April 1, 2000
Dividing the Eastern and Western grids into smaller, more manageable chunks would help marketers do business.
At a recent EPRI seminar on reliability, everyone, from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to the North American Electric Reliability Council, agreed that reliability under "deregulation" is a problem - a big problem, in fact.
The evidence in the form of many blackouts and power failures during the past several years is inescapable; even those who originally dismissed the reliability problem now acknowledge it. The seminar's formal conclusions summed up the consensus quite well: "North America is closer to the edge, in term of the frequency and duration of severe power outages, than at any time in the last 35 years." Interestingly, the U.S. Department of Energy recently echoed the same sentiment. Those few of us who have been swimming upstream warning of this for the last four years or more may be permitted a brief moment of satisfaction.
Perspective
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