The Blackout In Congress

Published: Aug 16, 2004

Saturday was the first anniversary of the biggest blackout in North American history, an occasion to reflect on how little Congress has done to make sure the electric power industry does not repeat the same sloppy mistakes that triggered a chain of events that eventually left 50 million people in the United States and Canada without power.

For nearly a year, a few lonely souls - chiefly John Dingell in the House and Maria Cantwell and Jeff Bingaman in the Senate - have tried without success to win a vote on measures that would require mandatory operating standards for the nation's utilities and give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the authority to impose penalties on companies that ignore those standards. The standards that now exist are administered by an industry group and are voluntary.

These bills would not address other issues that Congress and whoever occupies the White House will have to deal with in years to come: whether the national grid should be managed differently, how much we ought to invest to make the system more efficient, and even the larger question of whether deregulation has worked the way its architects hoped it would or whether it has simply made companies less accountable.

What the bills would do is make sure that companies trim the trees around their power lines, keep their computers and other machinery in good working order, and maintain good communications with neighboring power systems.

The pork-laden energy bills in Congress include such reliability provisions. But because they seem to be going nowhere, Dingell and Cantwell have offered freestanding measures focusing solely on reliability.

Dingell has now gathered 169 of the 218 signatures he needs to force a floor vote. He deserves help. A good little energy bill should not be held hostage to a big bad one.