Excuses and blame: causes of the August blackout pinpointed.(Editorial: opinions and commentary from the editor)

Anyone who attended Electric Power 2004 (March 30th) knew that the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force was going to blame Ohio utility FirstEnergy for the August 14th blackout. Calls to strengthen the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) and Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO) echoed throughout the Baltimore Convention Center well in advance of the Task Force's April 5th report, which concluded that NERC and MISO deserved some blame for the outage, but largely lacked authority to prevent it.

I wasn't terribly surprised that utility CEOs gathered at Electric Power 2004 called for increased investment in transmission, the return of nuclear power, and a resurgence in coal generation as steps towards improved electric system reliability. In short, many of the same companies who brought us stranded capacity in the deregulated era while shortchanging other investments now ask our faith in their ability to fix the problems caused by their poor investment strategies. And yes, there was the usual wringing of hands about the state of the capital markets and the unreasonableness of environmentalists who oppose every power project on the boards.

I don't think the delegates would have anticipated that Alison Silverstein, senior policy advisor to Federal Energy Reliability Commission (FERC) chairman Patrick Wood, would say of the report, "If FirstEnergy would have shed 1500 megawatts of electricity in Cleveland before 4:05 p.m. that afternoon, we think the blackout would have not occurred."

Certainly they didn't listen to a speaker, an old engineer who spoke from the floor at the opening session. He wanted to know why utilities don't make better use of waste heat from their plants. A little later I heard that end users didn't really want to participate in demand-side plans and that distributed generation could not have prevented the blackout because these technologies cannot be sited and really make the utility job of ...