Who’s Got The Power?

Posted Tuesday, May 01, 2001 at 08:04 AM EST

By Marc Baum Ipo.com

We run the country on electricity. We expect an unlimited, uninterrupted and cheap supply of it for our offices and our increasingly oversized homes. The same goes for gasoline in our supersized SUVs. Until this decade, utilities and oil companies were happy to indulge us. When supply didn't meet demand, companies simply drilled for more oil or built new generators.

But now we have a new demand. Though our energy use has soared, we now have decided that we want our energy companies, whether they are extracting fossil fuels or generating power, to be kind to the environment while not building new power plants in any of our collective backyards. We also want all of this to occur seamlessly just as we have embraced the "market" and decoupled power generation from distribution in a society that views conservation cynically and somewhat suspiciously. The problem with our new environmental awareness is that without some personal "sacrifice", there is inherent conflict with our growing energy dependence. In order to satisfy racing demand for electricity, utilities must build new generators, those generators must be placed in someone's backyard and they must turn some energy source into power.

It would be easy if we could build clean and attractive power plants. Unfortunately, no currently available source of electricity is both cost-effective and pollution-free. Coal is cheap but dirty. Natural gas is growing more expensive because it burns clean, but like oil and coal, can harm the environment as we extract it. Hydroelectric power destroys river habitats, and the waste disposal issues make nuclear energy still too scary to accept. Whatever the source, power plants are ugly. The answer in twenty years may be fuel cells, or wind or solar power, but twenty years is a generation. If President Bush is successful in lowering the research budget for alternatives, maybe longer.

This leaves us in an economically untenable position: we want to increase demand, limit supply, and keep prices low. This muddled thinking has already caused a crisis in California where the response has been less than inspiring. The state's deregulation process may have made matters worse, but the main problem was an imbalance between supply and demand. Politicians knew that it would be tremendously unpopular to allow the utilities to raise energy rates, so they refused. The utilities, forced by California law, to pay wholesale energy prices which, as it turned out, rose exorbitantly, lost tremendous amounts of money. After one utility filed for bankruptcy, the state relented and allowed a price increase. It's a temporary solution at best, and it may receive a stern test as soon as this summer, when energy demand will spike again.

The public hasn’t acknowledged the overall scope of the problem. In New York, authorities warn, and most of us believe, that a hot summer will make us the next California. Still, we are bogged down in a series of nimby battles as people fear that "temporary" power plants will be anything but that. This resistance is hard to reconcile with the unlimited, cheap power people still want at home and at work connected by freeways that despite too few roads and our supersized cars, we feel should be free from traffic. And did we say that we are also for miles of parkland, and no global warming?

The choices we face are not so difficult; we just don’t like them. Either we use less or we make more. And because we want the more to be cleaner, it will, on a kilowatt basis, cost more. Put another way, we can either be environmentally conscious and pay higher energy bills (which drag on the economy as we pay more directly for cleaner power and more for the products made with it), or keep prices low and cover the country in soot. The only compromise across these choices is conservation. If we use less, we need to generate less. If we use less, even if it costs more, we could pay less. The solution is relatively simple, but it requires some sacrifice, which currently is not central to American cultural or political life. Any politician who starts talking about sacrifice will be about as popular as Piggy in Lord of the Flies. So for now, we muddle along with band-aids and duct tape. Perhaps when things get a lot worse, a more permanent solution will become possible. We just think that a more enlightened approach might be to find some answers sooner.

http://www.tfc.com/syndication/TFC/Mavens-IPO.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 06, 2001

Answers

Response to WhoÂ’s Got The Power?

A lot of people didn't like Jimmy Carter. But he had one thing right, we needed to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. To that end, over twenty years ago, this country started down the road of alternate energy.

The effort fizzled out and was scrubed. If we had stayed the coarse back then, we wouldn't be in this boat today. Our government was too stupid to see it. Too stupid to look forward. The writting was on the wall then.

The smart money says they are still too stupid.

-- Tom Flook (tflook@earthlink.net), May 06, 2001.

Response to WhoÂ’s Got The Power?

I'm not a Carter man but he invested heavily to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. He convinced the oil companies to invest in oil extraction from shale. I know the cost was prohibitive at the time and also the citizens of Colorado did not want their mountains reduced. Maybe this is a good time to revisit that reseach and see if it is feasible.

-- David Williams (DAVIDWILL@prodigy.net), May 07, 2001.

Response to WhoÂ’s Got The Power?

I'll say it again...let each one of us do our part in conserving, irregardless of what "Big Brother" says or does. It will lower our own bills and help conservation nationally. What's so hard about turning off unneeded lights and shuting down the computer when not in use?

-- Pat (psrodgers@msn.com), May 07, 2001.