As the government dispatched crews to investigate the largest blackout in North American history, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned Sunday that consumers will eventually pay up to $50 billion in higher electric bills to modernize the nation’s ailing power transmission system.
“Rate-payers, obviously, will pay the bill because they’re the ones who benefit,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “And that’s where most of the responsibility, ultimately, will be assigned.”
Abraham declined to speculate on what triggered last week’s cascading outages that left 50 million people without power, but other energy experts said it was increasingly apparent the failure began with power lines outside Cleveland.
Less clear, said Michehl Gent, head of the North American Electric Reliability Council, is why the system’s warning alarms did not catch and confine the problem.
“There were fail-safe steps in place, and they didn’t work,” he said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” In just three minutes Thursday afternoon, 21 power plants in six states from New York to Michigan and Canada crashed.
With the immediate crisis quelled, political leaders ratcheted up the debate over who was to blame and what can be done to prevent similar outages.
Gent, during several media interviews, suggested human error might have been responsible for the missed signals in Ohio. Energy execs there replied it was too early to tell.
“There has to be much more going on in the system than four downed lines,” said Ralph DiNicola, spokesman for Akron’s FirstEnergy Corp., which owns the northeastern Ohio lines that have been blamed for starting the chain reaction that led to the blackout.
