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Empire of Energy

Energy is eternal delight.

So said the Romantic poet William Blake more than two centuries ago. Thanks to its extraordinary power, its quicksilver caprices, its myriad forms and forces, energy mesmerizes us. It’s simply magic.

What we often forget about energy, blinded by its light, perhaps, is that it’s derived from something else. Something consumed. Something extracted. We only recently seem to have awakened to the fact that for sheer ecological impact energy production dwarfs more visible extractive industries — logging, fishing, mining — in its effect on the earth and its environment.

What’s more, like trees and salmon and lithium, energy gets used up, grows sparse and scarce. It’s a finite resource subject to markets, regulatory pressures, public opinions and politics. Energy and environment now dominate all economic activity on earth.

In the Northwest, our Empire of Trees has given way to this new dominion: the Empire of Energy.

Turbine Technology

Still Powers The Pacific Northwest

The Aluminum Era

It was energy, in the form of aluminum, that began baling Longview out of its depression. That and the idea that power could be in the public’s hands, both at the local level in the fledgling PUD, and at the national level through BPA.

BPA had made its first industrial sale, 32,500 kilowatts of power, to Alcoa in January, 1940, and the Aluminum Era was on. From its advent in 1940 through the next six decades Reynolds Metals was a fixture of Longview’s economy and industry. But its principal subsidy, and competitive advantage, was withering. Well before the turn of the century the era of cheap power was over.

Electricity, on the other hand — once simply a plentiful byproduct of a reclaimed Eastern Washington and a tamed big river — is neither so cheap nor so plentiful as once it was. Demand stretches capacity: Server farms are the watt-guzzling aluminum plants of the 21st century. Climate change weirds out the weather: snowpacks, droughts, extremes of heat and cold. And the system itself, lorded over by the 1930s-era Bonneville Power Administration, struggles to keep up with costs, technology, and changing environmental attitudes.

Tom Karier, for twenty years a member of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, recently told The Seattle Times, “It’s not bankrupt yet, but Bonneville Power Administration has made it clear that it is facing a financial crisis and may be in trouble by 2028.”

In 2000, Alcoa took over Reynolds Metals and became the largest aluminum manufacturing company in the nation. Alcoa didn’t need the Longview plant and sold it to Longview Aluminum Company for $150 million, retaining ownership of the property. Longview Aluminum in turn transferred ownership to an investment group, which closed the plant in March 2001, claiming electricity costs were too much to maintain profitability. In 2003 the investment group itself filed for bankruptcy protection, and the plant was dismantled.

Its extravagant electrical footprint remains.

Megawatts To Negawatts

Lately the energy business is pushing a very radical message: Buy and use less of our product.

Utilities were facing an unenviable choice: with demand continuing to rise, either build more costly, controversial power plants, or simply use less of the product itself. Use less? In America? This radical idea was soon dubbed “negawatts.” Utilities suddenly were selling conservation as hard as they once sold power contracts. And, for a new generation of