PHILADELPHIA -- The mid-August power blackout that plunged more than 50 million people into darkness in a matter of seconds across much of the Northeast, Upper Midwest and portions of Canada, never should have happened, an industry representative said Monday.
The frightening part of the blackout's aftermath is that such an event -- which the energy industry promised would not happen again following a massive blackout of 1965 -- could reoccur. To prevent it, the industry must be is better able to match its generation, transmission and distribution systems to customer requirements.
Speaking at a seminar on energy reliability after the blackout, sponsored by the Foundation for American Communications, M. William Brier, vice president, policy and public affairs for the industry trade group Edison Electric Institute, told a group of journalists that his industry dropped the ball.
"The industry screwed up," Brier said. So many small things came together in a proverbial perfect storm, that combined they led to the massive blackout. From trees not trimmed near high-voltage transmission lines, to alarms that did not operate, to miscommunication between electricity "watchdogs" in separate sections of the country, the combination led to darkness.
Now, the industry and federal and state regulatory agencies are taking a closer look at what happened and even more important, what needs to be done to prevent a recurrence. Many again are eyeballing the nation's electric grid, particularly the relative lack of investment in the transmission system for the last quarter century and going forward.
"Over the past 25 years, the investment in transmission has gone down $103 million annually," said Ralph Fehr, an energy consultant who teaches at the University of South Florida and at Pennsylvania State University. "Transmission investment in the year 2000 was $2.5 billion less, in 2001 dollars, that the investment in 1975. Yet over this same period of time, electricity sales doubled."
While electricity consumption is projected to increase by 22 percent between 2002 and 2010, the energy industry's total investment in new transmission capacity is expected to increase only 5.2 percent.
While acknowledging the energy bill now in Congress is not perfect, Brier said the legislation contains a number of provisions that would help assure that the U.S. has the reliability rules and standards needed to ward off future blackouts.
