Electricity Crunch May Force the Nation into Tough Tradeoffs

By Jim Carlton, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

SAN FRANCISCO -- At the height of California's electricity crunch this summer, PG&E Corp. wanted to anchor a floating power plant in San Francisco Bay to help avert potential brownouts.

Environmentalists objected, arguing that the plant's four jet turbines would spew noxious fumes into the air and could spill fuel into the bay. They threatened to blockade the barge at the Golden Gate Bridge with a flotilla of small boats.

The energy company quickly backed off, diverting the floating rig, which had already passed through the Panama Canal en route from Texas, to a holding port in Oregon. When temperatures soared to the triple digits around here last month, Northern Californians once again cranked up their air conditioners, draining PG&E's electricity reserves anew and forcing it to cut power to 200 business customers.

The power shortages afflicting California and other parts of the nation are the product of the long economic boom, the increasing use of energy-guzzling computer devices, population growth and a slowdown in new power-plant construction amid the deregulation of the utility market. And as the shortages threaten to spread eastward over the next few years, more Americans may face a tradeoff they would rather not make in the long-running conflict between energy and the environment: whether to build more power plants or to contend with the economic headaches and inconveniences of inadequate power supplies.

The quandary is already evident as the nation's energy producers, even those proposing to meet the surging demand for electricity with the cleanest types of power plants, find themselves stymied by environmental groups concerned about pollution and damage to natural resources. The two sides are facing off coast to coast: from a proposed wind farm near Los Angeles, thwarted by bird enthusiasts, to a high-tech gas plant slated for New York's Hudson River Valley, under attack as a potential eyesore. Even hydroelectricity -- among the most renewable energy resources -- is under fire along the West Coast, from activists bent on unleashing wild rivers.

"Bottom line," says Sen. Slade Gorton, a Washington Republican who often sides with the power industry, "whatever suggestion you make, they find something wrong with it and bring more lawsuits."

Environmentalists benefit from electricity, too, of course, but they say better conservation, not more power, is the best way to solve the problem of shortages. Consumers and corporate users should be given incentives to use energy more efficiently, they say, by improving home insulation, adjusting their thermostats and modernizing office buildings by, for example, installing more energy-efficient lighting.

"Conservation is the cheapest source of power," says David Bayles, a director of the Pacific Rivers Council environmental group in Eugene, Ore.

Utilities, however, generally are spending less on conservation in today's era of deregulation than they were a decade ago. PG&E's utility unit, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., spends about $120 million annually on conservation programs, such as offering rebates on energy-efficient appliances, compared with about $170 million in 1992.

Industry and environmentalist forces clashed last year in the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles, where Enron Corp. proposed perhaps the greenest power source of all: electricity generated by the wind. But bird advocates complained that Enron's proposed windmill farm would imperil the nearly extinct California condor, a giant bird that likes to glide low along the steep slopes where the windmills were slated to turn.

"A condor Cuisinart, that's what it'd be," says Dan Beard, senior vice president of the National Audubon Society. Preferring to avoid a showdown with conservationists, Enron, which is based in Houston, agreed to relocate the windmills at considerable delay and expense.

Industry advocates acknowledge conservation is important. Pacific Gas, based in San Francisco, says its public conservation program has allowed it to stretch its capacity by about 1,000 megawatts in California over the past decade, roughly equivalent to San Francisco's electricity demands on a hot day.

But that still isn't enough to satisfy electricity demand in the Golden State, which industry executives say has risen 7% just since last year. Now, peak consumption approaches the state's generating capacity of about 46,000 megawatts.

During a series of heat waves from May through September, the state's operating reserves repeatedly fell below 5% of generating capacity, prompting California's Independent System Operator, a nonprofit corporation chartered by the state to monitor its power supplies, to declare 17 so-called Stage Two alerts. Those alerts required utilities to suspend power to business customers that receive favorable rates in exchange for agreeing to an interruption in their service during power emergencies.

"With the pace at which power consumption is growing, we are going to need all the solutions -- more conservation and more plants," says Leslie Everett, a Pacific Gas vice president.

To get new plants approved, utility executives say producers must jump through more regulatory hoops than ever -- with fewer assurances that environmentalists won't mobilize to quash their plans. In Athens, N.Y., for example, state officials required another PG&E subsidiary to design a proposed natural-gas plant along the Hudson River with a state-of-the-art air-cooling system that minimizes the need for river water.

"We must move forward. . . . Otherwise, the state will face power shortages and higher electric prices," Maureen Helmer, chairwoman of New York's Board on Electric Generation Siting and the Environment, said in approving the 1,080-megawatt facility in June.

But some people think the plant will mar the pastoral landscape near a quaint farmhouse and a state historic site called Olana, the estate of 19th-century American landscape painter Frederick Edwin Church. About 17 environmental, recreation and community groups are opposing the project, putting its planned 2002 start date in jeopardy.

"It's the right plant, but in the wrong place," says Ashok Gupta, an economist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group based in New York.

Such opposition leaves the power industry with few alternatives. In the wake of highly publicized nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in past decades, nuclear power has proven too controversial for most power companies. Yet new technologies, too, often run into political obstacles as at Athens, and even plans to expand existing plants are setting off fireworks.

Consolidated Edison Co.'s bid to double capacity at its East 14th Street steam and electrical plant in lower Manhattan, for example, is meeting stiff opposition from a coalition of community and environmental activists -- even though most of its opponents agree the new generators would be far cleaner-burning than the two they would join at the complex. Con Edison, whose application for the expansion is still pending with the state, wants the generators to replace an older plant elsewhere in Manhattan that it plans to shut down.

But the activists are demanding that Con Edison first clean up its old generators at the 14th Street plant, which went into service more than 30 years ago. They say carbon monoxide and other toxic emissions from those units have caused asthma and other health problems among the neighborhood's mostly low- to middle-income residents. "We see the need for energy, but we also see the need to reduce the pollution already out there," says Susan Stetzer, vice president of the East River Environmental Coalition, a New York conservation group.

http://dowjones.work.com/index.asp?layout=story_news_wsj&doc_id=11964

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 10, 2000

Answers

In the "every little bit helps" department, what say every town builds a gym, hooks up its Stairmasters and rowing machines to generators, and gives all users a tax credit or electricity discount proportional to use? It's renewable, non-polluting (as long as users refrain from fueling themselves with beans or cabbage), you could maybe even swing a health-insurance discount into the bargain. Those of us with a little extra on the hips might be looked on as a strategic reserve ....

-- l hunter cassells (mellyrn@nist.gov), October 10, 2000.

So you say pass on the beans and cabbage, I say bring them on and use fuel cells to convert the methane to electricity too. :)))

The above article is a prime example of not in my backyard.

-- (perry@ofuzzy1.com), October 10, 2000.

see www.astropower.com for the solution!

-- mark (mrobinowitz@igc.org), October 11, 2000.