LONDON, 17 August 2003 — To really appreciate the scale of the North American blackout, it is necessary to imagine what would have happened in UK in the event of a similar incident. Every office, factory and home in England and Wales would have been without electricity. It would have been a power cut to make the one which followed the 1987 hurricane seem tame indeed by comparison.

The US blackout, which now seems to have originated in the Midwest and cascaded eastwards in a series of devastating “power swings” until it hit New York, took out 62,000 megawatts of capacity, or enough to supply 50 million homes. That is not far off the total capacity of the British market.

There is another parallel between what happened over there and what could happen over here. Niagara Mohawk, the network operator at the center of the US blackout, is owned by National Grid Transco, the same company that operates the UK’s national transmission network of high-voltage overhead lines.

There, however, the similarities begin to run out, for the US and UK power transmission systems are quite different. The US is carved up into three large transmission blocks, covering the eastern seaboard, the west coast and Texas, each one of which may be divided up among dozens of individual transmission companies.

In England and Wales, there is one transmission system operator in the shape of National Grid. Soon there will be only one operator for the whole country when Scotland joins the fold.

The disjointed nature of the US grid has been a recipe for neglect and underinvestment, much like the rest of the country’s power infrastructure. It was not for nothing that the former US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson on Friday described the United States as a “superpower with a Third World grid”.

To compare it with the UK’s grid is like contrasting a chevvy with a Rolls-Royce. To take just one comparison: National Grid has twice as many miles of high voltage wire in the US as in the UK and yet investment in the UK system is four times greater. The knee-jerk reaction on Friday was to ask whether the US blackout could happen here. Yet the better question to ask is what the UK can do to help prevent another American blackout on the same scale.

The answer is quite a lot. National Grid Transco chose to plant its flag in the northeastern seaboard of the US because it is the area of the country with the most sympathetic regulatory regime.

The return on capital it is allowed to earn is almost twice that permitted in the UK. And yet even with that, it is a struggle to modernize the US grid in the way necessary. The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has recognized this which is why it had begun to encourage increased investment in the transmission system.

Partly this will help to open up the US electricity market by reducing the constraints on flows of power across the country. Partly it will help strengthen the security and reliability of the system.

National Grid Transco has made no secret of its desire to expand in North America and Thursday night’s power failure may have been just the wake up call the US needs.