120 years of utility hijinks in 60 pages

120 years of utility hijinks in 60 pages

Harry S. Truman once said it took him a week to prepare a two-minute speech, a couple of days to prepare a five-minute speech, but if called upon to speak for a half-hour, he was ready immediately. Author Harvey Wasserman has spent three decades in the trenches of America’s energy wars, leading a life which prepared him to write a very small book on a very big subject.

Anyone seeking insight into how 120 years of technical innovation and political machinations placed Indiana at her current energy crossroads should plunk down $5.95 for Wasserman’s The Last Energy War: The Battle Over Utility Deregulation (Seven Stories Press, ISBN 1-58322-017-8). Although Wasserman’s fifth book weighs in at a mere 60 pages (not counting prologue, appendixes, and such), no one should underestimate the potency of this little parcel.

Harvey Wasserman

Within the first ten pages, Wasserman recounts late 19th century battles between DC power proponent Thomas Edison and his nemesis, AC-driven Westinghouse; describes fights to protect municipal power systems from corporate takeovers in the early 1900’s; and recounts how the rash of utility holding company mergers of the 1920’s contributed to the 1929 stock market crash.

Then, Wasserman recounts how the FDR administration ushered in a new era for public power with the New Deal, and how the Eisenhower years gave us the technological cul-de-sac of nuclear power in what turned out to be a pretty raw deal. Although 1950’s nuke proponents promised electricity which would be "too cheap to meter," investors and consumers soon discovered cheap nuclear power was not safe, and that safe nuclear power was not cheap.

Indiana was one of the lucky states, missing the nuclear bullet with the demise of the Baily and Marble Hill plants. Other states, however, allowed nukes to go on-line. As electric rates soared, customers went ballistic. Rather than pay billions for nuclear construction and decommissioning costs, industrial customers began pushing to "deregulate" the electric industry in order to dump the cost of America’s nuclear hubris into the lap of average ratepayers. Nationwide, 120 to 200 billion dollars in nuclear "stranded costs" exist - creating the potential for a bailout to dwarf the Savings and Loan debacle, Wasserman writes.

In 1996, California became the first of 24 states to plunge into the deregulation abyss, sticking citizens with $28.5 billion in nuclear stranded costs. Residential rate payers were left crying at the alter when utilities ignored average citizens but fell over themselves to court industrial customers.

There is hope, however. Wasserman argues that citizens can use this moment to move U.S. energy policy in a direction which is more sound financially, more sensible environmentally, and which does not undermine the democratic notion that all stakeholders must have a say in decisions which will effect their families. But to do that, citizens must inform themselves about what the consequences of electric deregulation are, and how long those consequences will last.

Publisher Seven Stories Press can be contacted at (800) 596-7437 or on the internet at www.sevenstories.com.

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