May 30, 2006

ELECTRICITY AND CIVILIZATION

By Hal Mansfield

Electricity is a vital part of modern life. If electricity is not available at the flick of the switch, most Americans have trouble meeting their needs for water, food, heating, cooling, phone and Internet access and much more; that is, for the key foundation blocks of modern culture. At the community level, business, law and order, fire protection, health services and other vital services and functions are compromised. At the national level, civil order and defense are disrupted.

Over the past few decades, complex and reliable systems developed to make sure that - for most electricity users, most of the time - a flick of the switch brings exactly the electricity needed.

The cultural and economic importance of electricity cannot be overestimated. The electric power industry is one of the most dollar intensive of all industries. The asset value of power plants, power transmission facilities and power distribution facilities is huge and increasing. A recent estimate placed that asset value at around $850 billion.

Over 133 million electric customers pay about $270 billion per year for this vital energy. The U.S. system is a model of reliability. However, there are growing concerns that our nation's electric generation, transmission and distribution systems are facing serious problems, if not tragic disruptions.

Here's why: The majority of the ten thousand, or so, electric power plants are over 30 years old. The efficiency of these plants averages 33%, as opposed to modern, state-of-the-art distributed and co-generation plants with average efficiencies of 50 to 60%. For a variety of economic and environmental reasons, investment in and the building of new plants and attendant facilities lags far behind increases in demand.

Because significant numbers of the old plants are being retired and far too few new plants are being planned or constructed, America faces the prospect of electricity shortfalls of magnitudes never before seen. That is the electric generation side of the concern.

The second area of concern is with the transmission and delivery systems. There are roughly 160,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines in the United States. Since 1990, demand has increased by about 25%. In this same period, new transmission facility construction has declined by about 30%. The increase in demand coupled with the decrease in construction creates congested transmission paths (bottlenecks). These bottlenecks lead to greater line losses because of system overloads, to higher consumer costs and to lower reliability.

Because of opposition (including lawsuits) to the construction of new lines from various sources, many would-be investors turn to more reliable investments. Industry executives are hesitant to plan and to begin new construction projects. In addition, there is confusion between private industry and various governmental levels regarding the permitting processes and the actual construction of new transmission facilities from power lines to substations.

Distribution of electric power to end-users usually begins at substations. Substations take high voltage electric power and distribute that electricity over hundreds of thousands of lower voltage lines to the customers' meters. In addition to commercial distribution systems, up to 2,000 government entities operate their own distribution systems as do over 900 rural electric cooperatives, including our own LPEA, making for an incredibly complex final distribution matrix.

Local and regional power outages frequently grab the media headlines away from the fact that the U. S. system, overall, has been a hallmark of reliability. That track record could change. Unless vitally needed investment capital becomes available and the electric generation, transmission and distribution systems meet the ever-increasing demands with modern, efficient and sufficient additions, reliability will suffer and consumer costs will rise substantially. Cultural catastrophe is not out of the question.

The electric industry uses about 40% of all of the energy consumed in the United States. Estimates vary but it is evident that fossil fuel reserves are shrinking as energy usage escalates. An energy crunch is coming, one that will dwarf any that America has known. What then?

President George W. Bush said that the United States has not had an energy plan for 25 years. Actually, this country has never had an adequate energy plan. President Carter tried to develop one, but was voted out of office. The decades of decadent energy excesses are about to inflict their toll on world culture . . . but that is for another essay.

America must place the electric energy industry concerns high on the national agenda. Widespread, long-lasting electric brownouts and outages must be avoided. Nothing short of civilization as we know it is at stake. Without adequate, reliable electricity virtually every aspect of modern life will revert back to the pre-electric age! Unthinkable? Not at all.

Author Note: Hal Mansfield was born in Fort Collins, Colorado. After serving in the U. S. Army, he graduated from Colorado State University, in 1958. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Denver, in 1974. In 1993, he retired from Fort Lewis College, where he taught psychology, statistics and writing for 18 years. In addition to fiction writing, part of his retirement regimen includes researching, thinking through, and writing about critical contemporary social issues. After a "life-time" in Colorado, including the last 31 years in Durango, he recently moved to Green Valley, Arizona, but is spending the summer of 2006 in the foothills west of Loveland, Colorado with some of his extended family. Some of his writing efforts, including letters to the editor, have appeared in "The Durango Herald" since the mid-1970s, and also in "Solar Age Magazine," "crimemagazine.com" and "Crossroads: A Journal of the Southwest."