Now that lights are back on, it's time to talk about causes, effects, responses

Thursday's massive power outage demonstrated one of the signs of how times have changed: When New York was struck by massive power outages in 1965 and 1977, virtually no one thought first of terrorism as the possible cause. Yet that was the first thought on the minds of millions of people when the lights went out in 2003.
That awareness, along with the devastating effects of the blackout, demonstrate the need for a serious examination of how fragile the nation's transmission system has become.
One thing that hasn't changed since 1965 or 1977 is much of the hardware that carries thousands of megawatts of electricity almost instantaneously from state to state and across the border with Canada. For almost a generation, precious little has been built in the way of transmission facilities -- for a variety of reasons, all of which will have to be opened to new and vigorous examination.
Even 21st century software can not make up for the deficiencies of a 20th century transmission system, as Thursday's blackout demonstrated.
Looking for source
Investigators are focusing on Northeast Ohio as the probable starting point of the system's failure. Initial reports had New York and Canada accusing each other of being the site of the flashpoint. But regardless of where the origin turns out to be, the effect on 50 million people was the same. And there is no guarantee that the same thing couldn't happen again, with the initial failure originating at almost any point in the power grid. Indeed, it is likely that there will be more blackouts in the years it will take to complete a multibillion-dollar rebuilding of the system.
And given the worldwide attention that the blackout received, it's logical to expect terrorists to take an interest in ways that they could precipitate another -- possibly worse -- blackout through coordinated acts of vandalism against a number of high-voltage transmission lines in any of the nation's power grids.
There will be no shortage of investigations into the blackout of 2003.
Some of the players
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is already at work. "Regardless of what the root cause was, it was clearly exacerbated by a system that is unable to support today's economy," Nora Mead Brownell, an NERC commissioner, said Saturday on NBC's "Today" show.
Alan Schriber, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, said a PUCO investigation will begin this week to reconstruct the wave of power losses that raced across hundreds of miles in a about a quarter of a minute.
"We will do that second-by-second if possible. We want to see what breakers broke, what plants shut down and what circuits they shut down," Schriber said. He urged other states to do their own investigations and compare notes.
Hearings in the House of Representative will open next month. U. S. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, is already calling on Congress to resurrect the Environmental Streamlining of Energy Facilities Act, which he introduced in 2001.
And, of course, political blame-shifting has already begun between Republicans and Democrats, incumbents and challengers and radio talk-show hosts of various stripes.
Finger-pointing is an exercise of questionable merit, but real debate over what went wrong and why, and over what can, should or must be done to correct it is healthy.
Deregulation factor
A good part of the debate must center on whether deregulation has played an integral role in the deterioration of the transmission system in recent years and how a transmission system can be rebuilt in a deregulated energy market.
"It's a wake-up call," President Bush said. "The grid needs to be modernized; the delivery systems need to be modernized. We've got an antiquated system." And it is.
But it's a system that was built up in the last half of the century by individual utilities working within agreements with state regulatory agencies that guaranteed a return on their investment. It was that guarantee that spurred them to build generating and transmission facilities that cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America, told the Philadelphia Inquirer, that utilities are more inclined to seek quick financial returns under deregulation. They are not interested in investing in infrastructure that is designed to last 50 years.
Absent a guarantee on such a long-term investment, who will build the transmission lines to safely carry all that deregulated power?
This newspaper raised questions such as those years ago, when the Ohio General Assembly was champing at the bit to deregulate. None of the projections on how much cheaper electricity would be in a deregulated environment took into account the long-term costs of an aging, stagnant transmission system over which the supposedly cheaper power would travel.
We got a glimpse of those costs last week as cities were paralyzed, plants closed down, people scrimped and billions of dollars were lost.
Save a little
And who among us, called upon to conserve energy for a few days to avoid the prospect of being caught up in rolling blackouts, didn't wonder what role conservation should play in our futures? Wouldn't keeping the thermostat a few degrees higher in the summer and lower in the winter be better than cursing the darkness -- or sweating or shivering through a power outage?