A study conducted earlier this year by the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center concluded “Despite efforts to mitigate blackout risk, the data available from the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) for 1984-2006 indicate that the frequency of large blackouts in the United States is not decreasing.”
According to George Gross, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor of electrical and computer engineering who specializes in utility policy, a serious lack of investment in the power grid continues to put reliability at risk and is the "Achilles heel" of the country's electric system.
"The August 2003 blackout was a wake-up call for the country to upgrade its transmission grid system," Gross said. "But the truth is that very few major transmission projects have been constructed and, as a result, transmission capacity has failed to keep pace with the expansion of power demand."
The US-Canadian task force that investigated the August 2003 blackout found numerous violations of the voluntary standards, and concluded that utilities botched routine monitoring of transmission lines and failed to trim trees along transmission passageways.
Since July, all seven of the country's regional grid operators that monitor power flow throughout the nation reported record electricity consumption as temperatures increased. Blackouts struck many parts of the country during the month of July, not because of a shortage of supply, but because the dilapidated power grid could not handle the amount of electricity that was sent back and forth across the transmission lines.
Demand for electricity is expected to increase by 45 percent by 2025, according to the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), a power industry-funded organization in charge of overseeing the rules for operating the nation's power grid.
“In some cases, demand has reached levels that were not expected for another three or four years," said Jone-Lin Wang, most recently the managing director of the Global Power Group at Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Very hot weather tends to cause more incidents of equipment failure in the distribution systems. Although the bulk power system provided adequate supply, extreme heat and surging demand put the distribution systems through extreme stress, leading to some equipment failures and localized power outages."
But neither the Bush administration nor federal lawmakers have developed a comprehensive plan to handle, at the very least, the annual increase in demand. Blackouts will likely become more frequent in areas like New York and New England, Wang said.
“We are concerned about New England because there is nothing in the pipeline, but some small renewable projects and wind," Wang said. "New England is in trouble."
The 2003 blackout led to calls for spending of up to $100 billion to reduce severe transmission bottlenecks and increase capacity so the transmission lines can carry additional electricity from power plants to homes and businesses.
But investment in the grid has lagged, and progress has been slow.
"Transmission capacity is still below 5 percent," Gross said. "The need to strengthen the existing transmission infrastructure, to expand it and to effectively harness advances in technology constitutes the single most pressing challenge for the country's electricity system."
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