Alarming State of the U.S. Electricity Grid

▪ 2005

      The massive power blackout of Aug. 14, 2003, which affected the midwestern and northeastern United States and parts of Canada, highlighted the precarious condition of the U.S. electricity grid, but a full year after the blackout, only recommendations but no new regulations or major changes to the grid's infrastructure had been made. The U.S. electricity grid, which was described by former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson after the 2003 blackout as a “third-world electrical grid,” was widely considered to be overburdened and in serious need of new infrastructure. For many years it had suffered sporadic failures, ranging from major blackouts to the minor brownouts that had become commonplace during summer months, especially in the West. Furthermore, during the previous 10 years the demand for electric power in the United States had grown at the same time that the nature of delivering electrical power had radically changed as policies for the deregulation of the electric power industry were implemented. With deregulation, independent suppliers began delivering most of the electric power to utility companies and, for economic reasons, could contract to deliver the electric power from distant locations. Thus, a utility that owned a segment of the electricity grid often served more as a conduit for transmitting electric power between third parties than as a supplier of electric power to its own customers.

      Much of the infrastructure for transmitting electric power in the United States was built in the 1960s and early '70s, and few significant improvements had been made since. Estimates of the cost to upgrade the grid lay between $50 billion and $100 billion. Individual utility companies had little incentive to make large-scale investments to improve their segments of the grid for several reasons, including a confusing mix of government regulations and deregulation policies for the utilities and the patchwork nature of the grid that resulted from its being owned by a host of competing regional utilities. Government regulations mandated a cap on the rate of return for many utilities and on the amount they could charge consumers, which thereby limited—in the utilities' view—their ability to recoup costs for any major structural improvements they might make. In addition, the organizations that oversaw the electricity grid, such as the utility industry's North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) and the government's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), had little power to enforce their own recommendations.

      A joint U.S. and Canadian task force established to examine the causes of the August 2003 blackout issued a report in April 2004 that called for such reforms as making reliability standards mandatory (thereby giving FERC greater power to enforce the standards), increasing the role of regional reliability councils, and improving the data collection and cooperation of various regional utilities. Despite the favourable attention these recommendations received, various energy bills concerning electric power languished in subcommittees of the House of Representatives. Lacking any federal legislation for energy-related reform in 2004, the U.S. electricity grid was left in essentially the same condition it was in at the time of the 2003 blackout.

Christopher O'Leary

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