Editorial: Electricity grid’s crash is intolerable

Friday, Aug. 15, 2003 | 4:40 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION: August 17, 2003

President Bush says the nation's electricity grid needs to be modernized. "We've got an antiquated system," Bush said Friday after a power outage that left 50 million people without electricity in the Northeast, parts of the Midwest and southern Canada. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, energy secretary during the Clinton administration, wasn't as diplomatic: "We're a superpower with a Third World power grid."

It's not as if there haven't been warnings about the system's vulnerability, as a story in Friday's Washington Post reminded us. Two years ago David Cook, the general counsel for the North American Electric Reliability Council, told Congress: "The question is not whether, but when the next major failure of the grid will occur." It's been estimated that the transmission capacity of power lines has only increased by 15 percent in the past 10 years while the demand for power has increased by 30 percent. It is taking its toll on the grid system, as we saw last week.

One of the reasons why there is a reluctance to build more transmission lines is the enormous cost to utilities and, in turn, to their customers. Then there is the issue of the lines themselves. No one wants them built nearby. But the bottom line is that Washington and the states, working with the utilities, need to make sure that more capacity is built into the system. The current electricity grid clearly isn't ready for the 21st century.