Preventing future blackouts

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The power outage of August 2003 that left tens of millions of people without electricity in New York, seven other states and part of Canada should not have happened, according to the final report released Monday by a joint U.S.-Canadian task force that investigated the worst blackout in U.S. history.

The report, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said, "makes clear that this blackout could have been prevented." Perhaps now — eight months later — Congress will act on its promise to fix the problems that caused the blackout.

The outage was not prevented, the report said, because poorly trained operators in the FirstEnergy Corp. of Ohio control room failed to alert other utilities that its computer system malfunctioned so the cascade of outages could have been short-circuited. The utility also had not followed through on safeguards to deal with power failures and lacked a backup monitoring system.

The result — in addition to the impact on millions of people, including 6.7 million in New York — was a $10 billion bite out of the economy.

The task force recommended establishing reliability standards under an international overseer with the authority to punish companies that violate them. That would replace the voluntary rules of the North American Electric Reliability Council, which has no enforcement power. The task force found that FirstEnergy had at least seven violations of the voluntary rules.

FirstEnergy has since increased staff training and spent $10 million on new computer controls, [§ part of the $80 billion that is needed to replace the SCADA/EMS] company spokeswoman Ellen Rains told USA Today. That's more than Congress has done.

Measures addressing electricity reliability are contained in an energy bill that is stalled in Congress for a third year. These include upgrading the nation's rickety grid, and taking control away from some 130 separate power authorities and forming new regional transmission networks regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to ensure adequate electricity distribution.

Those measures, along with task force recommendations, should be separated from other measures in the dead-ended energy bill and approved quickly in stand-alone electricity reliability legislation such as that proposed by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and others.

New York state, it should be noted, has also done nothing about keeping an adequate flow of power to meet the state's current and future needs despite its own warning even before the massive 2003 blackout. In 1999, a blackout left 200,000 people without power in parts of Manhattan. The Democratic-controlled Assembly and Republican-dominated Senate are in political gridlock. Sadly, that's typical of a state government that hasn't passed a budget on time in 20 years. But nothing is happening.

Both Congress and the state Legislature need to act to prevent another costly blackout.

The Journal News

-- Anonymous, April 07, 2004


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