CAN IT HAPPEN ELSEWHERE?

Outside New York, there were quite a few cocky power company executives who said about the possibility of blackouts: "No, it can't happen here." There were some who pooh-poohed Consolidated Edison's "act of God" explanation as unconvincing. There were a number who blamed Con Ed's own defects and described with pride the superior safety features of their own systems. Yet on closer consideration, few power executives were willing to say flatly--and publicly--that they could offer ironclad security against the same sort of failure.

Systems from Boston to Los Angeles protect themselves with tie-ins to multistate power pools and with automatic "load shedding" controls that temporarily cut off some customers when overloads threaten. Yet New York too relied on those devices, and they were not enough.

Of course some of New York's problems are unique. Nowhere else in the U.S. is power failure likely to last as long as 25 hours; New York has more underground cable than any other system--80,837 miles of it--and it obviously requires more time to repair than do surface lines. And because each section of Manhattan's power grid sucks as much power as a small city, the restoration of power in each neighborhood had to proceed slowly and carefully to avoid sudden overloads on the system. Earlier this month, when fire destroyed an electric cable in St. Louis, it took only eight hours to restore power to the 40-block downtown area.

Power lines travel into most cities from several directions, but all the major cables connecting Con Ed to other pools of electric power run in a single corridor from the north. Last week a storm apparently knocked out all eight of these lines within an hour. Says an executive of Chicago's Commonwealth Edison: "If a major line goes out here, we can interchange a lot more easily and flexibly." One reason for the difference: Commonwealth Edison can more readily obtain right-of-way for power lines in Midwestern farmlands than can Con Ed in the crowded Eastern Megalopolis.

But to the extent that geography adds to the vulnerability of major power lines, New York is not alone. In the peninsular state of Florida, all the lines to power pools elsewhere run up and down in a fairly narrow corridor. Last May 2.5 million residents in five Florida counties (including Miami's Bade County) were without power for approximately four hours after the electric system short-circuited.

New York's blackout also focused attention on the intensely debated question of whether U.S. utilities have enough power-generating capacity. As oil and gas become scarcer and costlier, electricity will become an increasingly important energy source (it now accounts for 29% of U.S. energy). Many utility executives and their equipment suppliers argue that the U.S. will have to build many more coal-fired and nuclear power plants. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports that 84 nuclear plants will be completed in the next decade; the Federal Power Commission says that if the NRC'S estimate is correct, the national power level will be "too low." As a consequence of the 1973-75 recession, utilities canceled orders for 14 reactors and deferred 96 others. Among the reasons: harassment by environmentalists, government red tape and delays, the difficulty of financing. Says Robert Kirby, chairman of Westinghouse, the biggest builder of nuclear reactors: "We increasingly will be faced with brownouts and blackouts unless we do something to bolster our total power output."

Nationally, the U.S. now has a 24% surplus of generating capacity, and that should suffice through the early 1980s if present rates of growth in demand and capacity stay the same. At present, many utilities expect that use of electricity will increase by between 4% and 6% annually. But before the surge in energy costs and the 1973-75 recession, the growth rate was 7.2% a year; so far this year demand for electricity is up, to 7% annually in the first quarter. An FPC advisory commission warned that if the growth in demand returned to 7.2%, "the industry reserve margin would fall to zero by 1983, and the risk of power outages would be vastly greater than today."

The Northeast appears to have more than enough reserve electrical capacity, but there is a power squeeze in parts of the rapidly growing Sunbelt. In South Texas, for example, the requirement that utilities convert the fuel for their generators from natural gas to coal--at the same time that industry is converting from gas to electricity--often forces Houston Lighting & Power to buy power from other companies. Completion of two large nuclear power plants in Texas in the early 1980s is expected to ease the squeeze.

Output Threatened. In the Northwest, drought has threatened the output of river-based hydroelectric generators. "The future for the Pacific Northwest is very grim," says Dan Schausten, an executive of the Bonneville Power Administration, which services Washington, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana. If the drought persists next year, B.P.A. may impose electricity cutbacks--and, in the worst case, rotate scheduled blackouts among the communities it serves. A similar rotation of brief blackouts was imposed on Jan. 17 by Virginia Electric & Power and the Southern Co. when demand for heating during the big freeze--combined with equipment shutdowns elsewhere due to the freezing weather --threatened to overload their systems.

A flat prediction of trouble is offered by Frank Zarb, former head of the Federal Energy Administration: "There will be a lot of brownouts starting in 1981 and 1982 in various parts of the country due to a lack of capacity." That concern is shared by Jack L. Weiss, acting chief of the FPC's Bureau of Power. Says he: "If plants now scheduled are completed, if there's adequate fuel, if there's adequate transportation [for the fuel], then, yes, we'll have sufficient electricity. But there's a real possibility that all of the 'ifs' might not happen."

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