Growing concern is being voiced in the Pacific Northwest over the narrow margin of available power reserves over demand. In a statement issued in January 1948, spokesmen for the leading privately owned electric utilities and city systems of the area pointed out that the power requirements of the Pacific Northwest already exceed the safe operating capacity of the generating facilities of the region. This statement emphasized the need for additional Federally owned generating capacity if the future industrial development of the area is not to be retarded. In fact, plans for the establishment of new factories in the lower Columbia River basin have had to be dropped or indefinitely postponed because the available supply of firm electric power in that region is barely sufficient for the needs of already existing plants.

This situation in the Pacific Northwest was characterized in the tenth annual report of the Bonneville Power Authority, issued in December 1947, as “a far cry” from the conditions of ten years ago, when the great dams on the Columbia River with their enormous electric power potential were regarded by many as “white elephants” for whose output no regional market could be developed. The problem at that time-one of finding markets-has given way to the problem of developing power output rapidly enough to keep up with the growth of demand. the temporary loss of heavy industrial power loads following shutdowns in the major war industries in the early postwar period was quickly made up as industry converted to a peacetime basis. The subsequent increase in demand from all sources-industrial, commercial, domestic, and rural-has absorbed the entire regional productive capacity of electric energy. Both the Bonneville Power Administration and the public and private utility managers agree that, even if presently approved Federal power projects in the Pacific Northwest are completed as rapidly as is physically possible, the generating capacity of the region will not catch up with expected power requirements until at least 1954.

Postwar demand for electric power has, if possible, been even more insistent in the Pacific Northwest than in California, while the limitations upon expansion of generating capacity have operated more severely in that area. Few significant additions to generating facilities have, in fact, been made in recent years by the privately owned utility systems of the Northwest. Although the Bonneville Power Authority has added three large generators to its Grand Coulee plant, it had to relinquish in 1946 the two 75,000 kilowatt units which had been diverted in 1943 from the Shasta plant of the Central Valley Project. On balance, the total installed capacity in Washington, Oregon, and northern Idaho increased about 10 per cent during the period from January 1946 to June 1948; nine-tenths of the net gain was accounted for by the installations at Grand Coulee, which has now been developed to one-half its ultimate capacity.

One of the drawbacks connected with the growing dependence of the whole northwestern regional power supply upon the facilities of the Bonneville Power Administration is the fact that the individual generators of this system are very large units, ranging in size from 50,000 to 108,000 kilowatts each. When it is necessary to make periodic overhaul or emergency repairs to one of these units, the resulting reduction in power output is correspondingly large.

The heavy draft on the power supplies of the Pacific Northwest made by the war-created metallurgical and chemical industries is probably not generally realized outside that region. The aluminum reduction plants, in particular, require huge quantities of electric energy, which the opportune installation of the publicly owned facilities at Bonneville and Grand Coulee in the early war years fortunately made available. Except during the fiscal year 1945-46, when some of these plants were closed down, the aluminum industry has taken well over half the energy output of the entire Bonneville system and currently represents from one-quarter to one-third of the total power load of the aggregate utility system, public and private, in Oregon and Washington.

Because of its concentration in a small group of highly mechanized plants, which employ a relatively small labor force and hence present only a minor employment problem, the aluminum reduction industry of the Pacific Northwest offers a ready opportunity for the adjustment of the industrial power use to seasonal fluctuations in total demand and output.