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RECIPE FOR MAJOR POWER DEVELOPMENT By L. M. ALEXANDER. Associate General Manager Salt River Project. Phoenix, Arizona Thank you for this opportunity to be here today. I am L. M. Alexander, Associate General Manager of the Salt River Pmject. Today, however, I appear as the Chairman of the multi-utility Steering Committee which is creating the major Navajo Thermal Electric Generating Project near Page, Arizona. Recipe (or a Prescription) for a Major Power Development ~ The old days are gone when each utility decided what size generating station it would install -and proceeded to install it-generally in its local service area. Gone too, seemingly, are the days when the Bureau of Reclamation built hydroelectric powerplants wherever a good site was available -and thus they had dollars from power revenues to payoff the power and water costs of new projects. . In fact, Peter McTague, a utilities consultant of Gilbert Associates, began a speech recently to a group of utility executives with the unsettling remark, "I wonder how many of you realize you are working in a dying industry." He did not mean it literally', of course, because demand for electric power is growing at such a rate that utilities must double their output in the next 7 years. McTague was talking about the evolutionary crisis the industry now faces because of new social pressures. The Southwest is no exception. In fact, in growth rate it has exceeded the national trend during the past two decades. Between 1950 and 1960, the population of the Southwest increased 39% compared with 19% for the Nation as i whole. While California will have the fastest growth in terms of numbers, Nevada and Arizona will maintain the first and third highest percentage growth rates in the Nation. Such growth requires great quantities of electric power. So early in 1967, Salt River Project-as were other utilities-started studying alternative sources of power for the mid-1970's. Southwestern utilities, including Salt River Project, had previously participated 1n WEST-type Slide 1 planning for the major Four Corners and Mohave coal-fired generating plants. These massive joint ventures had come about because of the relative economy of mine.mouth type coal burning plants of extra-large size-jointly owned-so that each had to have reserves to cover ollly its share of the unit in case of outage. One of the most challenging and perplexing problems a utility or a group of utilities must face IS deciding where to locate large generating plants, so as to provide the desired power supply at the lowest possible cost. There used to be four extremely critical requirements in any site consideration: Slide 2 1. Competitively priced fuel to feed the massive thermal boilers-23,000 tons a day at the Navajo Plant. Coal fuel had to be the first consideration for the mid-70's because gas fuel pnces had doubled in the preceding ten years and nuclear plants were not yet proving to be competitive in this area. Slide 3 2. An adequate, reliable supply of cooling water. You can't invest half a billion dollars in a plant and transmission system and not have an assured source of cooling water at all times, Slide 4 3. Nearby townsite large enough to support the facility during both its construction and opera- ting stages. -23-