The Nation: CAN IT HAPPEN ELSEWHERE?

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New York's blackout also focused attention on the intensely debated question of whether U.S. utilities have enough power-generating capacity. As oil and gas become scarcer and costlier, electricity will become an increasingly important energy source (it now accounts for 29% of U.S. energy). Many utility executives and their equipment suppliers argue that the U.S. will have to build many more coal-fired and nuclear power plants. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports that 84 nuclear plants will be completed in the next decade; the Federal Power Commission says that if the NRC'S estimate is correct, the national power level will be "too low." As a consequence of the 1973-75 recession, utilities canceled orders for 14 reactors and deferred 96 others. Among the reasons: harassment by environmentalists, government red tape and delays, the difficulty of financing. Says Robert Kirby, chairman of Westinghouse, the biggest builder of nuclear reactors: "We increasingly will be faced with brownouts and blackouts unless we do something to bolster our total power output."

Nationally, the U.S. now has a 24% surplus of generating capacity, and that should suffice through the early 1980s if present rates of growth in demand and capacity stay the same. At present, many utilities expect that use of electricity will increase by between 4% and 6% annually. But before the surge in energy costs and the 1973-75 recession, the growth rate was 7.2% a year; so far this year demand for electricity is up, to 7% annually in the first quarter. An FPC advisory commission warned that if the growth in demand returned to 7.2%, "the industry reserve margin would fall to zero by 1983, and the risk of power outages would be vastly greater than today."

The Northeast appears to have more than enough reserve electrical capacity, but there is a power squeeze in parts of the rapidly growing Sunbelt. In South Texas, for example, the requirement that utilities convert the fuel for their generators from natural gas to coal—at the same time that industry is converting from gas to electricity—often forces Houston Lighting & Power to buy power from other companies. Completion of two large nuclear power plants in Texas in the early 1980s is expected to ease the squeeze.

Output Threatened. In the Northwest, drought has threatened the output of river-based hydroelectric generators. "The future for the Pacific Northwest is very grim," says Dan Schausten, an executive of the Bonneville Power Administration, which services Washington, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana. If the drought persists next year, B.P.A. may impose electricity cutbacks—and, in the worst case, rotate scheduled blackouts among the communities it serves. A similar rotation of brief blackouts was imposed on Jan. 17 by Virginia Electric & Power and the Southern Co. when demand for heating during the big freeze—combined with equipment shutdowns elsewhere due to the freezing weather —threatened to overload their systems.