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Abstract
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) was created in 1972 as a nonprofit research organization, funded primarily by the US electric power industry. Managing a broad public-private collaborative research program, EPRI was to prepare the industry for change by addressing major issues related to electric power production. Among other things, EPRI initiated an ambitious environmental research program in relation to acid rain and, later, climate change. Partly in consequence of the lessons learned in acid rain research, EPRI’s Environment Division around 1990 developed grand plans to show industry leadership on how to address climate change. However, as this article shows, EPRI gradually realized that natural science research alone was not an adequate response to environmental and social changes. Two vocabularies for change resulted: one in which change would be addressed by means of assessments in which future developments in the nature-society-technology system could be delineated, predicted, and ameliorated, and one in which change was essentially unpredictable and potentially dangerous.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Hidy, “Getting Proactive.” At the time when he was making this statement, George Hidy acted as Vice President of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and President of EPRI Environment Division.
2. Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 86. Hirsh quotes utility managers using the term ‘social contract’ in 1985 and 1987, respectively, see ibid., 229, note 20.
3. In the 1970s critics like Amery B. Lovins had begun talking about alternative or soft energy paths in which energy efficiency and renewable energy sources would steadily replace the established system based on fossil and nuclear fuels, see Lovins, Soft Energy Paths. From the mid-1980s onwards, the critique took on an economic dimension with the introduction of notion of social or external environmental costs of power production, see Hohmeyer, Social Costs; Hohmeyer and Ottinger, External Environmental.
4. Weart, “The Public.”
5. Cited in Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of doubt, 185.
6. Anonymous, "What's at stake"?
7. Ibid.
8. Hidy, Interview.
9. Hirsh, Power Loss.
10. Hidy and Spencer, “Climate Alteration,” 1026.
11. World Commission on Environment and Development (The Brundtland Commission), Our Common Future.
12. Hirsh, Technology and transformation, 138.
13. Much to our own surprise, we found the literature on this topic to be wanting. Numerous studies deal with the clash between public environmental concerns, government regulation and industrial management in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, see, for recent examples, Sullivan, Tainted Earth; Skjaerseth and Skodvin, Climate Change. Others delve into the making of environmental knowledge and consciousness, but either neglect the role of industrial environmental research, or see industry’s involvement in the shaping of environmental research agendas as being in more or less opposition to public and regulatory interests, see Jamison, The Making; Bocking, Nature’s Experts; Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt.
14. Yearley, “The Environmental Challenge,” 460.
15. Bachmann, “Will the Circle,” 671–676.
16. Ackerman et al., “Grandfathering,” 931–934; Hercher, “New Source,” 749.
17. On the interplay between science, politics, and law in the United States, see for example Jasanoff, Science at the Bar; for a comparison, in the case of the life sciences, between U.S. and European approaches to managing the boundaries between scientific expertise, government regulation, industry interests, and the courts, see Jasanoff, Designs on Nature. The fact that disputes over scientific evidence were fought persistently over in U.S. courts increased the public visibility and scrutiny of the more technical details of environmental problems, see Yearley, “The Environmental Challenge,” 465.
18. EPRI thus was within the long-standing U.S. model of industry self-regulation, according to which trade associations are formed to allow industry to self-police and minimize government involvement. On the many forms of industry self-regulation, see Gunningham and Rees, “Industry Self-regulation.”
19. The notion of “technological stasis” is explored in Hirsh, Technology and Transformation. On the restructuring of the electric utility system see Hirsh, Power Loss. The system metaphor and the founding of the utility system are more fully dealt with in Hughes, Networks of Power. In several books, David E. Nye traces how electricity seeped into American culture and what that process meant for cultural patterns of consumption and the power industry itself, see Nye, Electrifying; Nye, Consuming.
20. Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 137.
21. Ibid., 132–134.
22. About ten years earlier, in 1963, Joseph C. Swidler, then chairman of the Federal Power Commission, addressed the annual meeting of the Edison Electric Institute, trade association of the investor-owned utilities. According to Swidler, the utility industry invested less than 1% of their revenues in R&D compared to 6 and 3%, respectively, in the chemical and petroleum industries. Taking into consideration that most of the R&D was being conducted by utility equipment manufacturers, such as General Electric, Westinghouse, and Combustion Engineering, Swidler proposed establishing a permanent industry-wide research organization to represent the needs and interests of the 3500 individual utilities in America. American Electric Power Company (AEP), one of the nation’s largest generators of electricity, was an exception in that the AEP conducted pioneering research in such areas of high-voltage transmission and super-pressure boilers. See Hakkarinen, Atmospheric Sciences, 1–2; Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 132–133.
23. Starr, “The Electric Power Research Institute,” 1190.
24. Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 137.
25. Grant, “Obituary.”
26. Starr, “Social Benefit.”
27. Ibid., 1232.
28. Hakkarinen, Atmospheric Sciences, 19–21.
29. The reason for minimizing EPRI’s research on health and ecological effects of radiation was the amount of research on these topics done by federal agencies, most notably the Atomic Energy Commission, see ibid., 19.
30. Ibid., 20–21.
31. Ibid., 21.
32. Gorham, “Acid Deposition.”
33. Cowling, “Acid Precipitation.”
34. Likens and Bormann, “Acid Rain.”
35. Hakkarinen, Atmospheric Sciences, 38–39.
36. On the view of the utilities on emissions control, see Perhac, “Sulfate,” 641–642.
37. Hakkarinen, Atmospheric Sciences, 42–43.
38. Hidy et al., Design.
39. Ibid., 1–9.
40. Perhac, “Sulfate,” 641.
41. Hakkarinen, Atmospheric Sciences, 36. Apart from the SURE project, EPRI carried out other research projects on the identification, characterization, monitoring, transport, and chemical interactions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxides, as well as their effects on ecosystems, materials, and human beings. Moreover, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses of air-pollution damage and its social costs were being conducted.
