Expand or Expire

As the principal purveyor of power to the nation's fastest-growing state, San Francisco's Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has to expand at full speed just to keep up. Already a giant among U.S. power utilities, it ranks first in the size of the area it covers, first in revenues (1963 earnings: $113 million on $749 million sales), and second only to New York City's Con Edison in generating capacity. P.G. & E.'s growth has been so phenomenal that the company will spend a record $255 million in 1964 on new power plants and transmission facilities. The 1964 outlay, announced last week, is only the first installment of a master plan that by 1980 will make P.G. & E. the nation's biggest utility in every respect.

"Wet & Dark." Guiding P.G. & E. on its fast upward climb is its new president, Robert H. Gerdes, 59, a lean, shy lawyer whose voice sounds like Jimmy Stewart's. Gerdes joined P.G. & E. in 1929, worked mainly on legal and financial affairs before replacing Norman Sutherland as president last July (Sutherland died a few weeks later from cancer--TIME, Sept. 13). Though a native Californian, Gerdes has a utility man's notions about the profitability of bad weather. "We like it wet and dark," he says, "and the colder the better."

Even if the weather is as good as Californians claim it is, P.G. & E. will spend $2.4 billion in the next 17 years to triple its kilowatt output to 15 million a year by building 16 new generating plants, mostly nuclear-powered. The company pioneered in private nuclear power, already has two plants in operation.

P.G. & E.'s nuclear ambitions are, in fact, involving the company in the bitterest controversy in its 111-year history. It has already laid the foundations for a site on which to build a big reactor at Bodega Bay, a desolate crag 50 miles north of San Francisco. Because Bodega Bay is only 1,000 ft. from the San Andreas fault--the shifting rock formation that triggered San Francisco's 1906 earthquake--many Californians strongly oppose the plan, fearing that a quake-damaged reactor might spill fallout over the neighborhood area. Whether P.G. & E. can go ahead with its plans depends on the Atomic Energy Commission, which is studying the matter thoroughly before making its ruling.

Nuclear or Else. Should P.G. & E.'s plans at Bodega Bay be frustrated, Gerdes nonetheless intends to build other reactors elsewhere. He has little choice but to go nuclear. California lacks the coal and natural gas with which to produce inexpensive electricity, and Gerdes must thus develop P.G. & E.'s nuclear capability or face the possibility that the company in a few years may be unable to meet the state's growing electrical demands. It might then be forced to raise prices--now below the national average--in order to build more conventional power plants. President Gerdes is ever mindful of the fact that such action would give California's numerous proponents of public power an opening to demand the establishment of a TVA of the West.

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