That may be why they have difficulty conserving. No commodity is more mysterious than electricity. Most people who turn on their televisions and Christmas lights do not even know where their household current was produced. We need more conservation than we've had before, and we need to accelerate additional supply. Those pleas have echoed through the state for months with little effect on consumer habits.
Some experts say part of the difficulty is that electrical power is so taken for granted.
They don't see reservoirs going down. Electricity . . . is just there. Cynicism about whether the present crisis is real contributes to this reluctance. The two eras are not easily compared. The gasoline crisis of the 1970s, caused by an Arab oil embargo, created a sharper sense of crisis in which conservation seemed both a necessity and an act of national defense.