"In June of 2001, Bush opposed, and the congressional GOP voted down, legislation to provide $350 million worth of loans to modernize the nation's power grid because of known weaknesses in reliability and capacity. Supporters of the amendment pointed to studies by the Energy Department showing that the grid was in desperate need of upgrades as proof that their legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) should pass. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration lobbied against it and the Republicans voted it down three separate times."

- politicalstrategy.org -

Al Qaida is taking credit for the power blackout that affected some 70 million people in the Northeast and through much of the Province of Ontario last week.

There isn’t any particular reason to believe they had anything to do with the blackout, but the propaganda value of the claim is indisputable. Long-suffering Iraqis, fed up with little or no electricity ever since the American invasion, reacted with undisguised schadenfrüde, going so far as to email tips to New Yorkers on how to live without power. Already delighted at the discomfiture the blackout caused the hated Americans, they probably embraced al Qaida’s claim avidly, whether they believed it or not.

In fact, Americans can take pride in how well easterners reacted. Crime actually DROPPED during the blackout, and the only serious criminal occurrence was, oddly enough, in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, where four gunmen robbed a Sparks Street Mall jewelry store and fired shots at the crowd (nobody hurt, fortunately).

That the power distribution system in this country is fantastically vulnerable is undisputed. The start of this blackout, which covered some 800,000 square miles of the most densely populated part of North America, was apparently caused by nothing more remarkable than a power line expanding in the heat, sagging down into contact with some trees and shorting out. A similar incident in Oregon a couple of years back dropped much of the west coast into darkness for up to three days.

It doesn’t take much to throw dozens of states into chaos and cost the economy billions. A strong gust of wind. A very hot day. A faller, clearing the right of way for some high voltage transmission lines, goofing up and having a tree fall in the wrong direction. One nut with some very well insulated bolt cutters.

The fingerpointing began immediately, of course. Jean Chretien and George W got into a really silly argument over which side of Niagara Falls the blackout began on (both were wrong; it began in the well-known Canadian province of Ohio). Right wingers blamed environmentalists for supposedly blocking construction of power lines. Free market types blamed too much regulation. And everyone blamed Gray Davis.

But as the sequence of events become clearer and sober considerations set in, it became clear that there were two main problems that each contributed significantly to the size and extent of the blackout.

First, there’s the distribution system. Some of those high voltage lines are over fifty years old, and power generation over the past twenty years, not to mention power consumption, easily outstripped increases in the capacity of the distribution system.

With nearly every route at or near capacity on a hot day when air conditioners were all merrily humming away, the failure of one caused a cascade effect, as surges in demand exceeded capacity of lines to which the power from the failed line was rerouted. Just like what happened in 1965, and in every really big power outage since.

After 1965, the distribution system was significantly upgraded, and we went some 25 years before they started up again.

So why did the power distribution system decline? In one word, deregulation.

There are already several excellent pieces out there about the role deregulation played in the blackout. Greg Palast, Paul Krugman and JJ Balzer have all put essays up, at gregpalast.com, the NY Times, and American Political Journal respectively, addressing the inability of the free market to encompass the somewhat specialized needs of the power grid.

But Veronica, one of the most astute of Weasels, nailed it. Here’s what she wrote in a Usenet post:

There's a much more basic weirdness here. Follow me for a minute:

The situation: A Power Station connects to a power grid at two points: At its input power line and its output power line.

To put power onto the grid or take power off of the grid; a power station must measure wattage at each of those two points and then put exactly as much wattage as it "saw" at each point, onto its own lines. This is important.

The problem: If the station fails to 'match' wattage on either line; that power station blows up. Literally. ... and RIGHT NOW.

... and when it fails, it can take down smoothly functioning nearby stations.

This is an inherently dangerous situation. This is a MAJOR design and construction effort for people in the Power industry. All power grids have to be carefully designed to control it.

The solution: A power station must ALWAYS put exactly the same wattage on its intake and output lines that it sees on the grid at those two points. When Power Stations do this correctly, then the power transfers smoothly between the grid and the station and nothing blows up. We are all happy.

To make sure this happens, the power station must measure that wattage at those two points at least several dozen times a second. This requires a fairly robust fail-safe measurement system at each and every power station on the Grid.

This is not a complicated or difficult idea. It is really common-sense.

Now: If we expand this system by, say, a thousand power stations through five states, we have a power grid that works a little like the internet:

*) There is lots of redundancy that reroutes power whenever necessary – and it IS necessary; dozens of times a day.

*) Every location on the grid has an "address" that identifies exactly what it is doing at all times.

*) Everybody connected to the grid can always find out what is happening everywhere else on the grid at all times.

*) All power transfers between Stations and the Grid are carefully coordinated, address by address.

The conclusion: There simply should be no mystery about what broke first and what broke next. The power management systems at those hundreds of power stations must have reported the primary failure literally the second that the failure occurred. There must be records of the failure.

Now; here's what I really don't understand: If we have a system like this in place, why is it taking sooooo looooong to determine which point on the grid broke, why it broke, and what broke it? ... and don't tell me a tree in Ohio did it.

If we didn't have a system like this in place; then why didn't we? How the Hell did they expect the grid to work without failing?

Isn't it a BIGGER issue, that the managers of the system don't seem to know how to get a handle on this rather simple problem? Just read the records, dummies. Isn't it a BIGGER media story, that we have a power system that can't measure itself, and hired managers who can't analyze the problem, and all this is being smoothed over by politicians who don't seem to care?

The estimate heard most often is that it would cost $60 billion to upgrade the distribution system so it doesn’t crash a quarter of the country any time a branch hits a transmission line, and so it won’t take several days for the people supervising the grid to discover why it went down. For-profit energy companies don’t want to lay out that kind of money when they have a system that frequently works.

But that last outage cost between $4 and $6 billion. And every anti-American terrorist in the world was watching with acute interest.

Putsch, of course, says he wants to fix it, but wants oil and coal mining deregulated, drilling in the ANWR, and a host of other little environmental rapes. If the American people agree to his ransom, then he’ll think about spending the money to fix the power system.

In the name of security, of course.