Rock Artist with Soul

ELECTRIFYING ARIZONA ... A Short History

As the last of its three reactors hummed into service this year, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station-the nation's largest atomic plant-poured out sufficient electrical power for the needs of more than four million city dwellers. Highline wires wafted its energy far beyond the nearby air-conditioned oases that sparkle at night like jewels strewn on black velvet. But the early electrification of Arizona emerged from technology incomparably more modest, back in a time of homemade candles and kerosene lamps. In their most unrestrained fantasies, the footloose Japanese immigrant and the Yavapai County rancher who pioneered the illuminating of the territory could not have imagined today's mammoth generating machinery west of Phoenix.

Tucson became the first Arizona city blessed with artificial lighting-not from electricity but from manufactured gas-in the spring of 1882. Three years later, however, the Old Pueblo's 6,000 residents were cast back into the dark when the gas company failed and was sold at a sheriff's sale. The city lights did not come on again until 1892, this time thanks to electricity generated by steam turbines. A decade later, brightening the carbonized bamboo filament bulbs then in vogue cost Tucsonans 13 cents a kilowatt houralmost twice what their descendants would pay in 1988.

Meanwhile, the Japanese adventurer (his name was rendered as Hutchion Ohnick) had followed a lust for gold into Arizona Territory. Finding none, he settled in Phoenix, a dusty village of less than 2,000 souls, where room and board could be had for $6 a week, and good suits sold for $18. In 1886 he persuaded city councilmen to grant him an electric and gasservice franchise and, within months, he erected a dozen gas-flame streetlights.

Competition came close behind. In 1888, two St. Louis entrepreneurs built a steam plant in Phoenix at Tonto and Jefferson streets. Fueled with mesquite wood, it kindled 45 electric streetlights of 1,500-candlepower each, running only at night and not at all "when there is enough moonlight."

Some salesmanship of electric lighting was required. Many people still believed incandescent bulbs would blacken ceilings, and when removed should be replaced rapidly before electricity leaked from the socket.

Nonetheless, the night slowly was pushed back. Before the century closed, several other steam power plants started up in Phoenix. Electric service spread to Yuma in 1892, to Prescott in 1894, and eventually to other towns.

In 1897 a Yavapai cattleman chanced upon another source of energy. Lew Turner had been searching southeast of Camp Verde for water and feed for his livestock when he discovered the largest spring he had ever beheld. Because the sticks, stones, and plants it splashed seemed encased in rock (a residual effect of the water's mineral content), he named the stream Fossil Creek. Measurements would show that the spring disgorged a constant 20,000 gallons of water a minute, in wet years or dry.

"Gagings," the magazine Electrical World reported in 1910, "were taken daily for more than two years, and at the end of this time the gager gave up in disgust, as he had repeated the same figure three times a day throughout the entire time."

More important to its future, Fossil Creek dropped 1,600 feet in 10 mean-dering miles, tumbling down through thickets of cottonwoods and shrubs. The stream obviously packed a punch that could be corralled, and plans soon were made to do so. Not far away, the former territorial capital of Prescott and the booming copper camp at Jerome craved electricity.

Although the idea of yoking the force of surging water was age-old, in the United States its use to generate electricity had been a Western innovation. Only six years before Turner stumbled upon the spring, the nation's first hydroelectric transmis-sion line linked Willamette Falls and Portland, Oregon, 13 miles apart. But conditions were far different in rural Arizona, and the task on Fossil Creek would prove herculean. The area is remote even now.

To carve a primitive road up the rocky, rugged mountainsides and to install a power plant at a site called Childs required 600 men, 450 mules, and more than 150 wagons. (See Arizona Highways, Septem-ber 1979.) Because wooden poles were too bulky to be packed by the mules that carried the first components, disas-sembled windmill towers (the only steel towers then available) were chosen. The largest piece of equipment-the station-ary segment of the generator, a coil of wire called a stator-had to be hauled by a 226-mule team!

No American manufacturer made steel strong enough to withstand the stream's ferocity. So the Krupp Works in Germany was asked to forge parts of the penstocks, the gates that would direct the water into the system. They were shipped around Cape Horn to Los Angeles and taken by train to Mayer, Arizona, where the wagons picked them up.

Construction was completed in 1909. But more power soon was needed for a new copper smelter at Clarkdale, near Jerome. So a second plant was put in place between 1914 and 1916, down the creek at Irving on the Verde River. Flumes supported by wooden frameworks funneled the Fossil Creek flow there.

Jerome. So a second plant was put in place between 1914 and 1916, down the creek at Irving on the Verde River. Flumes supported by wooden frameworks funneled the Fossil Creek flow there.

