(3 of 9)
Is there a real prospect that the world will run out of its standard fuel resources? Yes, eventually. How much time remains? Nobody can tell for cer tain, but many specialists cite the figures of M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who predicts that 90% of all oil and gas will be gone by 2035, about 90% of all coal by 2300. Before that doomsday comes, most experts believe, technology can provide alternate sources of power, notably through nuclear energy. In the meantime, however, fuel supplies are al ready becoming scarcer, harder to dig out and thus more expensive. The focal point of this energy crisis—the point at which demand is growing fastest and threatening most immediately to out strip available supplies—is in electric power, which is largely derived from fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas).
Less than a century has passed since Thomas Edison first opened his Pearl Street Station to supply 85 New Yorkers with incandescent light. By 1920 the U.S. was producing 40 billion kw-h of electricity. Today it takes 25% of all its fossil fuels (plus some fissionable uranium) and produces 1.6 quadrillion kwh, or 34% of the world's output. The largest share of this power (40% ) goes to industry; the rest is split mostly be tween commercial (22%) and residential (34%) uses.
Electric power is a marvelous, inexpensive household genie. But it causes violent and lasting disruption elsewhere. Oil spills at sea, strip mining of coal on land, acid mine drainage into water supplies—these are some of the hazards of extracting fuels from the earth. When the fuel is burned, it is done wastefully; the average plant converts only 35% of fuel into power, and the rest disappears in the form of smoke and heat. The process is dirty. According to Government statistics, electric power plants account for half the sulfur oxides and significant amounts of the nitrogen oxides and soot that contaminate the air.
"Energy demands and environmental goals are on a collision course," says Energy Expert Freeman. "We've got plenty of energy for the present. What we're running out of is clean energy." To the dismay of electrical-utility executives, the new environmental laws, added to the older state and local regulations, now require considerable paper work before utilities can even start the new plants they say they must build to prevent future blackouts. The Duke Power Co., for example, recently complained that it had to get 67 different licenses and permits before it could start the Keowee-Toxaway project in South Carolina. Even when the bureaucracy seems willing to provide licenses, environmentalist groups have started suing to stop plant construction, particularly in densely settled areas of the Northeast, the upper Middle West and Southern California. The Sierra Club's Richard Lahn calls it "guerrilla theater."
The drama usually centers on two problems:
WHERE TO BUILD A PLANT. "In days gone by," says Charles Luce, chairman of New York's Consolidated Edison Co., "communities used to welcome us to get the increase in real estate taxes. Now they don't."