Public Involvement In Energy Facility Planning

The Electric Utility Experience

Dennis W Ducsik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000308617
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Because the power industry is anticipating greatly increased generating capacity requirements in the 1990s, political controversy over electricity demand and supply is likely to return to--and perhaps surpass--the level of rancor experienced during the 1970s. Fortunately, a sizable number of utility companies have come to believe that destructive c

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Introduction: The Quiet Revolution in Utility-Citizen Interaction

Dennis W. Ducsik

On the pages of Public Utilities Fortnightly in early 1975, Mason Willrich -- then a professor of law and now a vice-president for corporate planning at the Pacific Gas and Electric Company -- challenged utility executives to adapt innovatively to the profound changes in operating climate the power industry had witnessed since the mid-60's.¹ The touchstone of his argument was that an ambivalent, volatile, and increasingly hostile political environment had supplanted the societal values which traditionally favored utilities, i.e., consensus on growth, technological optimism, confidence in government, and deference to business judgement. Under these new conditions, Willrich said, the take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward implementation of facility development plans was no longer appropriate, because it engendered substantial and unnecessary bad will. As an alternative he recommended that broad public participation become a principle of operation in all major decisions, including (among other things) the siting of power plants and transmission lines.

Willrich, of course, was neither the first nor the last to recognize the bankruptcy of the traditional "decide-announce--defend" approach to making electricity decisions and to endorse, in the alternative, the concept of "open planning". As can be seen from the sampling of statements in Appendix A, throughout the 70s a number of opinion leaders issued calls for early, informal, and two-way communication between utilities and the public, arguing that constructive dialogue seldom occurs in the distinctly adversarial and highly legalistic arenas of government regulation. The former Carter Administration even attempted to institutionalize the principle of collaboration via its proposed Nuclear Siting and Licensing Act of 1978, which would have directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "encourage or require" utilities to "engage in open and advance planning (for nuclear reactors)...with opportunity for the Commission and interested parties to participate (therein)",² Recently echoing the same basic theme, moreover, was a U.S. General Accounting Office report to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, entitled 'The Federal Government Should Encourage Early Public, Regulatory, and Industry Cooperation in Siting Energy Facilities.³

Although power system expansion programs are now dormant in many regions of the country, it would hardly be prudent to infer that controversy over facility siting is therefore a thing of the past. In this regard it is important to note that the electricity industry and the federal government alike are still projecting substantial new capacity requirements to the year 2000 and, consequently, a need for many new sites. Consider, for example, that:

• the much-publicized DOE report on The Future of Electric Power In America has put the growth figure at 53 to 105 percent of the supply in place as of 1981,⁴ and a contemporary study by EPRI has indicated that a similar projection band would require between 205 and 630 new sites just for big nuclear and coal-fired units;⁵
• Secretary of Energy Donald Hodel has pointed out that something in the neighborhood of 20-30 percent of present capacity will become physically or economically obsolete in twenty years, which to him means that between 120 and 180 GWe (150 'typical' nuclear units or 200 to 300 coal-fired units) will be needed just for replacement purposes.⁶

Thus, the prevailing view among utility managers is that, as Secretary Hodel puts it, "if we are going to meet even our minimum additional requirements, the necessary power plants ought to be on the drawing boards today." Further evidence to this effect lies in the results of a 1982 EPRI poll, which revealed that 42 percent of utility executives thought they would order a new nuclear reactor within 10 years.⁷

These scenarios are the subject of rancorous debate with environmental and consumer groups, of course, who point especially to the problematic aspects of nuclear power and who vigorously promote energy efficiency and 'soft' production technology. But one must also realize that the locational problem would still remain even if the large baseload power plant were to become a 'dinosaur' in technical and economic terms, as activists these days hope and claim will occur. This is clear from the aforementioned EPRI study's estimate to the effect that a total of between two and four thousand new sites could be needed by the turn of the century, with the majority in either case being associated with small-scale hydroelectric generation and other renewable resource-based technologies. And this does not include still other categories of facility planning activity in which political resistance has become a fact of life, such as the siting of transmission lines and of rail access to coal-fired stations (especially those recently converted from oil).

