Ridder/Tribune News Service

The Philadelphia Inquirer

March 1, 2001, Thursday

HEADLINE: Nevada is steaming, and blaming California BYLINE: By Nita Lelyveld

LAS VEGAS _ From miles and miles away across the desert, the lights of the Las Vegas Strip shine brightly _ neon and millions of bulbs endlessly beckoning visitors to come inside the big casinos.

Residential lights blaze in the night here, too, as more and more homes each day swallow up open space. Nevada is growing at a breakneck pace: Since 1980 its population has more than doubled. And just outside Las Vegas is an endless suburb called Henderson, the fastest-growing city in the nation.

To live here, in the desert, takes huge amounts of electricity, especially in summer, when air conditioners are locked in combat with triple-digit temperatures.

But ask people in Henderson why their power bills are going up, and uniformly they will point not to their lights, their air-conditioning, the Strip, the growth, or the inhospitable, demanding desert.

They will point to California.

It makes no difference that Nevada's per capita energy use is much higher than California's, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, which ranked Nevada 28th in the nation in per capita use in 1997 _ the latest figures available _ while California ranked 47th.

The very mention of their neighbor and its power crisis makes Nevadans (many of whom just moved here from California) sputter angrily and point accusing fingers westward.

"When you move here, out to the desert, right away you learn that you have to conserve things," said Tony Yepes, formerly of Van Nuys, Calif. In Nevada, he said, he has learned how to grow desert plants that need less water, how to keep his air conditioners running well by changing the filters.

"Californians, they're very wasteful," Yepes said. "They're not as conservation-oriented as they should be. In California, people act like they have carte blanche, like it's the land of milk and honey."

Westerners all over are blaming California for rising electricity and gas rates in their own states. Nevada's governor, Kenny Guin, a Republican, last month put the brakes on electricity deregulation here for the second time, saying in his state of the state address that "we must learn from the mistakes made in California."

Deregulation is not entirely to blame for the California power squeeze, and halting deregulation will not necessarily solve problems in other Western states. After all, much of the West has _ like California _ experienced rapid population growth. And in much of the West, from the booming Portland, Ore., and Seattle areas to Las Vegas, new customers have arrived by the thousands without new power plants to serve them. Just like California.

"All of us in the West would like to be very smug about how terrible California is for growing so quickly without building new capacity. But the truth is, we're in the same boat and we haven't had very many new power plants either," said Dick Burdette, manager of resource and market analysis for the Public Utility Commission of Nevada.

When it comes to supply, "we're right on the ragged edge, especially in the south," said Robert Boehm, director of the Energy Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In Henderson, which the Census Bureau ranks as the fastest-growing city of 100,000 or more, rush-hour gridlock is now a fact of life along the wide streets lined with chain stores and miles of planned communities full of nearly identical tile-roofed houses. New construction sites are everywhere, along with model homes standing solo on soon-to-be-filled expanses.

The city, whose slogan is "A Place to Call Home," was home to 24,000 people in 1980. By 1990, the number had nearly tripled, to 65,000; by 1999 it had more than doubled again, to 166,399.

Between 1980 and 2000, California's population grew by more than 10 million, from 23.6 million to 33.8 million. In the same two decades, Nevada's population more than doubled, from 800,508 to almost two million, according to the Census Bureau.

Nevada's energy situation is better than California's now, but it is precarious. In Nevada, the utilities recently sought to raise rates by 17 percent, pointing to skyrocketing wholesale electricity prices brought about by California's shortages.

Like California, the state often has to import electricity. Its two major utilities recently merged under parent Sierra Pacific Resources, agreeing to a requirement that they sell off their generators _ just as deregulated California utilities had been forced to. But now, uncertain times have led some potential buyers to back off, even as Nevada considers whether it really wants the utilities to hand over plants to outsiders in such a volatile market.

Meanwhile, with the fate of deregulation unclear in the state, potential builders of plants here are nervous _ just as potential builders were in California, before deregulation passed and in the plan's early years. And Nevada's utilities, which did not set up long-term contracts for power because deregulation was on the horizon, now find themselves subject to the same high-priced wholesale market that is making California miserable.

Additionally, Nevada's economy relies on such power-hungry industries as mining and casino gambling, and the state's environment _ particularly in the burgeoning south _ requires air-conditioning to make life comfortable.

"We don't have a lot of industrial load in Vegas that can be easily shed when supplies are short," said Tim Hay, who directs the state's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "You can raise the temperatures a little inside the casinos, but how much savings you'd get from that is questionable. It's just tough in a place where you have temperatures of 115 and 118 degrees in summertime."

In Henderson, people see things differently. They are the victims; California is to blame.

"What happened in California, it's going to affect us now," said JoAnn Paschal, 65, another California transplant. "I think California is a beautiful state, but the prices are too high. And now because of California, the prices are going up here, too. What can you do? We'll just have to pay and pay and pay."

http://www.buildingteam.com/news/members/WestNews.asp

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 01, 2001