42. Perhac, “Sulfate,” 645.
43. Mueller et al., The Sulfate, xii.
44. United States Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Alternatives, 69.
45. MacCracken, Interview.
46. Mueller et al., The Sulfate, 9–5.
47. Schmandt, Clarkson and Roderick, Acid Rain, 67; Regens and Rycroft, The Acid, 52–54; Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, chapter 3.
48. Zehr, “The centrality,” 337; NAPAP, “Annual Report, 1989.”
49. Quoted from Schmandt et al., Acid Rain, 167.
50. Ibid., 169; Herrick, “Predictive,” 256–529.
51. Perhac, Interview.
52. Ad Hoc Committee to Review the National Acid Precipitation Program (NAPAP), Report, 24 and Appendix A.
53. Hakkarinen, Atmospheric Sciences, 34–35.
54. Cowling, “The Performance,” 111.
55. Science and Policy Associates, Inc., Acidic Deposition, 1.
56. Schmandt et al., Acid Rain, 120–121.
57. Perhac, “Testimony,” 469.
58. Boyle, “An American Tragedy,” 7.
59. Ibid. In effect, Boyle’s observation of the different buffering capacities of the three Adirondack lakes might just as well as have been offered in support of Perhac’s conclusion that some other factor than precipitation is responsible for the acidity. Indeed, EPRI’s Integrated Lake-Watershed Acidification Study (ILWAS), completed in 1986, as well as the NAPAP National Surface Water Survey more or less reached the same conclusion, namely that natural factors and other human activities have much more substantial effects on soil and water chemistry than those produced by acid rain, see Regens, “Acid Deposition,” 179.
60. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, chapter 3; Regens and Rycroft, The Acid; Schmandt et al., Acid Rain.
61. Bryner, Blue Skies.
62. Perhac, “Useable Science,” 26.
63. Ibid., 27.
64. Balson, North, and Richels, “Framework.”
65. Lovely, “Wisconsin’s,” 42.
66. Ibid., 35.
67. Perhac, “Useable Science.”
68. Hidy, Interview.
69. The U.S. Global Change Research Program began as a presidential initiative in 1989 following George H. W. Bush’s inauguration. It was codified by Congress through the Global Change Act of 1990 calling for ‘development and coordination of a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change’. See U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990.
70. Most integrated assessments use models, aiming at understanding human impacts on climate while also providing cost-benefit analysis of possible mitigations. More than a modeling exercise, integrated assessment also is a framework for conducting research that takes an integrated and interactive view of the climate-society system in the attempt to assess possible socio-economic effects of various scenarios of climate change, for example the effects of a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, see Risbey, Kandlikar, and Patwardhan, “Assessing.”
71. William Nordhaus was the principal investigator in the development of the integrated assessment models such as Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) and Regional Integrated Climate-Economy (RICE).
72. Hidy and Peck, “Organizing.”
73. Ibid., 1575.
74. Ibid.
75. EPRI Environment Division, “EPRI Climate,” 10.
76. The sections on MECCA are mainly based on Hundebøl and Nielsen, “Challenges.”
77. Ibid., 443.
78. Ibid., 448–449.
79. Ibid., 465.
80. MacCracken, Interview.
81. Schneider, Interview with Robert Chervin, January 10–13, 2002.
82. Anthes, Interview.
83. Hidy, Interview.
84. Hirsh, Power Loss.
85. Bratcher, Interview.
86. Manne and Richels, “CO2.”
87. Ibid.
88. Manne, “MERGE.”
89. Manne, “The Kyoto Protocol”; Manne, “An Alternative Approach.” For more on the MERGE model, see the website: http://www.stanford.edu/group/MERGE/ (accessed October 13, 2015). From the second assessment report in 1995 and onwards, one of the developers of MERGE Richard Richels has served as lead author for IPCC.
90. See the EPRI website: http://eea.epri.com/models.html (accessed October 13, 2015).
91. PUHCA stands for Public Utility Holding Company Act. Also known as the Wheeler-Rayburn Act, PUHCA was passed in the 1935 to facilitate regulation of electric utilities. PUHCA remained virtually unchanged for 50 years until enactment of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) of 1978, which was, in part, intended to augment electric utility generation with more efficiently produced electricity and to provide equitable rates to electric consumers. In 1991, when Hidy was making his presentation, legislation to increase competition in the electric sector by authorizing new entities, so-called ‘exempt wholesale generators’ (EWG) to sell electricity to wholesale customers and providing EWGs with easy access to the transmission lines, was underway. The resulting legislation, the Energy Policy Act, was passed in 1992, covering everything from oil pipeline regulatory reform through transmission access to alternative fuel vehicles. At the time, it was described as a ‘landmark’ in energy legislation, ‘as it embodies public policy decisions favoring competitive electricity-generation markets and access by all wholesale electricity consumers to that competitive-generation market’, see Stuntz, “The Energy Policy Act,” 69.
92. Hidy, Interview.
93. Hirsh, Power Loss.
94. Bratcher, Interview.
95. Hakkarinen, Atmospheric Sciences, 34–35.