WESTward Ho!

The West customarily thinks big, but the new plan was impressive even by Western standards. It called for the creation of the world's largest electric-power complex, which would dwarf the TVA and the Grand Coulee Dam, produce as much power as 17 Aswan high dams (or about a 36 million-kw. generating capacity) and make Russia's biggest hydroelectric project at Bratsk in Siberia seem modest. Ten Western power companies and the municipally owned Los Angeles Water & Power Dept. announced last week that they expect to spend $10.5 billion on this project in the next two decades to serve an area that covers one-sixth of the U.S. and spreads over nine states.*

The participants plan to blueprint and build the new facilities through a newly organized group called WEST, acronym for Western Energy Supply and Transmission Associates. WEST will be more than a power pool; it will encourage joint projects and coordinate the transmission, generation and marketing of power. Its first joint project will start shortly, when member companies begin construction of a 750,000-kw. plant near the Arizona-New Mexico-Colorado-Utah boundary known as the four corners. The plant will burn the low-grade coal still buried beneath many a nearby ghost town, but future WEST plants might also use oil, natural gas or, in water-parched Southern California, nuclear reactors that will convert salt water to fresh while they generate electricity. The associates' first president, Dick Walter Reeves, 61, head of the Public Service Co. of New Mexico, expects the scheme to lure enough new industry WESTward to provide thousands of new jobs. WEST itself, by 1986, will be paying an additional $75 million in taxes.

*All of Arizona and Utah, most of Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, and parts of California, Texas, Wyoming and Idaho.

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