Blackout '03: Lights Out

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Though officials were quick to say what hadn't happened, they were at a loss to explain what had. How can the power demands of a not unusually hot day somehow bring a huge chunk of the northeastern electrical grid crashing down? The blame cascaded as fast as the blackout. On the ground some Americans blamed Canada for its origin; Canadians returned the favor. Ottawa officials first suggested that it was a lightning strike at a plant in upstate New York, except that it was a lovely sunny day in Niagara Falls, and there were no reports of lightning anywhere. In the end, the two governments announced a joint task force to investigate, and President Bush said he would look into "why the cascade was so significant, why it was able to ripple so significantly throughout our system." But finding answers may mean reviewing yet again the lessons learned from four historic power failures going back to the 1960s, looking at the weird rules that govern how power companies invest their money, and confronting the evidence that an antique grid of twigs and twine cannot meet the demands of 21st century consumers, much less protect itself from anyone who might actually set out to bring it down.

Experts will have to wade through 10,000 pages of of log data before they can say exactly how the disaster started, but they had a pretty good idea why: the electrical system in the Northeast and Midwest consists of a lot of capacity to generate power and too few means of moving it around smoothly. Over the past 10 years, electricity demand has jumped 30%, but transmission capacity has increased only half that much. Because everything is tied together, too much strain in one place can cause the whole system to snap. Officials learned that lesson in the blackouts of 1965, and 38 years later, they learned that all the safeguards put in place ever since may no longer be adequate for the job.

In the olden days--say, the 1930s--electricity was generated by coal-burning or hydroelectric plants located a short distance from the people who would use it. That meant when problems hit, the lights went out locally, even if locally meant a large city. But in the 1970s new federal utility laws threw transmission lines open to all comers. Now utilities could get their power wherever it was cheapest, even if that meant it had to travel farther: power generated in Alabama is sold to Vermont. The nation's power grid--the vast system of lines, transformers and switching stations--was never designed to move electricity long distances, let alone "from Maine to Miami," points out Terry Boston of the Tennessee Valley Authority.