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Page added on July 19, 2012
Corruption and Mismanagement See Much of the US without Power
Amidst record-high temperatures and a very anti-climactic 4th of July, power outages have left millions without air-conditioning and even water in rural areas where households rely on electric pumps. At least 52 people have died from heat and three million people are still without power.
No it’s not Yemen, where power outages in the capital Sana’a have sparked a new round of protests. It’s the United States of America, where corruption converges with a moribund electricity distribution system to produce increasingly frequent blackouts across the Midwest and East Coast.
A thunderstorm that struck the East Coast early last week left millions without electricity and power companies took days to restore power to about half of their customers. Four days after the storm, power was restored to 67% in the Northern Virginia suburbs and 61% in Baltimore, but Montgomery County, Maryland and parts of Washington, D.C. only managed to restore 43%, leaving over a million without electricity as temperatures soared above 100 degrees.
In the Midwest, there was less chance of blaming storms. In Michigan, for instance, an increasingly woebegone state, power outages are frequent. In counties near the capital, Lansing, hundreds of homes were without power for the 4th of July. Power was restored that evening, but lost again the following day. And this has been going on for some time.
Everyone would like to know why. The answer is simple, and three-fold: An outdated electricity distribution system, corruption and mismanagement.
Americans are now being told that keeping utility bills down means keeping maintenance of the country’s dismal electricity distribution system to a bare minimum. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the entire system could collapse by 2020 without an immediate investment of $673 billion. Furthermore, experts say that brownouts and blackouts will end up costing more in the end than re-hauling the entire system.
The system cannot handle increasing demand, especially when the entire country is turning on the AC. Last week’s brownouts and blackouts will become status quo.
In fact, as NPR quipped, “the basic principles of power delivery haven’t changed much since Thomas Edison flipped on the first commercial power grid in lower Manhattan on Sept. 4, 1882.”
According to the ASCE’s engineers, more than 60% of the country’s electricity transmission lines and power transformers are at least 25 years old, while 60% of the circuit breakers are more than three decades old.
This is to prepare Americans for higher utility bills in the future. But it also ignores the corruption and mismanagement that has allowed privately owned power companies to profit from bare-minimum maintenance and deregulation. There is no investment in infrastructure, no guarantees of service, and continually worsening standards of safety and maintenance.
It is an outmoded system of distribution compared to Europe’s for instance, where power lines are buried underground. While this makes them more difficult to reach and harder to fix, they are also much less at the mercy of Mother Nature.
With that in mind, all eyes are on the Potomac Electric Power Company (Pepco), the utility company that provides power to Montgomery County, Maryland and parts of Washington, D.C. and which was rated last year by Business Insider as “the most hated company in America”. Certainly, these past days and weeks have done nothing to help that rating.
According to OurDC, from 2008 to 2010, Pepco’s profit earnings were $882 million, yet they paid no federal or state income taxes and instead received $817 million in tax refunds. At the same time, local authorities allowed Pepco to cut back on maintenance to save money.
There was an attempt last year to take Pepco to task, but the result was a very public slap on the wrist. An investigating commission found that Pepco was not conducting inspections of its sub-transmission and distribution lines even after storms. It also found that the company was about four years behind on the tree-trimming necessary to ensure that the local greenery is not interfering with power lines. Pepco was made to promise a 3% increase in reliability year-on-year (beginning only next year), and it was fined a one-time fee of $1 million for failing to fix problems that led to frequent outages.
Of course, no major changes were enforced and Pepco paid lip service to the situation by submitting a five-year plan for improvements that would cost around $300 million and be passed directly on to the consumer.
Burying power lines would cost between $5 and $15 million per mile. Pepco likes to point out that this would mean an increase in consumer power bills by about $107 per month. The consumer would no doubt like to point out that the power companies’ greed and mismanagement, for which the consumer has long been footing the bill, should be rolled in to cover a large chunk of this cost.
As always, disunited, the consumer doesn’t have a chance. The consumer will pay for power company greed and neglect unless there is some form Arab-Spring (American Summer) manifestation.
