Saturday, August 14, 2004 Posted: 12:23 PM EDT (1623 GMT)
WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) -- Congress must pass legislation to protect the nation's electricity grid if it wants to avoid repeats of the devastating outages that rolled across eight states last year, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, said Saturday.
"America is not a third-world country that can't guarantee power to its citizens. We are not a country without resources, technology or ingenuity," Cantwell said in the weekly Democratic radio address.
"But we are a country without mandatory rules for performance and coordination of our electricity grid, because Washington Republicans and their special interests refuse to do what's right for the country by passing new electricity rules that hold violators accountable."
The blackouts one year ago left 50 million Americans without power and cost billions of dollars. In response, the Joint U.S. Canada Power System Usage Task Force called for new mandatory rules with penalties to protect the integrity of the grid.
The task force largely blamed Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. for allowing a local power failure that started with line outages near Cleveland to spread in less than a minute to the East Coast and into Canada.
Cantwell introduced legislation that aims to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authority to devise a system of standards for the reliable operation of the energy grid. Her measure is part of the energy bill stalled in the Senate; she has been unable to persuade majority Republicans to agree to consider it separately.
Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan, introduced a similar measure in the House, but he has been unable to have the bill heard on the floor of the GOP-run House.