Frontlines

Scare Tactics

The Wall Street Journal is goading Congress to act. And it might just work, if the warnings come to pass.

On May 8 ISO New England predicted it would have enough electricity to meet peak demand this summer. But how much demand are you gonna see at $6,000 per megawatt-hour, which was the ISO's prevailing price that day from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m?

That's $6 per kilowatt-hour - or about 50 times as high as the total packaged rate that you would expect to pay to your neighborhood monopoly utility. And delivery is extra.

Three days later, the Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Smith fanned the flames with her "Gloom and Doom" piece about Oracle building its own power plant "bunker" as insurance against outages. With quotes from Energy Secretary Bill Richardson predicting summer brownouts on the nation's "third-world grid," a thinking person might guess that the administration had engaged the Journal in the battle to sway Congress to pass comprehensive legislation this year on electricity restructuring.

But that's what it will take to get Congress to act - a good scare. Or better yet, a panic. The current system for maintaining electric reliability was born of the great Northeast Blackout of 1966. We probably need another cataclysm of like proportions to put the electric reliability wars into proper focus.