Despite recommendations from investigators and support from the utility industry, the government has yet to regulate the reliability of the nation's linked system of electrical power plants and transmission lines, known as the grid.

After a government committee investigated the blackout of Aug. 14, 2003, its major recommendation for preventing future power failures was direct:

"Make reliability standards mandatory and enforceable, with penalties for noncompliance."

That hasn't happened, said Alison Silverstein, who was until recently the senior policy adviser to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

"The weakest link in the chain really does have the potential to take down the grid," Silverstein said.

There are plenty of links. The grid is owned by several thousand utilities that are advised by 10 regional reliability councils. Fifty state boards set local regulations.

And contrary to what its name would imply, the commission has little regulatory authority over electricity generation or transmission.

Adherence to national standards and practices is largely voluntary. There is no one at the federal level, for example, who can order a utility to improve its reliability when it threatens to black out much of the country, as happened a year ago.

Some areas of potential regulation are starkly simple, like requiring utilities to trim vegetation growing in power line rights- of-way. It costs utilities huge sums to keep transmission lines clear of trees, and sometimes they neglect the chore.

"Almost every single outage of the last 30 years has been caused by the same thing -- trees," said Leon Lowery, a utilities expert serving the Senate Energy Committee.

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August 14, 2003, was no exception.

The blackout began in northeastern Ohio at 3:05 p.m., on a warm, unexceptional day.

A sagging 345,000-volt power line touched a tree that the local utility, FirstEnergy, had neglected to trim. A moment after the flash and explosion, safety equipment automatically broke the circuit and shut down the line.

What should have been a small problem inexorably began to grow.

Over the next hour, several other FirstEnergy power lines failed after grounding on overgrown trees, increasing pressure on the transmission lines that remained in service.

Voltage began dropping over a wide area as demand for electricity exceeded supply. Cleveland and Akron, Ohio, went dark, then much of Michigan. Nuclear and coal-fired generation plants around Lake Erie started shutting down to avoid damage.

In a little more than an hour, the grid's instability had spread as far east as New York, as far north as Toronto.

By 4:13 p.m. the power failure had cascaded across most of the Northeastern United States. Fifty million people were without electricity in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and southern Canada. Some wouldn't see service fully restored for several days.

A joint investigation by U.S. and Canadian energy authorities found that FirstEnergy had not trimmed trees near its transmission lines, setting the stage for them to fail.

Then FirstEnergy operators couldn't manage the problems that arose Aug. 14 because they did not know they were taking place, investigators said.

The utility's 8-year-old computer system for tracking malfunctions was out of service. Worse, its alarms failed too, so FirstEnergy managers didn't know the system was out.

Investigators said that when FirstEnergy did learn it was in trouble, it did not adequately communicate with other utilities so they could protect themselves. Because of the interlinked nature of the grid, power failure can be contagious.

Investigators said FirstEnergy could have prevented the cascade from getting out of hand by briefly turning off power to Cleveland. That would have freed electrical capacity to stabilize the utility's part of the grid. FirstEnergy's operators never did that, and Cleveland was among the cities to suffer a protracted outage.

FirstEnergy defends its actions on Aug. 14.

"The first reaction should not be to shut down the city of Cleveland," said Ralph DiNicola, a spokesman for FirstEnergy.

He said FirstEnergy has since increased its tree-trimming, replaced its computer system and taken other steps to improve reliability.

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While the local utility responsible for the blackout, FirstEnergy, was under intense pressure to improve reliability, no one at the national level could require it.

The North American Electric Reliability Council, a nongovernmental organization, has for years pushed for legislation giving it authority to enforce reliability standards.

The council, known as NERC, is a voluntary advisory body composed of utilities that financially support it. It can suggest a utility improve its computer systems or install reliability monitoring equipment, but it cannot order it done.

People in the industry say the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should oversee the council, which should be empowered to set mandatory reliability standards and investigate violations. This would be similar to the relationship of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Stock Exchange.

But legislation to give the council national authority over the grid and its operators is stalled in Congress. The session is shortened so lawmakers can campaign for re-election, and it is unlikely the bill will come to a vote this year.

"It's everybody's second priority," said David Cook, NERC's general counsel

Cook said that a blackout on the dimensions of Aug. 14 could recur because utilities are free to be as careful or as careless as they like.

"It's what can happen when people don't follow the rules," Cook said. "Getting people to follow the rules is the reason we have been pushing the reliability legislation."

The idea of regulating utilities on a national basis first surfaced in 1965, when a huge power failure blacked out much of the East Coast.

The electrical utility industry successfully opposed federal regulation.

But now the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group that represents investor-owned utilities, thinks oversight is needed.

"We very strongly support it," said spokesman Jim Owen. "I think everyone agrees right now that we need mandatory (reliability) standards that will have teeth."

Those in the utility industry may have come to accept the idea of national regulation because they have little choice.

Decades ago, utilities were largely independent and rarely provided power to other utilities except in emergencies.

But since the early 1990s, utilities have increasingly bought and sold electricity from one another. Meanwhile, independent companies began generating power for the wholesale market. Those developments have forced utilities to become more dependent on each other.

The New York City area, for example, is an importer of electricity generated elsewhere. Meanwhile, Ohio utilities frequently sell power to southern Canada.

"The chief executive officers realize how dependent they are on the other parties," said David Meyer, a senior adviser in the U.S. Department of Energy. "They very much want a strong organization that has the mission to set standards and monitor performance."

------(c) 2004, Chicago Tribune.Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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