“The massive power failure that struck the Northeast and parts of the Midwest this week also delivered a jolt to Congress, where energy legislation has been stalled amid deep regional differences over how best to upgrade the nation’s aging electric power transmission system.” Washington Post

Competing bills differ on support for a plan that would put electricity transmission under the control of several regional authorities, a step toward a national transmission system opposed by regions like the South and the Northwest which enjoy cheaper power. Bush, as usual, voiced his usual authoritative but empty platitudes about an “antiquated transmission system” and how we’ve got to “figure out what went wrong.” Of course, his energy scheme focuses more on federal handouts to his friends on the supply side — tax incentives for oil and gas drilling (especially in wilderness areas) and nuclear power support. Although analysis of the power failure, whose precise cause remains unknown, does not suggest it was set off simply by a short-term overload in peak demand, almost no one in the national debate pays much attention to the potential value of conservation in reducing demand for power and consequent stress on the transmission system. And participants in the debate draw diametrically opposite lessons about whether it calls for centralization of control over the power grid or enhancing regional autonomy. Along with centralization, of course, comes automated control of transmission traffic, automatically reconfiguring connections across the grid to respond instantaneously to surges in demand somewhere in the system. It strikes me that this is precisely what analysts say caused the cascading series of failures on Thursday, whereas in areas that were spared it was because local power engineers flipped a switch to isolate their localities from the larger process.

While the debate should probably not be shaped by these dramatic failures which so far have happened only three times during my lifetime (1965, 1979 and now), they are probably only the tip of the iceberg in alerting us to potential unintended consequences of automation of electricity flow. The megalomaniacs (literally) who favor centralization, giveaways to the energy industry, and unquestioning responsiveness to the unchecked growth in demand are those who will control the public debate with emotional evocations of the spectre of chaos, anarchy and social breakdown with increasingly frequent massive blackouts if we do not do their bidding.