In the year since the largest blackout in American history, utilities have fixed many of the problems that contributed to the breakdown but still have not resolved larger issues that could lead to future outages, according to industry officials, regulators and specialists.
Utilities and operators of the nation's electrical grid said they have done what a post-blackout report suggested to diminish the possibility of a recurrence: cut more trees to prevent them from interfering with lines, upgraded computer systems to give a better view of how electricity is flowing in other regions and provided more training to control-room employees.
The cascading power failure that spread across eight states and into Canada, affecting 50 million people, highlighted that some of the operators running the nation's power grid were not following voluntary rules designed to promote electrical reliability. Jolted by the failures of Aug. 14 -- which disrupted traffic lights, travel and phone service in the Northeast, Midwest and Canada -- utilities and electrical grid operators have been following the rules much more closely, according to the industry and its overseers.
"At least for the short term, we're at a much better state than we were last summer," said Patrick H. Wood III, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees wholesale power.
But Wood and some utility executives remain concerned that operators of the grid could again stray from the rules as memories of the blackout fade -- unless Congress makes the rules mandatory and approves fines for violators. Even though mandatory rules are supported by the industry and its harshest critics, Congress has not enacted the legislation, which is part of a larger, controversial energy bill.
Some industry specialists said that even if everyone were to follow the rules, problems would remain that could lead to more blackouts.
Most fundamentally, they said, power companies have not solved complications associated with deregulation of the industry over the past decade. Before deregulation, electricity was typically generated closer to where it was used. With deregulation, electricity is increasingly being shipped on high-voltage transmission lines from power plants in one part of the country to consumers who live hundreds of miles away.
In addition, there still has not been significant investment in new transmission lines that specialists say are needed to allow electricity to flow freely from one part of the country to another and provide a route for backup electricity that could limit the scope of a blackout.
"The sorts of things that you need to do to make sure that we're not going to have a blackout are not coming into place," said Michael W. Golay, a professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The blackout reports and actions that have been taken have really been, in my view, exercises in damage control to try to deflect criticism. We'll see if I'm right when we see if we have more blackouts, which I'm expecting we will."
Industry executives and outside specialists are divided about why there has not been another major outage in the past year. Utility officials credit the improvements they have made and the increased adherence to the voluntary rules. But academics who study the nation's aging power grid, a 200,000-mile network of high-voltage transmission lines, said the reason may actually be a combination of moderate temperatures and good luck.
