UTILITIES: Catharsis Time Again at Con Ed

New York's Consolidated Edison would be a very special enterprise even if it were not the nation's largest utility, serving more customers (9.0 million) and producing more revenues ($2.9 billion) than any other. As the company that almost everyone living in and around the Big Apple loves to hate, it supplies more than just gas, steam and the costliest electricity in the country. Con Ed's softspoken, Wisconsin-bred chairman, Charles Luce, 60, himself says that the big firm also provides ''a tremendous catharsis for the pent-up tensions of the city. If we didn't have a Con Ed, we'd have to invent it."

After New York's big blackout last week—in many respects a replay of the 1965 power shutdown that darkened eight states in the Northeast—that old Con Ed catharsis began working overtime. Federal, state and local agencies launched investigations of the power failure. Politicians and editorial writers howled over the fact that only three days before the city went dark, Con Ed's $200,000-a-year chairman had said he could "guarantee" that the chances of another blackout were remote. New York Mayor Abraham Beame summarily convicted Con Ed's management of "gross negligence," if not something "far more serious."

Can Con Ed really be as poorly run as its detractors say it is? The company has always been a tempting target, partly because of its very size. Besides being New York City's biggest taxpayer ($471 million last year) and second largest private employer (25,371 workers), it operates a vast power system comprising 118,000 miles of overhead and underground wires, cables, gas mains and steam pipes, as well as 15 generating plants and battalions of maintenance crews that seem to be forever tearing up city streets. When Luce was brought in to run the company in 1967—two years after the first big blackout—Con Ed was being badgered by civic leaders and its own 254,000 shareholders to overhaul a stodgy, ingrown management that appeared to operate as if it were part of the city bureaucracy.

A lawyer by training, Luce had had limited experience with utilities. He was administrator of an Oregon power company in the 1960s and later showed managerial talent as an Under Secretary of the Interior during the Johnson years. He seemed to possess the kind of even-keeled candor needed to deal with irate customers and fretful stockholders.

Testy Relations. Luce started off briskly enough. He revamped virtually the entire 55-member top-management team at Con Ed, bringing in many new executives from the outside. He ordered a variety of improvements to reduce chances of future system-wide blackouts, and encouraged natural-gas conservation. To better the company's testy relations with its customers, he scrapped the gratuitous DIG WE MUST signs that work crews used to place at their street excavations, emphasized pollution-control efforts and set up special offices to handle complaints.