other electrical gadgets that they had not been able to buy before.

In seven years, the utility companies have added 6,000,000 customers to their service, and have almost doubled the total amount of current they feed to all consumers. On top of that, industry has changed from three shifts a day, which spread the load, to the single shift, which concentrates it at one time. The result has been that most companies now have only a 4% emergency reserve of power v. 38% in 1939.

Double Effort. To build up their reserves and beat the shortage, the utility men were well into a $5 billion expansion program, the biggest in their history. Example: California's Pacific Gas & Electric Co. was spending $500 million on expansion, part of it to transmit power from the Government's Shasta Dam. It hoped to boost transmission enough so that last year's power shortage would not occur again. In addition, the Government hoped to step up California's Central Valley Project's capacity enough to take care of another big spurt in demand.

Though plagued by shortages of generators, private utilities hoped to build up their capacity to a safe reserve of 15% by 1950. And the federal government, currently spending $250 million in generating expansion (it now has about one-fourth of the U.S. total capacity), hoped to bring electrification to areas where private capital has not yet wanted to venture.

Too Small, Too Slow? But all this private and public effort was neither fast enough nor big enough for Cap Krug and his Under Secretary Oscar L. Chapman, who last week called for a doubling of the U.S.'s generating capacity in the next ten years. Chapman thought that the U.S. would be short of power for years. Private utility companies disagreed. They guessed there would soon be a surplus, unless a new demand was created. To create that demand, the Edison Electric Institute last week started a nationwide drive for all-electric kitchens.

Much of the argument between utility companies and the Government concerned timing. The Government could plan--and spend--on a basis of demand ten years hence (and write off some of the losses as "flood control"). The utilities had to restrict their planning to two or three years ahead, to be reasonably sure of their market. One way or the other, it looked as if the U.S. would lick the power shortage, though the debate on how to do it would go on for months.

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