By Emily M. Smith

Baseball players, Pokemon characters, and power plants have one thing in common. All are featured on trading cards. While no one will probably take the Hoover Dam in a swap for a Mickey Mantle rookie card, Christopher Bergesen, originator of the Power Plant Trading Cards, is undeterred.

Three years after he began distributing and selling them, Bergesen refers to his production of 200,000 cards showcasing 115 power plants on nearly every continent as a public service. Not only because he—like many in the power industry, he pointed out—isn't making any money on his effort, but also because the cards function as a way to draw attention to the underappreciated feats of engineering that have enabled improvements in the lives of billions of people. "People are scared of industry because they don't understand it," Bergesen said. "They don't understand it because it's never been presented to them in a way they could understand."

The trading cards offer an accessible avenue. Bergesen's son gives out the cards at his college. Maybe because they are a reminder of the days when the two men collected baseball cards together. Maybe because he thinks they're cool. Whatever the reason, that kind of P.R. is hard to buy for $3, which is what a set of five cards sells for on www.industcards.com, Bergesen's Web site.

The front of each trading card has a glossy, color photo of a power plant and its name. Since the image makes the card, Bergesen is always on the lookout for good photos.

The back of the card offers the kind of trivia one might find perfect for a game: the plant's general location, the operator, the units of power generated, the fuel, the capacity and configuration, the engineering and construction.

Bergesen, who has been involved in the power industry for two decades, came up with the idea while working at McGraw Hill, where he assembles power plant directories and databases. "Think of it as collecting stamps," he said. Unable to sell his colleagues on the marketing benefits for the industry, Bergesen went out on his own.

Whether the cards are given out during trade shows, plant tours, career fairs, or as gifts purchased from his Web site, the responses run the gamut. "Finally," wrote a woman ordering some cards as a gift, "someone as weird as my husband."

Nathan Totsoni, communications representative at the Four Corners power station in New Mexico, gave the plant's trading card to those at a retirees' picnic. The cards, he said, had more staying power and personality than a coffee mug. Those not acquainted with the power industry are equally impressed, he said. A few months ago, a father and daughter, on a cross-country trip from California to Atlanta, stopped in for a tour. They also got a card. According to Totsoni, the father called it "a great memento of our trip." As Totsoni and other Four Corners employees have discovered, the cards become "good cheat sheets" that can jump-start a tour-giver's memory. The information on the back also inspires questions and conversation from visitors, be they politicians or children on a field trip.

Trading cards for a dozen plants are not available because the 2,000-card supplies ran out and no one reordered. The seven cards featuring nuclear power plants are also unavailable. After misuse of the ordinary became a global concern on September 11, Bergesen closed his Web site for a month. Lingering uncertainty about potential misuse prevents Bergesen from predicting the nuclear plant cards' reappearance on the Web site.

While Bergesen is content to break even on his hobby, "I would love to have a massive collector culture leap up," he said. And with 10,000 visitors to the Industcards Web site each year, he knows power plant enthusiasts abound.

Emily M. Smith is managing editor of ASME News.

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