Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

In the Northwest, the dams produced so much cheap hydroelectricity that hundreds of thousands of people who flocked to the region during and after the war did not bother to insulate their homes. Insulation was expensive; electricity was dirt cheap. In 1974, $196.01 worth of power from Con Edison in New York would have cost $24 if purchased from Seattle City Light. (For decades, the Northwest and British Columbia have had the highest rates of electricity consumption in the world.) The result was that by the 1970s, to everyone’s amazement, the seemingly limitless hydroelectric bonanza was coming to an end; brown-outs were being predicted for the 1980s. Since the good damsites were gone, the region’s utilities and their federal power broker, the Bonneville Power Administration—another product of the go-go years—launched a program of coal and nuclear powerplant construction which, viewed in retrospect, seems more like dementia than the rational, orderly planning it was purported to be. Of the twenty-four thousand-megawatt plants that were to be built under the Washington Public Power Supply System—one a year—five were begun, only to be scrapped or mothballed, half-completed, a few years later, threatening to cause the biggest municipal bond default in history. The cost of their construction, driven by inflation and hyperactive interest rates, drove electricity rates up, which immediately drove demand down, which drove rates further up, which drove demand further down—a self-pe...