Speaking to members of the Senate Consumer Affairs and Professional Licensure Committee, Nora Mead Brownell said the reliability rules must be drawn up not by the electric industry, but "by the people who manage the system every day" at the regional transmission monitors like the PJM Interconnection in Valley Forge.

"Today, this is a voluntary program of rules overseen by the industry," said Brownell, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. "We need clear and crisp rules not designed by industry, and [they should be] overseen by an agency independent of the industry it regulates. And there needs to be an independent audit."

Brownell, a former banker who served on the state Public Utility Commission from 1997 to 2001, used the banking industry as a comparison. She said all banks must follow the same rules, they are constantly monitored, and the penalties for noncompliance are well known.

The committee especially wanted to hear her views on the recently released findings of the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force. The report laid blame for the Aug. 14 outage at the feet of Ohio- based FirstEnergy Corp., which owns Metropolitan Edison Co. and Pennsylvania Electric Co. in the midstate.

FirstEnergy is disputing some of the findings, but the electric industry and regulators have long concluded that the company's actions and inaction were to blame for the blackout, which caused an estimated $5 billion to $10 billion in damages.

What Brownell found galling is that the immediate cause of the huge outage -- a falling tree in Ohio -- also was the cause of several previous major blackouts.

"It's astonishing that the bottom-line cause of every major blackout of the past half-century has come down to something as simple as contact with a tree," she said in her statement. "Had adequate standards for maintaining transmission rights of way and vegetation management been in place and adhered to, we would not be here today."

She said all electric utilities need to step up tree trimming along transmission lines.

In comments after the session, Brownell said she wasn't advocating wholesale tree cutting by utilities along the wires that carry electricity directly to homes, but rather a professional, scheduled approach to tree trimming along transmission lines, which don't tend to be in neighborhoods.

Tree trimming by utilities occasionally meets public resistance. FERC's euphemism of choice is "vegetation management."

Brownell said not just blackouts, but even "blips" in electricity transmission can cause major damage to computer-dependent companies. She said companies with digital systems can be shut down for as long as two to three days by fluctuations in electric current caused by transmission congestion.