N.Y.'S CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARE Monday,January 29,2001

New Yorkers finally may be waking up to the gravity of the state's electricity crisis - thanks, no doubt, to the chaos in California and the soaring electric bills here last summer. Last week, several trade groups in the city mobilized for what was, in effect, an emergency press conference to sound alarms over looming power shortages.

The conference itself was titled, "New York City Electricity Supply Outlook: A Matter of Urgency."

"California can happen here," howled the group's media advisory.

Yes, these groups are concerned about how power shortages will affect their businesses - and pocketbooks.

But what's wrong with that?

Besides, on a broader scale, they were fretting about the city's - and, by extension, the state's - economic health.

"The decisions of businesses to expand or relocate to the city - and thus the health of the city's economy - will largely be determined by the sufficient supply and price of electricity," a report by the groups said.

Speaker after speaker testified as to how his industry would be impacted not just by blackouts, but by the mere risk of power cuts and price spikes.

They showed how the city has become ever more energy-dependent, particularly because of the growth of computer-intensive and high-tech service firms here.

No securities firm, they said, for instance, would be willing to take a chance of going offline for even an hour.

Even scarier was a scenario in which the entire economy could collapse - prompted, perhaps, by a shutdown of mass transit.

Think this is all Chicken Little-speak?

Then look at California.

Football fans in the Golden State were actually urged to watch the Super Bowl in groups, to avoid blackouts.

And the crisis there has moved well beyond the nuisance stage.

Kids have been trapped in elevators.

Cars are piling up at blacked-out traffic lights.

Companies are laying off workers.

"You have a First-World economy that's suddenly been plunged into a Third-World economic environment," the chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation was quoted as saying.

How can New York avoid such a fate?

The groups made several recommendations - conservation, improved "price signals," provision of peak-period use incentives, development of "micro" generators, fuel cells and so on.

None of these, of course, is nearly as important as two other proposals they made: speeding up the approval - and construction - process for new power plants and expanding transmission lines to make it easier to import power.

But this is New York; plant-owners have to stand on their heads for years before they can start building.

One plant, for example, to be built in Athens, took years before finally clearing all local hurdles - and it still faces a lawsuit by environmental narcissists.

Other plants can't get even that far.

But now New York is warned.

Unless it moves fast, California dreaming will soon become a New York nightmare.

http://www.nypostonline.com/postopinion/editorial/22510.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 29, 2001