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August 15, 2003

You know the Iraqis are enjoying this one

I can hear the Baghdad cab drivers now: "So, how do the Americans like having no power, no phones, and no water pressure. Not so liberating is it?"

You can get by without power, but no way to call for help, and you're screwed. I kept thinking that while I watched cars bolt out across four lane highways that would normally have a stop light, but were transformed into moonlit street level expressways. I would be very interested to know the number of people that Con Ed has killed with this black out stunt. All those people who had some type of medical problem but no way to call for help. Probably not an easy number to compile. I'm not talking about the cordless phone problem (they won't work without the juice). I'm talking about a dail tone. Anything. I have an old phone, for emergencies like this, that doesn't need power to make a call. About two hours after the power went out, suddenly this phone dies, too. I got in my car and started driving to find a working phone. Got all the way to Danbury, Connecticut and gave up. Started to worry I would run out of gas, since most gas stations were closed. Should have gone to New Jersey instead, but there were long lines at the few gas stations still open, and it was already getting late. Would have felt silly too, since I've got a dial tone now. It came back about eight hours after it went out. Sprint PCS phones kept working the whole time, but my friend who had one hit the road not long after the black out.

Alright, I'm gonna try to sleep again, but I'll leave you with this:

While energy experts disagreed on the precise cause of Thursday's power blackout, they were in agreement that the extensive failure betrayed the age of the Northeast's transmission system and its failure to keep up with demand.

"We are a major superpower with a Third World electrical grid," said Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, the energy secretary during the Clinton administration. "Our grid is antiquated. It needs serious modernization."

The power system in the Northeast has long been plagued by inadequate transmission capacity and bottlenecks nationwide, especially in the New York metropolitan area. Most of New York City's and Long Island's power at peak times must be generated in the city and on the Island, because it is physically impossible to transmit that much power into the area along the existing lines....

The problem, for the most part, has been that no one has an incentive to invest billions of dollars in new wires, new towers and new transformers. The old utilities have sold off their power plants but still hold a highly regulated monopoly on the network of lines, and they would only invest in new transmission if state regulators would guarantee them rate increases to pay for it.

That is the last thing the regulators, who deregulated much of the industry in hopes of lowering rates, would be willing to do. The entrepreneurial power companies that have bought up power plants have decided against building new transmission lines that would compete with existing ones, possibly driving down transmission charges, and would, at most times, be nothing more than "excess capacity."

Of course, Bush is already showing signs that he will try to blame this on the Democrats, despite the fact that Republicans have a majority in BOTH the House and Senate. It has also been fairly well established that Bush supports more deregulation, not less, and deregulation led to this black out. So what is stopping you from modernizing the power grid, Mr. Bush? If you've "said so all along" that it should be done why don't you support legislation to do it? You sure haven't had much trouble getting those tax cuts through, or deregulating the energy sector into the ground. Wait, I forgot, this is George W. Bush I'm talking about here. W, as in: "Who me?"

Q Mr. President, does this suggest that even with all the attention paid to homeland security that the electrical grid is still vulnerable, should it have been a terrorist attack?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think, you know, one of the things we'll have to do, of course, is take an assessment of why the cascade was so significant, why it was able to ripple so significantly throughout our system up east. And that will be a very important part of the investigation once we deal with the immediate -- and the immediate, of course, is to take care of people.

You know, for example, in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has ordered out thousands of police officers on the street to help bring calm; fire fighters are working overtime; emergency crews are out working well. My focus is to work with state and local authorities to help deal with the immediate problem. Of course, we'll have time to look at it and determine whether or not our grid needs to be modernized. I happen to think it does, and have said so all along. But this will be -- this is going to be an interesting lesson for our country, and we'll have to respond to it.

My emphasis added. It will be "an interesting lesson," indeed. Does Bush get a free pass on deregulation from our great corporate media, or not?

Posted by Mike at August 15, 2003 04:39 AM

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