Electricity Blackout

Bush had made comprehensive energy legislation a key priority at the beginning of his administration. But attempts to pass a package of energy measures -- including tax incentives for oil and gas drilling, support for nuclear power and provisions for the electricity grid -- have been stymied by partisan divisions in Congress. emphasis by timber

Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster: recall the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of "pirates" --and now he'll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.

So where's the President? Just before he landed on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, the White House was so concerned about our brave troops facing the foe that they used the cover of war for a new push in Congress for yet more electricity deregulation. This has a certain logic: there's no sense defeating Iraq if a hostile regime remains in California.

Sitting in the dark, as my laptop battery runs low, I don't know if the truth about deregulation will ever see the light --until we change the dim bulb in the White House.

The Ohio power company failed to separate from the national electric grid, as it was supposed to (and as Michigan did). Thus the cascade of problems was sent on to New York.

"The system is designed to isolate itself to protect that area, to have the area go down and have the rest of the system survive. And instead it spread further and longer than it should have," said Michehl R. Gent, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Council.

A spokesman for the Ohio power company, FirstEnergy Corp., said it had followed all proper procedures but would not comment specifically on whether it had triggered the huge blackout by failing to separate.

"If they had separated you might have seen a region in Ohio area that would have been without power, but you would not have seen it in almost a national scale, as we did," Divan [Deepak Divan, CEO of Softswitching Technologies] said.

When Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush visited Akron (on Aug. 20, 1999) his campaign coffers swelled with the proceeds from a well-publicized $1,000-a-plate luncheon attended by more than 300 prominent GOP supporters.

But three weeks earlier, the same hotel hosted a private gathering of corporate executives also interested in financing the Texas governor's White House bid.

The earlier event at the Hilton Akron/Fairlawn wasn't billed as a fund-raiser. All the same, it poured tens of thousands into the Bush campaign -- vividly demonstrating how a major corporation can flex its political muscle despite laws aimed at curbing the power of big business to affect elections.

The occasion was the annual two-day conference of high-level managers of FirstEnergy Corp., the Akron-based utility giant that provides electricity for homes and businesses across northern Ohio and into western Pennsylvania.

Amid the usual business of business, about 170 executives, directors, supervisors, managers and spouses heard a hard sales pitch for donations for Bush.

There was nothing illegal about that. While corporations are barred by law from donating a dime to a presidential candidate, nothing stops them from asking their employees to give.

And give they did.

In the following days, 111 employees and spouses of FirstEnergy and corporate subsidiaries came through to the tune of $69,600 -- nearly 7 percent of all contributions made by Ohioans to Bush in the critical first six months of his campaign.

U.S. Judge Edmund Sargus in Columbus, Ohio ruled in favor of a lawsuit filed by the Clinton administration that accused FirstEnergy's Ohio Edison Co. of violating the Clean Air Act by classifying the projects as maintenance instead of new construction.

Sargus said he would hold a trial in March to determine the civil penalties that FirstEnergy must pay.

U.S. utilities have been fighting the Environmental Protection Agency for years over what constitutes routine maintenance to power plants built before 1970. Congress assumed that most of the aging plants would be gradually replaced with new ones and exempted pre-1970 plants from stricter pollution controls, unless they launch a major renovation or expansion.

The Bush administration has been criticized by green groups for failing to aggressively prosecute pollution violations by utilities under the so-called "new source review" law.

It was five years ago that a federal task force of prominent experts warned the Department of Energy that the reliability of the electrical system was based on a mishmash of voluntary standards, and that Washington needed to impose mandatory rules on the electric industry.

"Failure to act," the task force wrote, "will leave substantial parts of North America at unacceptable risk." Its report was written at the Energy Department's request by prominent engineers and policy makers.

As recently as last month, however, the Energy Department was saying exactly the same thing. While electricity demand has shot up by 25 percent since 1990, construction of transmission systems has declined by 30 percent, the department said.

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Standards for a more reliable system were not opposed by the industry, and were included in an energy bill that came before Congress in 2001. The bill never passed because of disputes over matters like drilling in the Alaskan wilderness and efficiency standards for cars. Such disputes are holding up a similar bill that is pending in Congress.