OF GRID AND GRIDLOCK

Resumen de Prensa            Enervía, martes, 19 agosto 2003

FUENTE: Editorial New York Times


Yesterday was the first full day of work for millions of Americans and Canadians whose lives were thrown into chaos by last Thursday's blackout, and for nearly everyone it was business as usual. The lights went on, the phones worked, the subways and trains ran more or less on time. Yet the nation's electricity problems are not over. The blackout alerted everyone to the frailties of America's doddering electrical grid. Washington must now move quickly to start fixing it. Instead of pushing stubbornly ahead with a couple of musty, misguided energy bills, Congress should act quickly on several excellent ideas that could help prevent a repeat of last week's nightmare.

Buried deep inside the bills is a provision that would give a little-known organization known as the North American Electric Reliability Council the power to write and enforce mandatory reliability standards. Created after the Northeast blackout in 1965, the council sets the rules of the road for transmission companies: how much electricity can safely run through a line, how much backup capacity must be on hand, how equipment should be designed and maintained. But its rules are merely advisory, and therefore largely ineffective.

Until we know the blackout's cause, it's impossible to know whether a council with real authority could have prevented or minimized the blackout. Yet giving the North American Electric Reliability Council regulatory clout is sound energy policy. The idea has bipartisan support and would almost certainly become law on its own. The problem is that lawmakers fear that the chances of passing an energy bill loaded with favors for special interests would be diminished if they removed sensible proposals like this one and voted on them separately.

That is exactly the kind of narrow-gauge thinking that imperils another good idea, championed by Patrick Wood III, a Bush appointee who runs the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Mr. Wood would create large regional transmission organizations to control the flow of power over state lines and oversee the upgrade that the national transmission system so obviously needs. Such multistate authorities are bitterly opposed, however, by states in the South and the Pacific Northwest, which see no reason to share their cheaper power from coal and hydroelectric sources or be forced to import more expensive power.

Senators from these states would freeze Mr. Wood's plan for three years as their price for supporting the energy bills. They cloak their agenda in righteous rhetoric about the dangers of yet another "federal takeover" of state authority. What they really want to do is hang onto an old and uncoordinated system that ill serves the rest of the nation. That the White House supports them makes the whole charade doubly depressing.




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