Washington Post

Our Energies Are in the Right Place

By Spencer Abraham

Monday, April 16, 2001; Page A17

"California's Largest Utility Files for Bankruptcy." "Rolling Blackouts Return to California." "Gas Price Surge Predicted."

These are not Department of Energy press releases; they are headlines in recent months. Yet, amazingly, in the face of these reports, some want to spend their time debating whether we confront an energy crisis.

On April 9 The Post ran an op-ed column by former energy secretary Bill Richardson devoted to parsing whether we have a "crisis" or a "serious challenge." While some may want to spend time on such theoretical exercises, the Bush administration is working to surmount a number of energy challenges we confronted upon taking office:

• America's oil imports had reached a record 57 percent. Yet the Clinton administration had placed opportunities for new supplies of oil and gas off limits and had no serious plan to increase domestic production.

• Projected demand for electricity during the next two decades had reached the point that the construction of more than one power plant a week for 20 years would be needed. Yet the federal government had no plan to address the siting, permitting and Clinton-imposed regulatory roadblocks impeding such construction.

• Our energy infrastructure was in need of nearly 300,000 miles of distribution and transmission lines for natural gas and new electricity transmission lines. Yet no plan existed to address even the bottlenecks that caused price spikes in New York City last summer.

• California was in an energy meltdown. Yet no action had been taken by the Clinton-appointed Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to force refunds of excessive charges for wholesale electricity, nor had any effort been made to provide California with desperately needed help to expedite new power generation.

That's what we inherited. It is understandable that some would like to divert attention from these failures with partisan attacks that masquerade as appeals to "bipartisanship." But other than correcting misstatements of fact, we are not interested in rehashing the Clinton administration's energy performance. We are focused on addressing the challenges now. Here is what we have done, among other steps, during our brief tenure in office:

We have responded to almost every California request to expedite new generation and transmission and to prevent production shutdowns. The FERC, now led by a Bush-appointed chairman, has -- for the first time in the California crisis -- ordered the refunds of more than $200 million of excessive charges for wholesale electricity.

In his first week in office, President Bush appointed a Cabinet-level task force to develop a long-term energy plan to address the aforementioned problems. This plan will, contrary to Bill Richardson's assertions, focus on both increasing energy supply and on conservation-energy efficiency.

Notwithstanding the advocacy of Richardson and others, there are several strategies our plan will not include. First, our plan will not impose price caps on wholesale electricity markets. Price caps won't cut demand, and they won't increase supply. Richardson's assertion that price caps would "allow new generating capacity to be added" is a view shared by almost no one. What price caps would do is guarantee more and longer blackouts.

Second, we won't beg for oil. OPEC's decisions to cut production, which Richardson suggests began after we took office, actually resumed during the Clinton administration. We will maintain a dialogue with OPEC and other producers, but such discussions would be far more positive if the United States had diversified its oil sources in recent years.

Third, we won't extend Clinton administration energy-spending priorities. These approaches failed to avert our energy crisis. Contrary to Richardson's claim, we haven't cut the Department of Energy's energy-efficiency and renewable-energy programs by 30 percent. What we have done is change priorities (including nearly doubling our weatherization program for the poor), reduce or eliminate programs whose missions had changed and maintained the core competencies of remaining programs so we can rebuild them consistent with the president's National Energy Plan.

Finally, we won't be "caught napping" as the previous administration admitted it had been about the energy crisis.

When the president's task force completes its work in a few weeks, Americans will understand our challenge and pull together to surmount this crisis. Unless, of course, we postpone taking necessary action and waste time debating the appropriate description of the problem, in which case these very real problems are only going to get worse.

The writer is U.S. secretary of energy.

-- Anonymous, April 16, 2001

Answers

Let's all hope they CAN produce...

Dennis

-- Anonymous, April 16, 2001