Energy Technology: Winner Take All

A review of which technologies and companies stand to win and lose as a result of the 2003 blackout.

 

Mishap, human error, and malice regularly crash the electric system. We have lurched from the Western economic power crisis of 1999-2000 to the Eastern reliability power crisis of 2003. Neither more studies nor more blackouts have changed what's been built-an excessive quantity of large generation plants dependent on relatively few major transmission lines. On its current course, the grid's inevitable destination is disaster.

Recent congressional testimony blames the root cause of the blackout on everything from deregulation to inadequate central authority over the grid. While there is an underlying truth to all these casual factors, this line of thinking misses the underlying problem.

The Rocky Mountain Institute's 1981 study explains why the power grid, our nation's most complex and critical infrastructure, remains profoundly vulnerable: the grid's centralized system architecture makes it inherently prone to precisely the sort of instability we've witnessed during the past few years. America relies on aerial arteries and precise electronic signals to keep huge machines rotating in exact synchrony across half a continent. And continued growth of the grid, combined with the liberalization of the country's wholesale power market, has placed even more strain on the system. When more and bigger power lines link more and bigger power plants, the grid becomes less stable in new ways and over wider areas. Restructured electric markets challenge this constrained system with transmission transactions of a frequency and complexity for which the grid was not designed.