Getting By With What We’ve Got

The illusion of an infinite California lasted a long time. No vision was too grand. We constructed huge dams to capture water and create power, designed fantastic freeways, pushed the suburban frontier ever outward, and prospered at every turn. Looking back, it was all too easy.

That California is no more. There’s not enough water to go around, no more rivers to dam. Freeways have made us prisoners of congestion and smog. Developers are running out of what they call “cheap dirt.” The big thinkers now work the margins, hunting for schemes to wean farmers off cheap water and manufacturers off smokestacks. Engineers who once debated coal vs. hydro vs. nukes now tinker with energy-efficient light bulbs.

We reside in the finite California--a designation that, happily enough, does not have to mean decline. This new California of limits, in fact, has the potential to be as exciting and prosperous as its boundless predecessor, and those who doubt this premise should consider the quiet revolution in play at the state’s giant power companies.

Not that long ago, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison were the terrible twins of California big business. PG & E had the north, Edison the south. They made money by making energy, and they made energy by making power plants--the more plants, the more money. It was a sweet, simple deal, and they could not be bothered with silly talk of “soft energy,” or meltdowns, or conservation.

Today, things are different. Today, the office of John Bryson, the former environmental activist who now heads Edison, is decorated with an arresting piece of artwork inspired by global warming. In the office of Richard Clarke, PG & E’s top man, there hangs a framed magazine cover showing Clarke with a woodsy jacket and walking stick--pinup for an article entitled “Environmentalism: The New Crusade.”

Prodded by litigants and protesters, the power giants slowly have come to understand that their future no longer is in business as usual. Over the past 15 years, they began, slowly at first and more recently at warp speed, to re-explore the soft energy ideas they once ridiculed. Symbolic effort was followed by backsliding, which was followed, finally, by negotiations with regulators and environmentalists that two years ago yielded powerful financial incentive for conservation.

The formula varies, but basically PG & E and Edison are granted revenue for energy conserved as though it was energy produced with conventional plants. With the incentives have come bushels of conservation programs--everything from refrigerator rebates to retrofitting skyscrapers with energy-saving gadgets. Clarke says PG & E in the next decade will save the equivalent production of three nuclear plants. Bryson predicts that Edison through conservation can “meet substantially all additional electricity needs for the balance of the 1990s.”

So eagerly have the utilities embraced conservation that regulators now seem nervous, as though somehow they gave away the store. A program evaluation is under way, and Clarke and Bryson both are struggling to persuade state officials they can deliver on long-range conservation goals and don’t need new plants--a role change their predecessors would find baffling. They also might be confused by the terms tossed about in this new day. Bryson and Clarke talk of “negawatts” and demand-side economics, photovoltaic solar cells and low-E glass. What they don’t talk about is building big power plants.

“In the whole American economy,” says Clarke, “the building of big things is a thing of the past. Things are more incremental today. They are more idea-oriented. They are more technology oriented.”

Some of the same people who developed the utility incentives have moved on. They now are at work on methods to coax motorists from cars, to redistribute finite water supplies, to reduce industrial pollution. This is the heavy work of the finite California--finding ways to grow, prosper and clean up old mistakes, all at once.

In this California, farmers must learn to become world leaders in water conservation. Manufacturers will have to find ways to profit from cleaner processes and products. Developers should go back to some of that old inner-city dirt they left behind in the rush to suburbia.

The game now is to the innovators, not the boomers. The best will pass the test. Those who cannot adapt, the ones who seemed clever only when the good times were on, probably will just drift away. So be it.