Local Self-reliance
(Page 2 of 3)
March/April 1983
By the Mother Earth News editors
The most dramatic provision of the legislation is its use of broadly defined "cost-effectiveness" as the key criterion for acquiring new energy sources. And this will be determined not only by first construction costs, but also by "all direct costs of a measure or resource over its effective life, including, if applicable, the cost of distribution and transmission to the consumer, and, among other factors, waste disposal costs, end-of-the-line costs, and fuel costs (including projected increases), and such quantifiable environmental costs as ... are directly attributable to such measure and resource". Therefore, before investing in any new coal or nuclear generation facility, the Northwest must exhaust all less-expensive conservation and renewable energy options.
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The planning council will submit its final proposal by the end of April, and—to make certain that the proposal refiects Congressional emphasis on conservation—40 organizations got together to create the Northwest Conservation Act Coalition. Relying heavily on the technical expertise of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the coalition came up with a comprehensive model plan, which develops its own load forecasts, cost-estimating methodology, and recommendations ... and contends that costeffective conservation would preclude the need for almost all new power plants.
While the model plan outlines a seemingly organized long-term energy future, the short-term electric power situation in the Northwest is bizarre! In the mid-1970's, more than 100 utilities (most of which are publicly owned and based in Washington) established the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) ... which has since gone broke trying to build five nuclear reactors (two of them now mothballed). Its members owe more than $7 billion, and the organization will soon go into technical default on its bonds. (Some say the default of WPPSS is a significant but temporary affair, while others see it as the beginning of a chain reaction that could lead to the bankruptcy of Washington state!)
