Pump Up the Power Grid
The Bush administration isn’t shy about using a crisis to advance a political agenda. It parlayed fear in the wake of terrorist attacks into the broad intrusions and civic roadblocks of the USA Patriot Act. It turned worries over the stalled economy into big tax cuts for the rich. The White House is now enlisting last week’s massive Northeastern electric blackout as a reason to pass a hydra-headed energy bill that would open Arctic wilderness to oil and gas drilling and force taxpayers to subsidize ethanol production.
Buried in those giveaways to oil drillers and corn farmers (the source of ethanol) is a good first step toward making the nation’s electric transmission grid more reliable. An uncontroversial provision in the energy bill would strengthen electric transmission stability. Although energy industry lobbyists are fighting intensely to keep the bill in one piece, Congress should pass the provision separately, and quickly.
Reliable electric power is a requirement of national security, and Congress can’t afford to let politics rule. The frazzled regulatory cop of the transmission grid, the North American Electric Reliability Council, needs some muscle now.
The council was created in the wake of the 1965 Northeast blackout to make and enforce reliability standards for transmission lines, but it was left to rely on voluntary compliance -- a scary thought in the Enron age. The measure that Congress should pass would give the council the clout it needs to write and enforce standards that would lead to greater safety and reliability.
However, enforcement alone isn’t quite enough. Despite the unpopularity of transmission lines, the grid must be expanded in some states. In addition, government encouragement of conservation and energy- efficient appliances would ease demands on the aging grid. Alternative technologies, from windmills to mini-turbines, can produce electricity closer to where it’s needed, particularly in cities.
The advent of a deregulated energy market brought a burst of new power generation, and energy trading firms sent a huge amount of electricity into the system. But, along the way, the grid became “an orphan,” according to S. David Freeman, chairman of the California Power Authority.
No one in the industry has a strong economic interest in adding transmission capacity as consumer demand grows and new power plants come on line. What’s needed are regional transmission organizations empowered by the federal government to ensure that capacity matches demand, even if it means acting as the last-resort builder.
Money does talk, and Congress should be listening to the message in this statistic: Even before last Thursday’s blackout, experts set the cost of lost U.S. productivity from power outages and related power problems at $100 billion a year. That’s more than enough reason to start now on strengthening the transmission grid.