8 Comments on "Corruption and Mismanagement See Much of the US without Power"
DC on Thu, 19th Jul 2012 7:29 am
There is more to come. As erratic and severe weath keeps pounding the US, the ever larger storms, will mean ever larger power interruptions. The system, such as it is, will keep getting patched up from the last beating, but little or no actual improvements will ever be undertaken. Eventually, even the patching will come to a stop. Entire areas will left to there own devices, and with decades of oil and coal company hinderance of solar and wind, tarrifs and bogus restrictions, few if any will have any means to run there electric toys.
BillT on Thu, 19th Jul 2012 8:31 am
‘For Profit’ services will only go up in cost. Those past profits have come at the cost of maintenance/replacement not performed. Future profits will come from the consumers themselves in a catch 22 situation. As electric costs go up, use will go down, and so will profits.
Here in the Philippines, I can install a solar PV system to replace the utility company service for less than $10k or about 8 years’ electric bills. Yes, you cannot run the A/C at ridiculous cold temperatures 24/7 ,but you can use it enough to take the sweat out of the rooms you sleep in. You can power necessary items like lights, fans, water pump,refrigerator and a few hours of PC or TV.
BTW: Electric here in Makati costs about $ 0.30 per KWh.
Arthur on Thu, 19th Jul 2012 9:39 am
“You can power necessary items like lights, fans, water pump,refrigerator and a few hours of PC or TV.”
Bill and I seem to converge on the opinion that with solar and wind and the rest of it, it will be possible to save at least most of domestic electricity consumption over the coming energy troubles.
The car will be gone, but not the PC/TV/lights.
Currently solar cells are subjected to the same price development as the personal computer and mobile phones were. In many areas, certainly sunny ones like Philipines or Spain, it already is economical feasible to phase out the utilities and produce electricity yourself. The tipping point will be reached when real industrial giants like Samsung will start mass producing solar panels.
http://deepresource.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/samsung-entering-thin-film-pv-market/
Arthur on Thu, 19th Jul 2012 9:43 am
– Opel Astra (average European car) = 75 kw
– Average domestic electric energy consumption (fridge, tv, pc, lights) = < 1kw
DC on Thu, 19th Jul 2012 10:22 am
For-profit for critical services like power, water, even law-enforcement etc is a disaster in the making.
There are Zero Solar panels or even small micro-turbines in use where I live.100% voluntary which means virtually none exist. No mandates, no rebates or govt programs to encourage or force anyone to use clean energy. And im sure if the condo building here(never happen anyhow) tried to install them, it would be debated for years before anything actually happened, and or wed learn govt regs or bylaws forbid installing them for some Byzantine reason.
DMyers on Thu, 19th Jul 2012 11:50 am
To add a gloomier note, I make reference to the late Richard C. Duncan’s so-called “Olduvai theory” of industrial civilization, http://www.dieoff.org/page224.htm (if that link doesn’t work go to the old index link at dieoff.org and scroll to Duncan). Duncan was an expert in electrical systems and noted the lack of investment in and maintenance of those systems going forward, which would lead to their failure.
Duncan predicted a series of brown and blackouts beginning in 2012, which would escalate into a failure of the grid, never to recover. Duncan was accurate in some of his predictions, including the peak of world oil production in 2006. His works were dated in the mid to late 1990’s.
BillT on Thu, 19th Jul 2012 12:28 pm
DM, some argue that total collapse cannot happen. That we will just slowly revert to having less and less until we hit a level we can sustain. The collapse signal will be brownouts becoming more and more frequents and lasting longer and longer. Then the same will happen with blackouts until, as you said, the electric will not ever come back on. How long will that take? Maybe a summer or two; or a day or two? Think about what that would mean in YOUR life.
BillT on Thu, 19th Jul 2012 12:32 pm
DM, some argue that total collapse cannot happen. That we will just slowly revert to having less and less until we hit a level we can sustain.
The system collapse signal will be brownouts becoming more and more frequents and lasting longer and longer. Then the same will happen with blackouts until, as you said, the electric will not ever come back on. How long will that take? Maybe a summer or two; or a day or two? Think about what that would mean in YOUR life.
There are thousands of huge transformers that regulate the electric grid. Most are ancient. All are very expensive and not ‘off the shelf’ items. We get them from foreign countries. They are not made here and it takes years to get one made to order. Anything that blows a few hundred of these will take the grid down forever.