The largest blackout in North America occurred Aug. 14, 2003, affecting 50 million people in eight states and one Canadian province. That massive power failure caused as much as $10 billion in economic losses. In response, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The law gave the federal government authority to overrule any states that withheld approval for new power lines for more than a year, and required it to identify energy transmission routes to prevent major outages in the future.
But now that the U.S. Department of Energy has actually proposed two National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors, Congress wants to take it all back. Key power transmission lines serving Northern Virginia, the District of Columbia and eastern Maryland are already severely congested, the DOE says. Without new east-west capacity, “reliability violations will occur in the Baltimore-Washington-Northern Virginia area by 2011.” Rolling blackouts would negatively affect everybody living in the eight states covered by the Mid-Atlantic Area National Corridor and seriously compromise national security. There’s no need to take such an unnecessary risk.
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Nobody wants to look at 130-foot high transmission towers, but they have to go somewhere, especially since demand for electricity is expected to increase 43 percent by 2030. Various state public utility commissions have had four years since the 2003 blackout to designate their preferred routes for new high-voltage power lines. If they can’t or won’t, the feds should step in. The U.S. still has the most reliable power grid in the world. Let’s not blow it now.
