Gail,

The vulnerabilities you refer to are real, and not just in the United States. However, they don't just apply to the electricity industry. There is a pattern here that can be applied to other utilities. The state of many secondary roads and bridges is also questionable. Then there's the condition of the sewers which have been allowed to decay and been patched-up for years. Water supply is another area which has been starved of adequate funding, the ammount of drinking water lost through leaks in the system is astronomic. Look at most public transport. I could go on, but the point is the recurring pattern one sees over and over again.

What's happened is that, basically, these areas have been starved of the necessary investment and funds, and the resources transferred to the pockets of shareholders or in order to reduce taxes. Over the last thirty years we've chosen to prioritize individual consumption of consumer goods, which we decided to call "feedom", while at the same time the infrastructure of society was slowly allowed to decay, ironically, storing up massive "expenditure bombs" for the future, when we may not have the money to restore the system.

It's like spending one's money on a party, instead of on a pension fund, but on a national scale!

I agree. It is funny (maybe a better word is tragic) how one finds exactly the same problems, as one looks around from area to area.

Even our problem of not adding new skilled workers is in some ways similar. We have found it possible to just cover what needs to be done with our existing older workforce, without investing in new workers. Our younger folks are expected to work at McDonald's and become physicians/lawyers/script writers and all manners of service providers. Young folks going into engineering have found jobs lacking for quite a few years, and we are starting to figure out why.

Gail,

Excellent work this is exactly what I have been looking for.

I am currently working on a similar issue for UK electricity. I should be ready to publish in a few weeks.

The mix of primary energy and vulnerabilities are some what different in the UK but infrastructure issues are very similar. It would be an understatement to say 7-8 years out electricity generation is looking challenging in the UK.

Bob

A similar problem exists with a lot of colleges and universities. College presidents aren't interested in allocating resources to unglamorous behind-the-scenes stuff like roofs, plumbing, wiring, HVAC, structural repairs, etc. Instead, they want to build impressive-looking new buildings, add innovative new programs that will be written about in the press, and give scholarships to athletes that will help their teams achieve a winning season. These are the glitzy, showy things that will impress the alumni, and donors, and boards of trustees. Meanwhile, the deferred maintenance accumulates, and the campus slowly crumbles. By the time the maintenance can be deferred no longer and the bills become due, the college presidents that should have attended to it are long since retired -- probably with their name attached to a building or an endowed chair or a statue on the central green.

Well put. Some 17 years ago I collaborated on an article for Information Week magazine called BLACKOUT. All utilities are required to post with their state public utility commission an annual statement of their normal capacity, and peak capacity, as well as their projections for the next five years. Collecting this is 1990 was a chore because of no internet access, today it faily easy. What you quickly find is that nearly every utility is in negative territory(not enough power)at peak usage and has to buy it off some other utility that isn't experiencing a similar crunch. Our forecasts in the article pretty much bore out in real life some five to seven years down the road. The other problem was created by the wonderful problem solving group, Congress in the early 1990s, with an Energy Act that was going to give us all kinds of benefits. Basically it focuses on the three pieces of a utility, generation, transmission, and distribution. Congress thought there was not enough competition, so they decided in all their wisdom, to allow a utility to only own 2 of the 3 pieces. Most utilities quickly shed their transmission capabilities by selling it to a 3rd party. As you can well imagine, transmission isn't a great revenue generator, so the transmission portion seems to be a single point of failure in this whole scenario. But wait, we have a savior that steped up, ENRON. Within two years California was on its knees with rolling brownouts and blackouts. I am reminded of the old saying by Will Rogers on the radio back in the 30's when he closed out his broadcast by saying to his audience, "You should be able to sleep well tonight ladies and gentlemen, Congress is not in session"

Reduced to a bumper sticker, the new industry mantra is:

Privatize the profits,
Socialize the costs.

In the wake of the Enron collapse, very little attention has been paid to the regulatory distortions put in place by Enron and other utility industry lobbyists.

Thanks for doing this summary, Gail.