THE breakdown did not come all at once—not like the cataclysmic nightfall that blacked out New York and most of the Northeast in 1965—but it was no less eerie. House lights went out; furnaces sputtered and cooled; auto traffic jammed up at darkened intersections. Dog races were canceled because the electric rabbits would no longer run. Factories shifted to a four-day week, then a three-day week, laying off 1.6 million employees. Only the most essential services operated full time—hospitals, water and sewage plants—and nobody knew how long they could continue.
A scenario for the future? Perhaps.
But it all happened last winter, when Britain's coal miners went on strike for almost two months. Without coal, there was not enough fuel for electric power plants. Without enough electricity, the nation faltered.
Americans use nearly twice as much electric power per capita as the British and six times as much as the world average. Could such power failures happen here? Early warning signals are everywhere. Says James Lydon, a vice president of Boston Edison Co.: "We have a serious power-supply situation in New England. The consumer can expect voltage reductions this summer." Similar brownouts are forecast for New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, Florida, Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin. Miami, New York City and Chicago cause "special concern." When the temperatures rise next month, consumers who keep buying more and more electrical appliances can expect from time to time to find their air conditioners slow, their lights dim, their TV pictures shrink.
The real threat lies in the future.
The U.S. demand for energy is growing at such a rate—doubling every 15 years—that some officials already call it the nation's most basic economic problem. "A crisis," says Interior Secretary Rogers C.B. Morton. "Endemic and incurable," says John A. Carver Jr., vice chairman of the Federal Power Commission. "Sabotage power and you sabotage the future," warns M. Frederik Smith, a business consultant to the Rockefeller family.
Americans want more gasoline to turn the wheels of their 83 million cars, more kerosene to thrust their jet fleets faster, more coal to fire the boilers of industry, more natural gas to heat their homes in winter, more electricity to cool them in summer. The U.S. now burns up the equivalent of 1.9 billion tons of fossil fuel every year (30% of the world's consumption) but produces only 1.7 billion tons—and the gap is widening. It must import the rest. Says S. David Freeman, former energy expert for Presidents Johnson and Nixon: "Our rates of consumption are so large that we can see the bottom of the barrel."
How big is that barrel? Not all the figures are reliable, but experts view it this way: