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By Milt Caplan, President, MZConsulting Inc.

"On August 14, 2003, large portions of the Midwest and Northeast United States and Ontario, Canada, experienced an electric power blackout. The outage affected an area with an estimated 50 million people and 61,800 megawatts (MW) of electric load in the states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and the Canadian province of Ontario. The blackout began a few minutes after 4:00 p.m. eastern daylight time (16:00 EDT) and power was not restored for four days in some parts of the United States. Parts of Ontario suffered rolling blackouts for more than a week before full power was restored."

Modern society has come to depend on reliable electricity as an essential resource for national security; health and welfare; communications; finance; transportation; food and water supply; heating, cooling and lighting; computers and electronics; commercial enterprise; and even entertainment and leisure—in short, nearly all aspects of modern life. Customers generally know little about the system that provides them with their electricity, but they do expect that electricity will be available when needed at the flip of a switch. While most customers have experienced local outages from time to time caused by an accident or severe weather, what is not expected is the occurrence of a massive outage on a calm, warm summer day. Widespread electrical outages, such as the one that occurred on August 14, 2003, are rare, but they can happen if multiple reliability safeguards break down.

The North American transmission system is a complex network that has evolved over the past century to meet the ever-growing power-hungry needs of society. The system was developed on a regional basis and expanded on a piecemeal basis, not planned in an integrated fashion across the continent. The last 20 or 30 years have seen chronic under investment in new transmission, far below investment in generation. The result is an aging infrastructure that is falling apart at the seams. With current environmental requirements and electricity deregulation changing the rules of the game, the system is being challenged as never before. And with projections of continuing growth and rapidly changing technology, huge investments are required to improve the reliability of the system today and to meet the needs of the future. Unfortunately, it can take an extreme event such as the 2003 blackout to bring this issue to the forefront and drive needed action.

In response to a request from ClickSoftware, this white paper will examine the issues faced by the electricity transmission and distribution system, including those related to the workforce, as it struggles to move forward and keep the lights on for the people of the United States and Canada.