Control of Water-Power by the Colonies Control of Water-Power by the States. Beginnings of National Control of Water-Power before 1866. Development of National Control of Water-Power after 1866. THE FEDERAL POWER COMMISSION ITS HISTORY, ACTIVITIES, AND ORGANIZATION CHAPTER I HISTORY The Federal Power Commission is an independent administrative agency composed of the Secretaries of War, Interior, and Agriculture. It was created by the act of June 10, 1920 (41 Stat. L., 1063), and its function is to exercise general administrative control over all water-power sites and kindred establishments that are located on the navigable waters, on the public lands, and on the reservations of the United States. To accomplish this function, the commission is required to coöperate with state and national governments in making investigations of water resources and in publishing the results thereof. It is required to issue permits and licenses for the purpose of utilizing dams, reservoirs, power houses, water conduits, transmission lines, and kindred projects. It must regulate, under certain conditions, the financial operations of water power industries including the rates of service. It must make physical valuations of the properties of power enterprises, determine the character of their services, and control the operation of power projects. The significance of these functions is obviated by the almost inexhaustible immensity of the water-power resources of the United States, the growing practice of substituting water-power for steam power, and by the constant appearance of new inventions for the further utilization of water-power in industry. In 1921 the United States Geological Survey estimated the potential water-power resources of the United States at 53,905,000 horse power, while the installed capacity of water wheels was only 9,242,000 horsepower.' It is also estimated that there is sufficient water-power in the country to do the work of 500,000,000 tons of coal annually,' and the energy derived from it may be transmitted thousands of miles. Thus the waters of the Sierra Nevada Mountains might be translated into the electric lights of New York City. Utilization of hydroelectric power is not limited to the milling industries and to the cities. It may now be extended to the manufacture of nitrogen from the air and to the manufacture of fertilizer from phosphate rock; to the operation of mines, transportation facilities, and farm machinery; to the lighting and heating of remote country houses, and to the execution of the simplest of the farmyard and household arts, such as milking cows, churning butter, cooking, sewing, laundrying, and sweeping. The seemingly unlimited uses of hydroelectric power in industry and in the rising standards of living indicates the undetermined volume of future waterpower permits that must be granted by the Federal Power Commission, and the vast amount of industrial regulation that they may have to exercise. Although the Federal Power Commission was not formally created until 1920, it had potentially existed in unorganized form ever since the Secretary of War's office had been created. Many of the functions of the present commission had quietly but gradually developed in three departments-War, Interior, and Agriculture. Corresponding to the growth of these functions was the gradual increase of administrative personnel and the continual development of a field of administrative law. The act of June 10, 1920, organized the three Secretaries into a single administrative agency, authorized them to detail some of their subordinates, provided them with an army engineer and an executive secretary, and consolidated their several legal powers. These legal powers were largely administrative, and they were 'World atlas of commercial geology, Part II, p. 14 (1921). 2 Sirrine, The relation of the federal government to the owners of undeveloped water powers on technically navigable streams, in Professional Memoirs, Engineer Bureau, U. S. Army, pp. 216-17 (1908). 3 For the various uses of electric power on the farm, see Year book of the Department of Agriculture, 1919, pp. 223-238. indigenous to America. They represented the hard stratification of a vast body of administrative precedents that had sporadically grown up in the various colonial and state governments, and in the federal constitutional and administrative law. Government control of water-power in the English, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish and French colonies was not limited to the jurisprudence of the European countries. New water-power problems had to be solved in the the New World, and a new body of administrative precedents was inevitable. To afford a birdseye view of the development of this whole field, a brief narrative of colonial and state precedents is given below. To indicate the original intent and the original application of government control of water-power, some specific cases are narrated. Control of Water-Power by the Colonies. The colonies from Holland were more accustomed to wind-mill power than to waterpower, and the settlers from the British Isles understood horsepower better than river mills. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims had been settled at Plymouth only eight years when they began to develop water-power plants in the form of grist mills. Endicott's first colony erected a water mill for the grinding of grain at Dorchester as early as 1628. Three years later a tide-water grist mill was constructed in Boston and a sawmill was erected at Neponset. By 1634 a stone weir was built across the Charles River at its lowest fall with a mill race constructed so as to convey water to the flutter wheel. The development of these mills had not progressed far before the colonial governments began to exert authority over the waterpower resources and to regulate the exploitation of them, whether utilized for purposes of manufacturing or navigation. A precedent for the government control of water-power was established in 1629, when the New Netherlands legislature gave the patrons the privilege of all the rivers within prescribed limits and the use thereof for grinding. A kindred precedent for the government regulation of power plants was established in 1638 when the Gen 5 Fanning, Progress in hydraulic development, Engineering Record, XLVII, pp. 24-25 (1903). A brief history of water-power development from the ancient times is given in Mead, Water-power engineering, Chapter 1. 'Laws and ordinances of New Netherlands, 1638-1674, p. 3. |