Power Outages Hit U.S. Grid; Utility Deregulation to Blame ...New York City - 'Sidewalk'Shocks, ...shocking.

Now that it's cooled down a bit, the reality of the situation is for all to see.

"New York state regulators reported that parts of the system are 30 to 60 years old. A New York City official task force on electric power, reported in 2005 the phenomenon of "sidewalk shocks" to people and animals walking on sidewalks above decayed cable networks. Repairs and upgrades in distribution capacity to the Con Ed network have been minimal, as deregulation set its priorities on profits first."


This article appears in the August 4, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Power Outages Hit U.S. Grid;
Utility Deregulation to Blame
by Mary Jane Freeman

[link to www.larouchepub.com]

More than 3 million Americans found themselves without electricity from July 16 to 29, some for hours, others for ten days. It was not only the intense heat wave across much of the nation that brought this harm and economic loss, but also the impact of deadly deregulation. Under deregulation, "power pirates"—made up of formerly regulated utilities—have been looting the electrical infrastructure system, especially the distribution grid. The result is that more than 100 people died in the July heat wave, and there were billions of dollars of spoilage and interrupted business activity.

Enron may be defunct, but its legacy lives on. Over the past five years, a pattern of "destructuring" of electricity companies has occurred. Utilities that under traditional regulation had operated coherent generating and distribution capacity to serve their regions, were split up, and in the course of this fracturing, infrastructure and workforce were drastically cut. Among the major players are AES, Duke/Cinergy, Exelon, and MidAmerican. This is the inevitable result of the process of deregulation begun in 1996, when California and Pennsylvania passed the first state energy deregulation laws. In the next ten years, utilities scrambled to privatize and gain control of electricity service in targetted locations—to loot the big markets.

Then in 2005, the treasonous action of Congress and the Bush Administration opened the flood-gates for still bigger mega-mergers of utilities: They repealed the 1935 Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA), just as Vice President Cheney's energy task force had demanded.

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