The Power Shortage

In the 88 years since Thomas Alva Edison inaugurated the nation's first steam-electric power station in lower Manhattan, the U.S. has become extraordinarily dependent on electricity. Americans now take for granted the busy computers that click in offices, the lights that blaze all night in poultry farms, the sensitive machines that monitor patients in hospitals. The average U.S. household contains 16 electrical appliances. But the day may come when people casually flip a switch or lift a receiver--and nothing will happen.

In simplest terms, the enormous demand for energy is catching up with supply. With $100 billion already invested in plants, equipment and transmission lines, the electric industry must double its facilities by 1980.

Nuclear Disappointment. Despite the crisis in the New York area last week, some industry spokesmen still insist that the nation generally has ample power. The Edison Electric Institute, a national trade association, argues that the U.S. has an average 18.2% more generating capacity than it needs to supply peak summer demand. Western states in particular have a surplus of power. But other experts are less sanguine. Speaking before the American Power Conference last April, Carl E. Bagge, vice chairman of the Federal Power Commission, bluntly informed the electric industry that it confronts a "national crisis." Said he: "Minimizing this fact will only make its eventual realization that much more devastating." In May the President's Office of Emergency Preparedness warned that most of the Eastern

Seaboard from New York to Alabama, plus Chicago, St. Louis and Minneapolis-St. Paul, might expect brownouts this summer.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that a bet made by the utilities in the mid-1960s did not quite pay off. At that time, nuclear energy seemed cheap, easily produced and pollution-free. Starting in 1963, utility after utility committed itself to the peaceful atom until in 1967 almost half of all new generating power ordered was nuclear.

Then reality intervened. For one thing, nuclear plants turned out to be less efficient and trouble-free than those run by fossil fuels (coal, oil). For another, utilities did not foresee the steep rise in the cost of money--and "nukes" (nuclear plants) are especially expensive to build. In addition, cooling towers required to control thermal pollution will boost the average plant's cost from $150 per kilowatt of capacity to $175. All these pressures caused utilities to cut down on their orders for nukes, from 31 in 1967 to seven in 1969.

Oversold Idea. Another cause of today's problems is yesterday's lack of advance planning, especially on a regional basis. Some utilities underestimated the appeal of air conditioning, which alone has changed the peak load period from winter days to summer nights in many parts of the nation. Others oversold the idea of "all-electric living"; electric heating uses three times the energy required by conventional heating. Meantime, consumption of electricity increased with population growth.

To compound the problem, equipment manufacturers were held up by strikes and shortages of skilled labor. When the Federal Power Commission surveyed 85 large steam-generating units installed in 1966-68, it found that 55 had been delayed for one reason or another. As a result, lead time for getting a new fossil-fuel plant on the line has been lengthened from four to six years. Nuclear plants are now expected to take seven rather than five years.

"The thing that really worries us," says Milton Searl of the Government's Office of Emergency Planning, "is the fuel supply. All of it--gas, coal and oil. If the trains should stop running --and we've been threatened with a strike--that's it. Or if the miners go out --and that is a possibility--then we're in trouble."

In fact, some marginal coal mines will probably close down rather than comply with the strict standards set by the new Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which is aimed at stopping "black lung" disease among miners. There is also a shortage of cheap coal with a sufficiently low sulfur content to reduce air pollution. The cleanest fuel, natural gas, is so hard to come by that the Midwest's biggest buyer, Commonwealth Edison, has now begun to burn its winter stocks of coal to supply Chicago with power. Even domestic oil is getting more expensive, and there seems little chance of the Government's liberalizing the import quotas it imposes on foreign crude.

Less Power to the People. Above all, the electric industry confronts a growing conflict with environmentalists, who know that power generation is a key polluter of air and water. Invoking the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, they are trying to stop any plant that fouls the landscape even if such action reduces electric power.

Fearing thermal and radioactive pollution from a huge nuclear power plant in Monticello, Minn., conservationists have filed a lawsuit against state agencies and Northern States Power Co. to bar the plant's operations. Result: the Minneapolis-St. Paul area has to borrow power from neighboring utilities. In Kalamazoo, Mich., another nuke is stalled pending consideration of the ecological effects of the plant's discharge of hot water into Lake Michigan. Until pollution-free fuels or new generating techniques can create energy without contaminating the environment, such conflicts are likely to spread across the nation.

Some experts want to increase the price of electricity as a way to moderate demand and provide industry with money to pay for expensive antipollution devices. Others, including the Federal Power Commission's Vice Chairman Bagge, suggest that parts of the nation may have to consider rationing. President Nixon has indicated that he might put the Atomic Energy Commission in charge of all forms of U.S. energy. If he does so, environmentalists hope that power needs and economics will be planned and balanced with ecological considerations. A report by the Conservation Foundation stresses that such comprehensive planning--"in the open and far in advance"--is the only road to a possible solution.

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