ASADENA felt aggrieved. Every month the town of millionaires, tourists, and midwinter roses growled deep down in its throat. The price of

electric current hurt its feelings. Despite the arguments of the local electric light company, despite merry sunshine. and purple mountains, Pasadena became grouchy every time the collector appeared. Fifteen cents per kilowatt-hour was the maximum upon which Pasadena's electric lighting rates were based. The company maintained that current could not be supplied cheaper, maintained the assertion almost tearfully.

Perusing the street-lighting bills, the City Council rumpled its vanishing hair. "Let's see if we can't make current for ourselves a little cheaper," suggested the city fathers. They called an election to vote on a bond issue of one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for a municipal light plant. Whereupon the electric light company rolled up its sleeves and waded in. The campaign was as lively and emotional as a darky camp meeting. Not that the citizens were overly enthusiastic about going into the electric light business. In fact, they preferred to stay out; they listened attentively to the electric light

company's loud cry of "waste of public money". But when they looked at their monthly bills the citizens became deaf to the company's frantic warning. The bonds carried, even though the margin was as slender as the neck of a Gibson girl.

Immediately after the bond victory, the electric light company reduced its base rate from fifteen to twelve and onehalf cents; also, it appealed to the courts to restrain Pasadena from selling the bonds. However, the company lost after a year's litigation.

That sudden price reduction and the electric light corporation's endeavors to kill the bond issue caused the citizens to sit up and sniff suspiciously. When more funds were demanded to enlarge the municipal plant, to extend its service. to all parts of the city, the bonds carried with a whoop. At once the hitherto masked batteries of the electric light corporation began to spew canister and shell into the municipal ranks. The

You may

under piles of elaborate balance sheets. When the three got up to report to the board, they sadly shook their heads in unison. The poverty of the company was appalling. Why, its gas revenue barely covered expenses; as for electricity, the books showed that the income was only sufficient to pay a measly little dividend. So impressed was the committee with the showing that they felt inclined to recommend an increase in the rates.

If only that municipal plant in Pasadena could be put to sleep-strangled in a hurry!

Just a little while after that sad report concerning its poverty, the corporation voluntarily reduced the price of gas ten per cent, cut electric rates from twelve and one-half to ten cents, and when the State's Public Utility Commission suggested a further reduction of the electric rate to eight cents, the company meekly obeyed, reducing its charges in a dozen communities without once running to the courts with the plea of confiscation. Well, it isn't in the hands of a receiver yet; it is still paying bond interest and stock dividends promptly.

But it is still selling current in Pasadena for four cents, striving hard to put under the sod the plucky little municipal plant that cut the electric light bills of half a million people nearly in two.

31

How much do you pay for electric current?

If you live in a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants or more, you probably pay at least ten cents a kilowatthour; if you live in a small town, your rate is likely to be considerably lower. Strange, isn't it, that rates should be higher the larger the market? That is the fact, though.

Pasadena, with thirty-five thousand inhabitants and nine thousand five hundred electricity consumers, pays four and five cents per kilowatt-hour for lighting current; and all around Pasadena a score of little towns get their current for eight cents. Yet according to the latest available reports, Chicago, Brooklyn, St. Paul, Philadelphia, Spokane, Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, Washington, D. C., Richmond, Reading, San Antonio, and a number of other large cities are paying a base rate of ten cents and more per

light is blazing, but that eighty out of every hundred horsepower in the plants lie idle and unproductive twenty hours out of the twenty-four because there is no demand for the current.

This latter allegation is true. Gas can be made during daylight and stored for the evening's use. Electric current cannot be economically stored; it must be consumed as fast as it is generated, and the capacity of the plant must be at least equal to the greatest load it may be asked to carry for short periods of time. In other words, the interest and other fixed charges on eighty per cent of the investment in a million-dollar plant devoted to lighting purposes only must be earned in a run of four hours daily.

The wages of the man who works only two hours daily must be six times as high as the wages of the man who works twelve hours if both are to earn the same amount. An electric light plant is the industrial equivalent of the two-hour man with the twelve-hour pay check. If falling water power, an electric be run at full capacity for twenty four hours with no more expense than is incurred when all the generators are running only four hours. Even with steam as a prime mover, the actual cost of making the current is but a small fraction of the total. At New

top, the total cost of the current delivered at the consumer's door expands enormously.

But, even if we admit the very high cost of retailing electric current, still electric light rates in the majority of American cities are unquestionably exorbitant. They are based, not on the cost of the service, but on the long-eared patience of the consumers. This worldrenowned, unfathomable patience of the American public rather than the value of the plants is the basis of the capitalization skillfully inflated by the corporation promoters. It is their most valuable asset. If it were not for this asinine endurance of Jones and Smith and Brown, the ten-cent rate would long ago have sought a safe refuge in the archives. of historical societies.

An economically installed, honestly financed, efficiently managed electric plant can, hundreds of them do, deliver current for lighting purposes, pay all legitimate expenses, set

castle-on-Tyne the cost of coal, labor, and material per kilowatt-hour did not exceed one-quarter of a cent. Many American plants burning coal or fuel oil produce the current as cheaply. But when the loss of current in transformers and on the transmission lines and distributing wires is added, when the overhead charges for maintenance, interest, depreciation, and sinking fund on ex

aside adequate amounts for depreciation and amortization, and leave a handsome surplus for dividends at a maximum rate of seven cents per kilowatt-hour!

Would you who are paying ten and twelve cents have proof of this assertion?

Neither in size nor in the character of

its equipment is Pasadena's plant of the highest efficiency. Pasadena's distributing system serves only half the consumers in the territory it covers. Pasadena generates its current with steam. Yet the plant is paying its way with a five-cent maximum rate for current. The capacity of the plant exceeds four thousand horsepower; the maximum demand made on the generators does not exceed