For the week of August 27 - September 2, 2003

An absurd claim

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Well before professionals had pinpointed possible causes of the Northeast blackout, Idaho’s Sen. Larry Craig flatly stated the cause as unequivocal fact for a Twin Falls Republican gathering.

Environmentalists.

Even for the demagogic Sen. Craig, who often favors dogma over fact, this is absurd.

The probable villain, according to the authoritative Cambridge Energy Research Associates as well as utility executives in the blackout area, was an overheated transmission line sagging into a tree near Cleveland. That touched off a local shutdown, which starved other utilities on the grid that then drained power from other utilities, triggering shutdowns like a tidal wave.

A more accurate target for Craig’s venom should be deregulation of utilities.

As regulated monopolies, utilities were required to meet public need with constant upgrading of generating and transmission facilities in return for fair returns on investments.

But unregulated companies, hungry for bigger profits, rushed to invest in generating plants, not less-profitable transmission grids. One estimate by Britain’s National Grid Transco is that the U.S. grid needs upwards of $100 billion in improvements, but has received only $800 million.

Consider Mississippi: It’ll have 30,000 megawatts of excess capacity this year, but insufficient transmission lines because no one was required to build new ones.

In falsely demonizing environmentalists, Sen. Craig forgets California’s 2001 blackouts were caused by gluttonous, unregulated energy traders—not lack of Arctic oil, as Vice President Dick Cheney contemptuously claimed in Craig style—who created shortages to spike profits.

A major player in that debacle was Enron, whose CEO, "Kenny Boy" Lay, had been President Bush’s longtime campaign banker.

So much for who calls the shots in today’s unregulated power industry, not who Sen. Craig would like to blame.

 

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