In 1965, a ten-cent fuse in a transformer failed. The resultant system overload sent an ever-greater cascade of failures out along the electricity transmission grid. Within a few minutes, 25 million people in the Eastern United States were without power for over a day. No one believed such a catastrophic collapse of the US power system would ever occur again. Well, it did: In 1977 in New York City and again in 1996 in nine Western states. Now once more millions of people from New York in the east to Ohio in the west and Canada in the north have been robbed of electricity.
The cause of the latest blackout is still undetermined, with the Americans and the Canadians currently blaming each other. But that it is still happening ought to provoke a great deal of thought, not only about the way that a power-hungry economy such as North America manages it power grid, but also about the appetite for more and more power in such economies.
The grid management question is probably the simpler to answer. In advanced economies that have liberalized their power sectors, the cost of electricity to business and household consumers has tumbled. The consequence of this has been that the power companies have had less profit to reinvest in their networks.
Reassessing North America’s apparently insatiable consumption of power is more difficult. Though many Americans may have weaned themselves away from their gas-guzzling cars, the fuel pump price of gasoline remains low and is seen as emblematic of the highly productive US economy. Meanwhile the consumption of electricity continues to rise, as life is supposedly made more bearable by yet more laborsaving devices around the home, and factories dispense with expensive and argumentative workers and replace them with cheaper and infinitely more efficient robots.
The major arteries of US life, be they skyscraper elevators, urban transportation systems or most crucially, computers, run on electricity. Knock out the power and chaos ensues. A lot of Manhattan office blocks immediately switched to back-up generators on Thursday night, and workers returned to their desks. But even the wealthiest companies can only afford to install so much generation capacity to take care of the critical functions of their business. There is a limit to the degree to which Americans can install their own generators and store the fuel to power them.
Maybe the time has come for them rethink their profligate use of power and curb consumption by abandoning some of their more wasteful habits, such as running air conditioning in empty nighttime skyscrapers. Alternatively, unless they are prepared to pay a whole lot more for their electricity and allow the power companies to make serious new investment in a rickety network, this latest outage is not going to be the last.