By America's entry into World War I, the Childs-Irving complex provided all the power for Prescott and surrounding Yavapai County. By the mid-1920s, transmission lines stretching south 75 miles to Phoenix supplied nearly three-quarters of the electrical demand of that city of about 30,000.

But even before a nail was driven at Childs, construction of a more monumental energy source began near the confluence of Tonto Creek and the Salt River northeast of Phoenix. Workers topped Theodore Roosevelt Dam in 1911, a year before Arizona achieved statehood. The great masonry structure was the first erected under the National Reclamation Act of 1902 by the federal government's Bureau of Reclamation. A landowners' organization called the Salt River Valley Water Users' Association, an entity of the quasi-governmental Salt River Project which today is one of the state's major public utilities, assured reimbursement to Washington. Its final payment on the dam came in 1955.

The dam's designers originally intended for it simply to store water for irrigation of the Salt River Valley. Soon, however, the potential for power production became obvious, and generation of electricity began even before the dam was completed.

Here again a road had to be hewn to the site through a rugged landscape, this time a distance of 65 parched miles from the railroad at Mesa. Anglo workers, mostly from Mesa, laid out the western portion of the route; Apache Indians built the eastern end. Veteran frontier cavalry scout Al Seiber directed the Apaches and became one of the road project's few fatalities. A falling rock killed him.

High-wheeled wagons tugged by 20mule teams carted all construction materials over what today is the famed and scenic Apache Trail, State Route 88.

The former president himself came to dedicate his namesake, reaching it in an open Kissel Kar.

"If there could be any monument which would appeal to any man, surely it is this," he told a cheering crowd.

His monument remains the world's highest masonry dam, 280 feet tall, and one of the most strikingly handsome. Native rock cut from nearby cliffs by Italian stonemasons forms the outer surface of the enormous structure. (Unfortunately, Salt River Project's current plans to heighten the dam also involve revising and covering its familiar stone surfaces.) Within one generation, an even more epochal engineering feat was to be undertaken. Between 1931 and 1935, workmen wedged Hoover Dam, towering 726 feet above the Colorado River bedrock, into Black Canyon between Arizona and Nevada. Planners first considered building the structure in nearby Boulder Canyon, and the name Boulder Dam stuck for years. Congressional action eventually assured the Hoover designation. President Herbert Hoover, an engineer by original profession, took part in preconstruction discussions on the project's design, location, and safety.

A crew of 4,000 blasted away nine million tons of rock and poured enough concrete to pave a highway from Miami, Florida, to Seattle-at a heavy human toll: 110 workmen died on the job, 13 of them from heatstroke.

For a dozen years thereafter, no other hydroelectric installation on earth exceeded this one in size. While dwarfed by the dam itself, the Hoover power plant, which now shelters 17 great generators, stands higher than a 20-story building.

The Bureau of Reclamation created still more power-producing dams in Arizona over the next three decades: Parker, Davis, and Glen Canyon on the Colorado River; Horse Mesa, Mormon Flat, and Stewart Mountain on the Salt River.

But not without controversy.

When Parker Dam was begun in the 1930s to divert water to southern California, Arizonans were concerned about losing their share of the Colorado River's annual flow. Governor B. B. Moeur sent armed National Guardsmen to the site in an attempt to halt the project. The courts ruled against him, and the troops withdrew.

A generation later, Glen Canyon Dam was the subject of long and emotional debate before it was built, and the rising waters of its reservoir, Lake Powell, inundated exquisite canyon retreats and invaluable archeological sites.

Both Hoover and Roosevelt dams have been designated as national historic sites. In 1976 the Childs-Irving complex became a "national historic mechanical engineering landmark," the 11th named by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Obviously, the widespread availability of electric power has transformed life in the United States and other industrialized countries in this century. But in the desert Southwest, electricity has had a special impact because it has made airconditioning a common amenity. Without that method of moderating extreme summer temperatures, the inland Southwest undoubtedly would not have had thedramatic population growth it has experienced. Barbed wire, the windmill, the sixshooter, and the railroad, each in its time, may have tamed the frontier. But airconditioning made it livable.

ELECTRIFYING ARIZONA

Sweltering summers explain why southern Arizonans burn 1,000 to 3,000 more kilowatt hours of electricity per capita each year than the American average of 9,000. Fortunately, their bills are less hour for hour than the rates charged in most major cities elsewhere.

Evaporative coolers were the first popular cooling systems, other than electric fans. They are much simpler than the air-conditioning units that followed. Although they don't work as well in high humidity, many are still in use. When Arizona's first such "swamp box" was switched on in Wellton in 1933, the school released pupils so they could go outside and see it in operation.

Although refrigerated air-conditioning was invented in 1902, it was not until the 1930s that the first three Phoenix buildings to be electrically cooled had their systems in operation. They were the Fox Theater, Hotel Westward Ho, and the offices of the Mountain States Telephone Company. Gradually other commercial buildings followed suit, but refrigeration remained beyond financial reach of most homeowners until well after World War II.

