Contact:
Chris McManes IEEE-USA’s Call
for Reliability Legislation WASHINGTON (15 August 2003) — The latest major power blackout, affecting 50 million people in the northeastern United States and parts of the Midwest and Canada, underscores the urgent need for Congress to enact stronger electricity reliability standards for utilities. “If left uncorrected, the decline in the quality and reliability of electric power will continue to imperil the lives of our citizens and seriously impact the nation’s economy,” IEEE-USA President Jim Leonard said. “Reliability of the electric grid needs to be the first and foremost consideration in any national energy policy. To restore reliability to its proper place at center stage in the market, Congress must pass legislation creating an organization empowered to develop mandatory and enforceable reliability standards.” IEEE-USA supports legislation empowering the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to create a self-regulating reliability organization, the Electric Reliability Organization (ERO). The ERO will give the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) the necessary legislative authority to assure the reliability of the complete North American electric system, including elements in Canada and Mexico. NERC is a successful, voluntary, industry-created organization whose mission is to ensure that the bulk electric system in North America is reliable, adequate and secure. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed legislation that will help accomplish this as part of their respective comprehensive energy policy packages. IEEE-USA strongly urges both houses to act quickly to resolve remaining differences between the two bills and pass an energy bill with strong reliability provisions intact. For more information on electricity reliability and communications from the IEEE-USA Energy Policy Committee, go to http://www.ieeeusa.org/forum/blackout.asp. Electric power reliability problems have led to more blackouts in recent years than historically experienced in North America. Customers in 14 western states underwent scattered outages twice in the summer of 1996. Major outages occurred during the summer of 1999 in different regions of North America, including Chicago and New York. More recently, California experienced rotating blackouts, price spikes and near bankruptcy of several utilities starting in mid-2000 and continuing into 2001. For more background on major power disruptions, see http://www.nerc.com/BlackoutTable.pdf. IEEE-USA is an organizational unit of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., created in 1973 to advance the public good, while promoting the careers and public-policy interests of the more than 235,000 electrical, electronics, computer and software engineers who are U.S. members of the IEEE. The IEEE is the world's largest technical professional society. For more information, go to http://www.ieeeusa.org.
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