POWER: High Noon

Wags in busy, whirring Seattle joke about the woman who told a census taker: "I have three sons, two living and one in Portland." Easy-going Portlanders scorn their frenetic rival to the north, refer with somnolent pride to their "city where it's always afternoon."

Last week Portland's afternoon quiet was abruptly shattered. From Dr. Paul J. Raver, the brisk administrator of Bonneville Dam, came the biggest news the Northwest has had in many a noontime. Aluminum Co. of America had contracted to build a $3,000,000 plant on the Columbia River eight miles from Portland and two miles west of Vancouver, Wash., use 32,500 kilowatts of Bonneville power (to be transmitted over aluminum cables).

To Portland, to all Oregon and to Seattle as well, these were stupendous tidings. Ever since the U. S. Government began to build Bonneville Dam (on the Columbia River) with its huge potential output of 502,400 kilowatts, and Grand Coulee Dam farther up the same river with its titanic 1,890,000 kilowatts to come, the looming question in the Northwest has been: Who will buy the power? Enterprising, efficient private utilities already had developed home consumption of electricity in Oregon to a point nearly twice the national average (760 kw-h per customer). Clearly the one answer was to get new industries to open shop within transmission distance of the dams.

The Bonneville-Grand Coulee area of Oregon and Washington is far from eastern and midwestern markets; freighting costs are high. Private utilitarians pointed out that they had tried for years to overcome these handicaps. Asked how Federal amateurs could expect to do better, Paul Raver's retort was the Aluminum Co. contract. "A nice Christmas present," he called it. He now expects to convince many more processors (chiefly of metals and chemicals) that they can save enough with ultracheap power to pay for the long hauls of raw materials and finished goods.