With these and related issues (e.g. rate-setting) still controversial in the public eye, it is obvious that the political atmosphere surrounding questions of electricity demand and supply is no less polarized now than it was during the previous decade. Correspondingly, it cannot be said that the need for creative approaches to conflict resolution in the utility sector has diminished in recent years. Very much to the contrary, if anything this need has grown more acute!

That increasing contention can be seen on the horizon does not suggest, however, that citizen participation will necessarily experience rapid penetration in the power industry. In this respect it is important to understand that the historical attitude of most utilities toward interactive modes of planning has always been unreceptive. Although some interest in the idea was in evidence by the late 60s, throughout the 70s the conventional wisdom was that getting together with affected interest groups would constitute an unnecessarily radical departure from established public relations strategies. This view was conditioned in part by the advent of NEPA and a variety of pollution control laws at the Federal level, together with the passage of pre-construction licensing laws by many states -- all of which made citizen "participation" (albeit in the narrow, adjudicatory sense) a formal part of the regulatory process. Such reforms on behalf of environmental protection, the industry hoped, would resolve most questions of plant/site acceptability and obviate the need to develop altogether new strategies for dealing with the public and its concerns.

The industry's wait-and-see policy was also strongly motivated, it should be noted, by acute wariness over the prospects for constructive collaboration. In fact, as this author learned from a series of interviews in the mid-708, ⁹ the belief was widespread among utility planners and managers that citizen involvement in siting would invariably turn into a 'can of worms,' both politically and in a technical sense. And it was equally clear that a substantial burden of proof would have to be satisfied if this fear of participation-induced problems was ever to be overcome, if only because so much was at stake in the facility planning function. One respondent put it this way:¹⁰

First of all, the issue of siting has become far more complex. It is now no longer a matter of building fossil fuel power plants or hydro-electric power plants which were often in remote areas and at a time when urbanization was not as widespread as it is now. Today, complex electric generating systems are being utilized, requiring a complex analysis for siting... vast investments are involved, and to open a decision-making process to "undefined forces" would make the investment much too risky. A corporate management thus faces a difficult decision: they are involved in a complex issue with vast sums of money committed to generate electricity for the future. In these times when every decision has to be justified to the stockholders as well as to the public and government, a trial and error process 'open' to other parties for decision-making Is very difficult to justify. Most corporate decisions are based on 'cost/benefit' analysis and with all the pitfalls involved in public participation, to convince management to undertake a process with potentially very high costs and potentially high but generally invisible benefits is at best a difficult proposition. Thus, acceptance of public participation has been slow.

For similar reasons, the bulk of managerial personnel today remain negatively predisposed toward the concept of public involvement, especially in the more pivotal aspects of corporate decision-making.

But there are also definite signs that risk-averse attitudes are giving way, if gradually, to a conviction that sound business practice requires a dialogue with interested parties throughout the course of planning. Among the several manifestations of this incipient transition is that a vanguard of utility officers has become vocal in warning that strict reliance on representative institutions for expressions of the public interest can result in dangerous political isolation. One company president recently said, for example, that "failure to give weight to public concerns in making business decisions is to put your business at risk."¹¹ Another executive, in writing specifically about the value of consumer advisory panels, put it this way:¹²

The idea of asking a group of citizens to advise us on how to run "our" business has been a difficult concept for most utility managers to get used to. And that is precisely why many utilities have decided they need consumer advisory panels--as a constant reminder that we cannot any longer consider this solely "our" business, not when our business has such a major impact on the public and not when energy costs are taking an ever-increasing chunk of the consumer's income.

