Perspective
Proper authority and market monitoring and mitigation could make the system work.
In the last few years we have watched appalled as the western U.S. electricity markets collapsed, taking with them the solvency and viability of several very large participants, including the California Power Exchange (PX).
Two years after 9/11, the industry remains vulnerable.
Two years ago the utility industry, like everyone else in America, was blindsided by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the aftermath, the rush to secure the grid was on, and the caps on security spending came off-at least for a little while.
Two years later, where are we? Is the grid better protected from attack?
It is, but not by much, according to the experts Fortnightly consulted.
The road to the current reliability crisis is paved with four decades of bad policy decisions.
The technical causes of the great Northeast blackout of August 2003 are coming into focus. For reasons yet unknown as of press time, transmission lines in northern Ohio were lost to the grid, and within seconds 50 million people in the United States and Canada were without power. Soon we will no doubt know the specific reasons for the blackout, and technical corrections and improvements will be made.
With just a few changes in reliability rules, regulators could call on consumer loads to boost power reserves for outages and contingencies.
The industry continues to debate the costs and technology of automated meter reading, even as some regulators insist on immediate implementation.
The developing jurisdictional battle over authorizing rejection of wholesale power supply agreements is getting white-hot, pitting creditors against ratepayers.
The crisis of confidence in today's power industry is, at its heart, a crisis of ideas.
Bankruptcy may not be better for ratepayers.
The venerated process may get a makeover.