How to prevent future blackouts

Deep in upstate New York's piney woods, near Adirondack National Park, stands a drab building that represents the future of electric power transmission - and one of America's best hopes at preventing a repeat of this weekend's massive blackouts.

Inside the two-story switching station, thousands of high-tech silicon valves coolly cajole hundreds of electricity streams into a workable flow that powers the region's homes and businesses. It's a marvel of physics - a traffic cop that keeps the chaotic world of protons and electrons from collapsing into gridlock and fuels a society of Osterizers and plasma TVs.

The trouble is, most electricity switching stations - and the cable networks they control - are more Stone Age than Silicon Valley. Yet now, after the worst blackout in North American history, the complex world of switching stations, power lines, and control grids that Americans have long taken for granted may be about to get an overhaul. As residents from Cleveland to New York hear the thrum of air conditioners and refrigerator compressors again, pressure is building to reengineer the nation's transmission network.

Division exists, however, over how best to do it. Energy companies want less regulation and more power lines. Consumer groups want more regulation - even if it means higher rates. Either way, new technology is needed and, given the outrage after the great blackout of '03, it's probably inevitable.

"There's plenty of technology on the horizon that can make today's overloaded, antiquated grid work more effectively," says David Talbot, a senior editor at MIT's Technology Review magazine. He ticks off a list: smarter controls, giant electrolyte batteries, new software programs that can anticipate problems before they ever happen.

Those technologies are getting a lot of discussion these days. The switching station in upstate New York - near the town of Marcy - is a prime example of one of the most commonly cited solutions: smarter controls.

But fixing the nation's electrical grid will involve more than just spending money on new technology. There are also touchy political issues, as Kurt Yeager, president of the Electric Power Research Institute notes.

Transmission companies, for instance, often get locked in battles with homeowners and conservationists over the construction of new towers and lines. An example is the Cross-Sound Cable, which will bring power from the port of New Haven, Conn., to the site of a shut-down nuclear power plant in Shoreham, Long Island. Connecticut officials, including the attorney general and the city of New Haven, have filed lawsuits to try to prevent the electricity from flowing.

Add in issues from the Army Corps of Engineers and the impact on spawning fish. Now the company is looking at years more until it wins final approval to bring electricity to 330,000 homes. "We got caught up in a twisted regulatory and political process," says Rita Bowlby of Cross-Sound.

Even beyond the not-in-my-backyard syndrome, the lack of any federal "road rules" means few companies want to invest in expensive new technologies. "No one's comfortable with who's going to own assets, and who's going to get a return on investment," says Ernest Moniz, an MIT physics professor who was an undersecretary of Energy under President Clinton. "There's an emerging consensus that some rules of the road are needed, but no consensus on what those would be.... Until that's resolved, it's going to be difficult to get the investment in new technology and new capacity."

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