The wasteful use of our coal, paralleling as it did our increasing need for power, was hampering the industries of the country even before the war. After the breaking out of the conflict the overwhelming pressure for increased production could not be met. In a panic we pushed our old methods of coal exploitation further than ever before, drew on our oil and gas supplies to the utmost, and then in final desperation integrated the administrative side of the coal industry through the Fuel Administration.
The relief this brought was immediate, although the chief work of the Fuel Administration was merely to systematize and coordinate the distribution of coal so that those who must have it would get it. For during wartime the factories must run, and the autocratic integration which the Fuel Administration accomplished created a seeming abundance by keeping the factory wheels of at least the essential industries turning.
But the relief was only apparent—not actual. When the tumult of the war was over and we were back in still water, Secretary Lane announced that the enormous development of war industries had created an almost insatiable demand for power—a demand that was overreaching the available supply with such rapidity that had hostilities continued, it is certain that by 1920 we should have been facing an extreme power shortage. Integrated administration had done all it could but the problem of power to advance civilization—to build up a surplus through production—to give all men the chance of the good life, was still unsolved. Just as the integration by the Fuel Administration had deferred the acute power shortage during the war, so the business depression that followed the signing of the armistice is still holding it in check. And yet if civilization is to go on, our multitudinous factory wheels must turn again more swiftly and in increasing number, our looms must weave more and more cloth, and new cars and new ships must carry new millions of people to and fro. As yet we know no other material means through which to build up the good life than these whirling wheels.
The technical experts have agreed that the problem must be solved through the integration of all our sources of fuel and power which they, like the Fuel Administration during the war, regard as a common reservoir like the water supply of a modern community, and through the reduction of both coal and water power to terms of their common denominator, electricity. As the result of Secretary Lane's prevision of the impending power shortage, Congress in 1921 made an appropriation for a preliminary survey by the technical experts of the power resources along the Atlantic seaboard from Washington to Boston and for one hundred and fifty miles inland. This territory has been called the “finishing shop” of America. It is of irregular coast line, giving good harbors for the shipping to carry its products overseas; its swift streams turned the first factory wheels in America; its mountain ranges are full of metals and easily accessible coal; and to this region the industrially trained peoples of Europe most naturally come. Obviously its factory wheels must turn.
As a result of the survey of this region, engineers have worked out what is called the Superpower Plan. According to this, a giant network of wire will be woven over the territory between the Alleghenies and the Atlantic seaboard and charged with the very essence of power. Great steel towers, like those that now carry the currents generated at Niagara Falls, the Keokuk Dam on the Mississippi, and the Roosevelt Dam at the head of Salt River in the Arizona Desert, will stride through the valleys and across the mountains along a two-hundred-foot right of way. Instead of steel rails and puffing engines to convey industrial power, there will be only towers and copper wires. Instead of millions of tons of raw coal moving slowly along through bottle necks in the mountains and through congested freight yards, there will be the silent rush of uncounted electrons hurrying to the centers of production to do the work of man. Instead of spreading dirt and noise and ugliness, these new carriers of cosmic energy will be high harps for the wind.
According to this plan of the Superpower Commission the main line of this new power system begins at Washington and follows the coast through the great centers of population—Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, New Haven, Providence, Boston, and on up to Newburyport. Stretching away from this main line two principal inland lines are projected, one swinging off at Baltimore out to Harrisburg and up the anthracite valley to Scranton; another leaving the main line just before it reaches New York and stretching up the Hudson Valley to Poughkeepsie, Port Jervis, and Utica, tapping the hydroelectric generating stations in the Adirondacks, and connecting again through Pittsfield, Northampton, and Worcester with the main line in Boston. North and south cross lines mesh these secondary lines with the main line along the coast—one through Hartford and Waterbury to New Haven, and another from Worcester to Providence, with a short branch line to New Bedford. Back and forth across this network of high-tension wires will run the power to turn the factory wheels.
About nine-tenths of this power will be the developed energy of coal. The Superpower Commission's plan calls for the establishment of great steam-generating plants near the mines where the coal will be used to fire steam engines which will turn dynamos and so convert the energy of coal into electricity and feed it to that great harp in the wind. Steam-generating plants to supply more distant consumers are projected at tidewater—that is at places to which coal can be delivered by coastwise steamers. Incidentally these tidewater plants involve a considerable amount of coal haulage from the mines to the seaports, and from the ports nearest the mines to the other ports along the coast; from the lower West Virginia fields, across the mountains, to the southern end of Chesapeake Bay and thence by boat northward along the coast to Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. En route this coal will be joined by other coal from the upper West Virginia and the lower Pennsylvania bituminous fields and also by coal from the middle Pennsylvania field which will have to be freighted through New Jersey to the Hudson ports, then again up Long Island Sound by steamdrawn barges. While great economies would be effected by the transformation of coal into electric energy at the superpower stations, both at the mines and at the tidewater ports, the plan of the Superpower Commission still involves the necessity of hauling millions of tons of raw coal from the mines to seaboard. This limitation the Commission held to be necessary, not only for the purpose of utilizing the comparatively small plants which existing public utility companies have already built, but because at the time their report was made the electrical engineers had not yet perfected means of transporting electricity for long distances without great leakage on the way. Since the Commission's survey was published, however, an invention has been announced which greatly increases the distance over which the high-voltage currents can be efficiently sent, so that it is now feasible to transmute a much larger proportion of coal into electricity at the mine. The plan for practically all the tidewater generating plants can be given up, together with the long, slow, costly process of carrying coal to them, and that ninety per cent of the electricity for the superpower system which is derived from coal can be generated directly at the mine.
The other ten per cent according to the Commission's plan will be hydroelectric power. Generating stations are to be established at the rapids of the Potomac just above Washington; along the lower reaches of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania and Maryland; along the upper courses of the Delaware and the Hudson; in the Adirondacks; and at intervals along the whole length of the Connecticut River. But the main dependence of the projected superpower system is still the bituminous coal supply which it is planned to keep at its old job of raising steam to drive the turbine engines which will in turn drive the electric dynamos.
Besides the Commission's superpower plan for the Atlantic seaboard, other power systems have been sketched out, one centering around Helena in southern Illinois and designed to serve most of the Mississippi Valley, one near the northwest coast, another in California.
The integration of water and coal is a long step toward the solution of the power problem, in that it not only brings a new force to supplement the coal supply but also saves the coal now used by steam locomotives to haul raw fuel to its millions of consumers. Moreover, it contemplates the electrification of all the railroads within the zone whose traffic is heavy enough to warrant it, and as it is estimated that two pounds of coal applied to an electric locomotive will do as much work as seven and one-half to eight and one-half pounds when applied to a steam locomotive, the amount of coal now used for transportation will be still further reduced. Through such beginnings as these projected superpower systems must come the comprehensive integration of the industry.