Fifty Years of AGE

The world's biggest privately owned power producer is American Gas & Electric Co., a seven-state utility network whose twelve major plants turn 10 million tons of coal a year into power for nearly 5,000,000 people from Lake Michigan to the Tennessee Valley. Last week AGE announced a program to grow still bigger; it will spend $700 million to boost its 4,000,000 kw. capacity (enough to light 7,000,000 homes for a year) by 65% in the next five years, the most ambitious five-year expansion ever tackled by a private U.S. utility. The program will give AGE more generating capacity than all the hydro capacity built by TVA in its 23 years. The outlook was so good that AGE last week recommended a 3-for-2 stock split. The company thus hoped to widen ownership of its stock and make it easier to finance its expansion program.

AGE, long since withdrawn from the gas business, reported a 12% increase in domestic electric power consumption last year in the 2,319 small communities (none over 150,000 population) in its market area. But AGE's hungriest customers are the power-consuming plants that have been lured into the area by plentiful, low price power, e.g., the Atomic Energy Commission's huge Portsmouth, Ohio, project whose round-the-clock 1,800,000 kw. appetite is met by AGE (38%) and 14 other utilities that combined to form the $400 million Ohio Valley Electric Corp.

Scholarly Powerhouse. In its 50 years of operation, AGE has consistently shown that a privately owned utility can do a good job of competing with public power. AGE helped modernize the backward areas of the Ohio Valley in much the same way that TVA has enriched the Tennessee Valley, and it lured many heavy industries that might otherwise have settled in the Northwest, where government power is cheap, e.g., Henry Kaiser's new $120 million aluminum reduction plant at Ravenswood, W. Va.

The powerhouse behind AGE's expansion is Austrian-born President Philip Sporn, 59, a scholarly, hard-driving executive who started his utilities career as a lamplighter while still in high school in Manhattan. After graduating from Columbia University's school of engineering, Sporn went to work for AGE in 1920, served as the company's chief engineer for 14 years before he became president in 1947. A music and art lover with an engineer's eye for form (he patterned AGE's transmission towers after the Eiffel Tower), Sporn likes to punctuate his conversation with frequent calculations on a slide rule, deals only in precise figures. He has doubled the company's capacity since 1949, hiked operating revenues an average of $15 million a year to $258 million in 1955. He also shaved the price of power to residential consumers from 3.15-c- per kw. in 1947 to 2.4-c- (at least .2-c- lower than the 1955 national average). He accomplished this chiefly by pioneering many technical advances in the industry. In 1947 Sporn helped develop AGE's 330,000-kw., high-voltage transmission lines, the most powerful (and therefore most economical) in the U.S. Sporn will soon start operating the first U.S. power plant (Philo, Ohio) in which ultra-high-pressure steam is used to generate power.

"Project, Achieve, Project." Since the next revolutionary change in power plants may come from the atom, Sporn has boned up on the problem, is one of the top U.S. authorities on industrial uses of atomic energy. He went to Geneva as a member of the U.S. delegation to the atoms-for-peace conference last summer, is president of Nuclear Power Group, Inc., a utility-backed atomic research organization that is contributing $15 million in research and development to Commonwealth Edison's 180,000-kw. reactor outside Chicago. Says he: "The power industry is in a terrifically dynamic phase."

Since AGE is in the coal-rich heart of the U.S., Sporn is confident that atomic power will not be economically competitive to his company for at least 20 years. Nevertheless, he insists that the company must constantly "project, achieve, then project further." Sporn's own projection is that AGE's present capacity would be doubled by 1965, quadrupled by 1975.

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