Unreliability Continues To Haunt the Grid Programs are addressing reliability improvement but rebuilding infrastructure is still the key
As the first anniversary of the 2003 Northeast blackout approaches, projects and programs to improve reliability are under way. But experts warn that the 46 recommendations of a joint U.S.-Canadian task force designed to improve system reliability fail to address what one source calls the basic problemof serious underinvestment in the grid.
Make reliability standards mandatory and enforceable, with penalties for noncompliance, reads the first recommendation of the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, released in April (ENR 4/12 p. 12). But the provision to do that is embedded in President Bushs comprehensive energy policy legislation, passed by the House but frozen in the Senate. And without mandatory reliability standards, utilities have little incentive to toe the line, says Aneesh Prabhu, an electric utility analyst at Standard & Poors.