Word: northwest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...infamous joint venture of 23 publicly owned utilities. With headquarters in the small city of Richland in southeastern Washington, the agency was set up in 1957 to build dams and power plants. By the early '70s Whoops officials, who put their faith in energy experts, thought that the Northwest was facing serious potential power shortages. Demand for electricity had been burgeoning 7% annually and was expected to continue growing at that pace. Hoping to provide an abundant source of cheap energy, the power system began building its first three nuclear plants between 1972 and 1975. In 1976, the Bonneville...
Meanwhile, the forecasts of power shortages proved to be wildly wrong. Conservation measures spurred by the 1973 and 1979 surges in oil prices reduced demand for electricity. So did a series of economic recessions that hit the Northwest particularly hard. The hypothetical need for the five plants vanished. First Whoops canceled Nos. 4 and 5 in January 1982, and later it mothballed Nos. 1 and 3. Only Project 2, scheduled to start generating electricity early next year, has a chance of being completed in the near future...
When the two plants were abandoned in early 1982, the people of the Northwest were enraged at the prospect of paying off the bonds through higher electric bills, with no hope of getting anything in return. Citizens' groups with such names as Irate Rate Payers and the Light Brigade sprang up and held town meetings to protest. Complained Mark Reis, executive director of a Seattle energy-conservation coalition: "They promised us power without cost, and they delivered cost without power." Some of the utilities tried to renege on their take-or-pay contracts with Whoops, and that raised...
Stunned Whoops bondholders grumbled about "hometown referees" who were making investors all over the U.S. pay for mistakes made by officials in the Northwest. Recalling the famous New York Daily News front page describing President Gerald Ford's refusal to bail out a financially floundering New York City, one Manhattan bond trader growled, "If you could write a headline about the whole sorry affair, it would read, WASHINGTON STATE TO INVESTORS: DROP DEAD!" Critics point out that the Northwest has very low electric rates as a result of its cheap hydroelectric power. If the entire cost of all Whoops...
...Northwesterners are not getting off unscathed. Their electric rates have already risen to pay for Projects 1,2 and 3. Moreover, their utilities will have to pay exceptionally high interest rates to raise capital in the bond market. At the moment, many investors are shunning bonds from the Northwest. "The whole thing is a nightmare," says Paul O'Connor, press secretary to Governor Spellman. "If traders on Wall Street have the choice between something that says Washington on it or something that says Indiana on it, they are going to go for Indiana. We've got a cloud...