More recently the electric heat pump has provided still another method of cooling. Heat pumps cool or warm a room by capturing heat from the air (even outdoor winter air) and driving it into or out of a building, depending on the season and temperature. A fourth to a half of Phoenix-area households have installed them.The state's remarkable postwar populaNation growth, combined with the steadily rising need for power created by the proliferation of air-conditioning and electrical appliances, put even greater demands on Arizona's public-utility enterprises.

It is still delivered by the three major utilities-SRP, APS, and Tucson Electric.

Arizona's expanding power needs soon called for more generating capacity, primarily provided by steam plants. For example, SRP constructed three in the 1960s and '70s-Agua Fria in Glendale, Santan in Gilbert, and Kyrene in Tempe. Tucson Electric and APS also expanded. At first, oil or natural gas stoked most of the new furnaces, but gradually coal became the fuel of choice, largely supplied from vast deposits on the Navajo and Hopi Indian reservations in northeastern Arizona.

Trains carry the coal to the APS Cholla plant near Joseph City and the SRP Coronado station near St. Johns, and will deliver to Tucson Electric's Springerville plant once it starts operating in 1989. SRP runs by far the biggest northern Arizona plant, the coal-fired 2.2 millionkilowatt Navajo Generating Station at Page near the northern border of the state.

Today, interlocking ownership of generating plants is common and complex. For instance, APS operates the Palo Verde atomic plant, though it owns only a fraction over 29 percent of it. SRP holds 17.5 percent, and California, New Mexico, plant.

Yet for all its sophisticated technology and nearly $6 billion price tag, it may not outlast the comparatively tiny Childs bydroelectric plant (BELOW), which has produced electricity steadily since 1909.

consumption will continue to grow with the population of its cities, including Tucson, sparkling metropolis of the southern desert.

ELECTRIFYING ARIZONA

and Texas firms divide the remainder. Despite nuclear Palo Verde's completion and full operation, inexpensive coal is expected to stay the favored generating fuel well into the next century. By the mid1990s, two-thirds of the Salt River Project's power will come from coal, more than half of Arizona Public Service's, and all of Tucson Electric's.

But coal may not be the final word. Alternate sources of energy may well loom in Arizona's future, such as sunlight and the natural heat within the earth.

A five-year study by the University of Arizona has identified extended areas, mainly in the lowlands, underlain by warm to moderately hot water. These geothermal concentrations have been considered for cooling or heating buildings at Williams Air Force Base near Chandler and the Federal Prison Camp near Safford. (The cooling would be achieved the same way a refrigerator works, by heating coils of ammonia or other gases so that the gases expand and thus chill.) According to the university survey, such water might preheat boiler water for conventional power plants and warm greenhouses and fish-farm ponds. So far as could be determined, however, none of these reserves is hot enough to yield steam for electrical generators, as is the case at certain locations in northern California and elsewhere.

As for solar energy, already more than 4,500 small units in Arizona capture sunlight. Most of these power remote water pumps or communications links, but about 1,000 are in homes.

A major barrier to solar energy remains the economic one. Sunshine may be free, but the thin-crystal photovoltaic cells that put it to use are costly up to $9,000 a kilowatt. By comparison, the per-kilowatt cost of the Palo Verde nuclear plant is $2,500. And the figure for a conventional fossil-fuel plant is $1,500 to $2,500.

Researchers are striving to make the wafer-like cells more affordable. They continue to seek new techniques and different materials. These are goals of the Solar Test and Research (STAR) Center built in Tempe recently by Arizona Public Service, with help from Arizona State University and others.

Meanwhile, a huge new surge of power pours from Palo Verde. Located on a 4,000acre site about 35 miles southwest of Phoenix, the plant employs a pressurized-water system-meaning that the water heated by the radioactive core boils a separate loop of water whose steam drives the turbines that run the generators. Ceaselessly recycled, the pressurized radioactive water never leaves the containment building, and the system is cooled with treated effluent from sewage-disposal plants.

Palo Verde cost $5.9 billion to build (with interest added, the total tab could reach $9 billion) and the plant has a life expectancy of 40 years. Whether it can be refurbished economically after four decades, no one can predict.

At that, it may not outlast Childs, "the little hydroelectric plant that could." Together Irving and Childs still churn out 5,600 kilowatts, just as they have for nearly 80 years. Employees at Childs concede they have replaced such items as bearings, bolts, and brushes from time to time. But almost everything else the windmill towers, the German penstocks, the big coiled-wire stator-is original. Amazingly, the pioneer generator has buzzed steadily, night and day, since 1909!