Technology Corridor

Has the Aug. 14 blackout finally made it more than a pipe dream?

 

Former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson ticked off a whole lot of people in the industry when he pronounced the United States a superpower with "a Third World electricity grid."

Yet while debate continues about the causes of the Northeast blackout, there's no arguing that the majority of transmission and distribution in this country is controlled via mechanical technology largely developed in the 1950s.

To many outside the electricity industry, using 50 year-old technology to distribute vital electricity sounds ludicrous. After all, the telecommunications industry made the switch from analog to digital networks in the 1990s, creating smart systems that can handle many system malfunctions without human intervention.

In the wake of the Northeast blackout, the idea of a similar, or even better, update of grid technology has gained new currency. And that's something that makes Clark Gellings, vice president of the Electricity Innovation Institute (E2I), pretty happy.

Gellings and his colleagues have been pushing the industry to move toward a smart, self-healing grid for the last couple years (see Figure 1). E2I, along with the Electric Power Research Institute, with which it is affiliated, formed the Consortium for Electric Infrastructure to Support a Digital Society (CEIDS) in May 2001, to provide a strategic framework for upgrading the electricity systems, particularly the transmission and distribution system.