...Aside from the transit nightmare, the Florida blackout also revived the awful memory of August, 2003, when an even larger grid failure in the Northeast left 15 million people in the dark. Improvements to America's electrical reliability system have been put in place the past five years; but Tuesday was a reminder that the country's power infrastructure is still more vulnerable than many feel it ought to be. According to research by three scholars at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the average U.S. electrical utility customer experiences 214 minutes of power outage each year — compared to 70 in Great Britain and just six in Japan. "The U.S.," says their article, "ranks toward the bottom among developed nations in terms of reliability of its electricity service."


Florida Power & Light (FPL), the giant South Florida utility that runs Turkey Point and the Miami substation where the blackout started, has yet to discover why the breaker that should have isolated the fire problem failed. "These systems are all designed to handle two contingencies," FPL President Armando Olivera told the Miami Herald. "We still don't have a full understanding of what happened." Says former Florida Public Service Commission Chairman Joe Garcia, a Democratic congressional candidate, "Obviously, they've got some explaining to do. There should have been units [compensating] in other parts of the state to make sure this doesn't happen."

But Larry Makovich, vice president and senior policy adviser at the Cambridge Energy Research Association in Cambridge, Mass., says the initial confusion isn't so unusual. "You have to think of the U.S. electrical grid system as one of the world's most complex machines," he says. "A good analogy is the U.S. air traffic control system — like airplanes, the wires and posts themselves are only part of the story. The monitoring and control aspect needs just as much investment."

Both America's electrical hardware and software components, Makovich concedes, are still dealing with "a legacy of underinvestment." In the decade before the 2003 blackout, for example, annual electrical transmission investment in the U.S. grew only about 20%. Between 2005 and 2010 it's expected to jump by some 65%, to about $15 billion — a level many U.S. infrastructure critics feel the country should have been at by the beginning of the this century, not a decade into it.