December 20, 2000

Electricity shortages won't stay out west

Parts of California and the Pacific Northwest recently have come under a "Stage Two" energy warning, under which both consumers and businesses were asked to reduce power usage or else face the prospect of rolling brownouts and blackouts.

The immediate reason for the warnings was the season's first real cold snap, which boosted electricity demand throughout the West Coast. But the problem is more than a week of bad weather. It's the result of a decade of under-building of electricity generation plants, a phenomenon that soon will impact the rest of the country as well.

The governors of California, Oregon and Washington couched the problem as economic growth, particularly in energy intensive high technology, outstripping power supplies. That's true, but only on the surface. The tech industry did not spring up overnight in the West. Silicon Valley took root 30 years ago and has grown steadily since, and Oregon's Silicon Forest was not far behind.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the organized environmental movement took hold in the West and is more powerful there at the local and state levels than anywhere else in the country. A few years ago Oregon environmentalists forced, through repeated ballot measure campaigns, the shutdown of Portland General Electric's Trojan nuclear power plant. There was nothing wrong with the plant, but PGE simply wearied of throwing millions at defensive political campaigns to keep its doors open. Now Oregon imports power during the winter months.

Meanwhile, new electric power generation construction has slowed to a crawl throughout the West as environmental extremists abuse public approval processes to stretch out the pre-construction permitting phase. At every stage of the process, utilities encounter fights. Not surprisingly, utility investors are taking their capital elsewhere. Leaders of big technology companies have to wonder how much longer they'll be able to expand their businesses in the face of electricity shortages.

The West Coast, however, is just the leading edge of the problem. Nationally, power plant construction is down and slowed not only by new regulations but also, as people in the West have long experienced, by increasingly contentious permitting processes.

While some of this growing national problem is local, and it is up to governors to reign in their utility commissions, at its root the problem is national.

George W. Bush as the next president will need a coherent energy policy that includes streamlining regulation if the West Coast's energy alerts are not to become a national phenomenon a few winters hence.