As the summer approaches, members of the New York City Council, in conjunction with New York Public Interest Research Group, will stand on the steps of City Hall today and call for more blackouts on the state’s power grid. They may not use precisely that language, but there can be no other outcome if the politicians at Albany listen to their call to make it more difficult to site new power plants. This will be illuminated tomorrow, when the Manhattan Institute hosts a panel discussion on how New York can deal with its power crunch with an eye toward market forces and sound science.

While environmental activists want to shut down existing power plants, such as the nuclear facility at Indian Point (which provides up to 30% of the energy for Westchester County and New York City), they have little to say for themselves as to how the state can make up the deficit. Speaking to The New York Sun yesterday, a spokeswoman for Nypirg, Camille Rivera, said that New York could boost production in existing plants on the supply end while working to conserve demand. This, of course, would be in addition to increasing the amount of money the state gives to “interveners,” who fight against new power plants.

Nypirg’s suggestions lack credibility. One of the scheduled participants in tomorrow’s forum, Peter Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of the Huber Mills Digital Power Report, plans to outline a series of “energy heresies,” one of which is that the more efficiently and cheaply we produce energy, the more of it we will use. If we make an SUV that gets more miles to the gallon, people will drive it more. If we squeeze more electricity out of a lump of coal, people will run their air conditioners colder and for longer.” The demand for electricity is insatiable,” Mr. Huber told us. As for increasing capacity at existing plants, this is what has been done for the last decade, Mr. Huber said, but you can only do this “up to a point.” The next step could be to build onto these plants, he said, but the greens never like that.

We’ll have to do something. Last year saw blackouts throughout New York City, and this year’s peak demand is expected to be up from 2002. The Public Policy Institute, a research affiliate of the Business Council of New York State, has estimated that within the next five years the state needs at least a dozen new power plants with at least 9,200 megawatts of additional electricity-generating capacity. The report notes that in the past 20 years, “peak demand has grown 5.2 times as fast as the state’s population and 2.1 times as fast as employment.”

By our lights, increases in demand are good news. As Mr. Huber pointed out to us yesterday, increased energy use has always gone hand in hand with the progress of civilization — from the hunter-gatherers to the agriculturalists to the industrialists.” Nowhere and at no time has an economy kept growing while reducing its energy consumption,” he said. We can try to import the energy that runs New York’s computers, servers, televisions, fax machines, printing presses, buzz saws, lasers, and lights; but we’d be better off producing it here. There’s no reason to send jobs to Canada and the Midwest, grow dependent on these regions, and then curse them for acid rain that drifts back our way. Keeping New York viable will require a much more serious effort than that which will be offered on the steps of City Hall today.