than half in the 1995 load demand projection from 57 GW (1974) down to 28 GW (1980). The EB projection is bounded by higher and lower ones from other contributors. The State Senate Designee stated that 2.5%/year growth was the minimum necessary to avoid the "self-fulfilling prophecy" of economic stagnation and shortfalls in capacity with respect to future opportunities such as the electric car or the solar-assisted heat pump. The low-growth oriented Sierra Club claimed that 1.1% growth would be adequate and even entertained a possible 0.4%. Clearly even a modest divergence between actual growth and any of these very conservative scenarios, would result in a growing "generation gap" requiring a "catch up" program just as the SPS option emerges. By that time additions of even currently "acceptable" coal systems may be difficult as C02 and acid rain problems intensify. The gap between the EB and the Legislature's projections could accommodate at least 1 SPS by 2010 and 3 SPS scale units by 2030. More optimistic growth means even larger gaps, requiring significant planning within the 15-year EMP horizon. NYPP would have sufficient reserves and interconnects for 1 SPS unit, but the only financial institution of adequate scale, the proposed ENCONO, has failed, as yet, to achieve acceptance. Given these problems and opportunities, the SPS program should be elaborated so that emerging features are perceived by state authorities to reflect benefits into their time frames and areas of concern. A prime missed opportunity was the failure of the SPS CDEP to develop the potential of rectenna "dual use" as an advanced biomass production site, whether land or water based. Incremental development of candidate sites for biomass, but designed to have maximum infrastructural dualities for a future rectenna, would be more responsive to local needs and assimilative capacity than a sudden "boom town" deployment. The first such "Sunplex" might be gradually evolved at federally owned Ft. Drum. Further, the exclusion of Great Lakes siting in preference for more highly problematical land siting, should be reconsidered. Expansion of Sunplex designs around existing generation nodes, such as Nine Mile Point on Lake Ontario or the Lake Erie coal station, would be more compatible with the current planning environment and with the acceleration of existing NYSERDA biomass goals. In addition, alternate rationales for securing public and official support should be developed and highlighted, namely: multiplier and spin-off effects on the ailing NYS aerospace industry in the near as well as far term; SPS "by wire" options which might also reduce acid rain from adjacent states or free up coal, nuclear or other resources for NYS. Perhaps the greatest opportunity of the early phases of SPS evaluation would be the development of new policy analysis tools which are more appropriate to decision modeling of the actual nonlinear, nonequilibrium, historical succession patterns of the "long wave" evolution of major social infrastructure (especially energy-related systems) than are the existing screening techniques which incorporate such methods as present value discounting, linear cost-benefit analysis, reversible equilibrium biased econometrics, and Malthusian epistomologies. Issues, such as the extent to which local decentralization is really just a euphemism for peripheralization relative to the hyperbolically advancing "growth poles" of the world economy, may then be competently addressed and weighed in energy planning.
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