Rhetoric does not always correspond to reality, of course, but in this case there is reason to believe that a significant number of companies give more than lip service to the cooperative school of thought. One indicator is the noticeable trend toward establishing permanent advisory boards or councils;¹³ another is the frequency with which community interaction is now an important element in socioeconomic impact mitigation.¹⁴ What's more, as Chapter Four of this volume reports, there are at least 34 North American utilities (including five in Canada) that have set aside their concerns and engaged in some form of non-adversarial interaction with the public while planning a power plant. There are even a handful of pioneering companies for whom citizen participation apparently has become a matter of routine across-the-board. Thus, while participatory ventures are still very much the exception and not the rule, there is certainly a new constituency in place where one did not exist a decade ago.

Interestingly, if the aforementioned activity can fairly be termed the beginnings of a "revolution," so far it has been a rather quiet one. No trade association or other industry-wide organization has yet developed a clearinghouse to foster cross-talk on public involvement activity; indeed, there has never been a full-scale conference for the new breed of outreach professionals to discuss and evaluate issues in participation programming. No one has even conducted a comprehensive and in-depth survey with an eye toward widespread circulation of the resulting data base.¹⁵ In short, there has been very little information-sharing of the kind that would benefit both current practitioners and those who are giving interactive methods serious thought for the first time.

Also serving to retard the rate at which innovation has diffused through the industry is the fact that written accounts of utility experiences have not often appeared in the trade literature. Indeed, as anyone who has ever attempted to assemble a bibliography on the subject will readily attest, outreach projects are not always well-chronicled in a summary report or other descriptive material. Typical of what turns up in a careful search is shown in Appendix C, which includes:

• only 30 works available through standard publishing outlets, with the majority tucked away in a scattered array of technical journals, workshop transcripts, or other sources of relative obscurity and limited distribution;
• a mere 18 additional unpublished reports, most of which are internal company documents that do not appear on any indexes or computerized lists and are available only upon request;
• only one in-depth case history, also unpublished, which really takes an episode apart and puts it back together again in a richly detailed fashion.¹⁶

More could be found with more exhaustive effort, no doubt, but the fact would remain that the documentary record is far from voluminous and is certainly disproportionate to the level of program activity achieved to date.

Not only is the available literature sparse; it is also quite primitive when it comes to interpreting the experience gained. What few accounts have appeared in print are largely descriptive and anecdotal, as only a half-dozen or so could fairly be called issue-oriented. What's more, virtually nothing has been written about the bad experiences, or the disappointing aspects of those which were successful on the whole. This is certainly understandable, given that doing so would inevitably touch on points of embarrassment and sensitivity to the parties involved. But the lack of negative feedback is nevertheless unfortunate, because there is just as much to be learned from failure as from success--and possibly even more!

Why have the lessons of the past remained such well-kept secrets? Part of the reason may be that utility managers are not accustomed to writing formally about their experiences, or are not inclined to devote resources in any substantial amount to applied research (especially that which has an academic flavor). It may also be that companies developing interaction programs have simply been too preoccupied with day-to-day operations to keep records good enough to reconstruct the experience accurately, let alone conduct retrospective evaluations. Whatever the cause, however, we know from an informal survey conducted in 1980 that the problem of "organizational amnesia" is a serious one. This poll found that 10 out of 22 respondents had not formally reviewed their participatory experiences; that all but four of the 12 who did conduct assessments relied exclusively on internal sources; and that only three companies were using (or attempting to develop) a well-defined methodology or model for evaluation.¹⁷

Regrettably, scholars and research-oriented professionals have not made much progress either in developing a body of empirical knowledge in this field. Indeed, it almost seems to have escaped their notice altogether, considering that the number of published analyses of even narrow issues can be counted on one hand.¹⁸ This paucity of substantive reference material stands in marked contrast to that which exists for citizen participation in other areas of project planning (e.g., water resources, highway location), where an enormous amount of applied work has been done.¹⁹ The literature is also miniscule compared to the myriad articles and books the research community has put out on resistance t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 INTRODUCTION: THE QUIET REVOLUTION IN UTILITY-CITIZEN INTERACTION
• PART ONE ISSUES AND CONCERNS
• PART TWO VIEWS OF PARTICIPATION PRACTITIONERS
• PART THREE SELECTED PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT PROGRAMS
• PART FOUR DETAILED CASE STUDIES
• APPENDIXES