The electrical grid was in dire need of a makeover -- one that required unprecedented amounts of money, attention and cooperation. In the past year, it has received plenty of money and attention. Cooperation, at least on some fronts, has been a little more elusive.

"Most of what could have been done in a year has been done -- with one big exception, " said Robert Burns, director of the National Regulatory Research Institute at Ohio State University. "We need mandatory reliability standards and that hasn't happened."

Almost to a person, the electricity industry agrees that mandatory reliability standards -- where violations are severely punished by a ruling authority -- are essential to the well-being of the electrical grid.

Currently, the North American Electric Reliability Council -- a self-policing agency of the utility industry -- sets standards that are strictly voluntary. Even for-profit utilities want all involved to be held accountable.

"The grid is an interconnected system that depends on everyone doing their jobs," said Scott Moore, vice president of transmission for American Electric Power in Columbus. "We want everyone to be held to the same bar we set for ourselves. We need that legislation"

So, what's the problem? "Politics," said Burns of Ohio State. Because mandatory reliability standards are so universally popular, people want to attach their pet projects to such a bill so they would be assured of passage by Congress.

"Everyone wants to hang their ornament on the Christmas tree of reliability standards," said Burns. "Eventually the tree is going to fall over."

Such standards have been part of a comprehensive energy bill expected to pass last fall. It's been stalled for months. Tyson Slocum, research director of the Public Citizen advocacy group, said the issue won't be resolved until mandatory reliability becomes a stand-alone bill.

"We need to rescue the reliability portion of the energy bill, and we need to do it now," he said.

Despite the stalemate on reliability standards, massive changes have been made to the nation's electric grid in the past year.

"I think we've done a very good job at looking at ourselves," said Alan Shriber, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. "We'll never be able to say with 100 percent certainty that such a blackout will never happen again, but we've made great progress."

In February, the reliability council directed Akron's FirstEnergy and the two regional transmission operators -- MISO and PJM -- who oversee the part of the grid involved in last year's blackout -- to make specific improvements in equipment, training, policy and staffing. The changes addressed the direct causes of the blackout, as outlined by the reliability council and the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force.

FirstEnergy, the Midwest ISO (MISO) and PJM have provided a formal certification to the reliability council that all remedial actions were completed, and the council visited to make sure.

The cascading blackout that spread across eight states and parts of Canada on the afternoon of Aug. 14, 2003, got its start in FirstEnergy Corp.'s system, when three power lines overheated and sagged into trees in Northern Ohio.

Because of confusion at FirstEnergy, MISO and PJM, coupled with malfunctioning grid-monitoring and communications systems, the blackout spread before it could be isolated and contained. As a result, 50 million people were left without electricity, and some estimates put losses from the blackout at $6 billion.

The U.S.-Canada investigation concluded that FirstEnergy did not follow voluntary industry standards in critical areas such as cutting down vegetation under power lines, and that others also failed to meet standards. Since then, FirstEnergy has boosted its vegetation management program, invested in new technology and revised its training and staffing.

The MISO invested nearly $15 million last year in additional personnel and new monitoring, alarm and communications systems that allow operators to see what is happening across the whole grid in real time. It reduced the number of control centers it oversees from 32 to 2, centralizing command, and developed a joint operating agreement with the neighboring PJM and three other authorities to address mutual problems.

Poor communication between PJM and MISO aggravated the blackout, investigators said. MISO is in the process of developing joint operating agreements with other transmission authorities.

"It was a wake-up call for us and it was a wake-up call for the industry," said Bill Phillips of MISO. "Our people rose to the challenge and met it."

Just how effective the changes are won't be known until the system is tested under severe conditions, said Shriber of the PUCO. The electrical grid is a lot like a tea bag -- you don't know its strength until it gets into hot water.

"Reliability is a long-term issue," said Shriber. Bryan Lee of FERC said all the measures taken so far won't add up to much without mandatory reliability standards. "The further Aug. 14 recedes into our memories, " said Lee, "the bigger the risk that we go back to the way things were."