Faults Still Plague North America's Electric System

Investigators and utility executives agree that the electric system still is plagued by the kinds of weaknesses that left 50 million people in the U.S. and Canada without power Aug. 14 .

A major study of the blackout cites lingering deficiencies, including poorly prepared engineers, faulty equipment settings, voluntary reliability standards and muddled oversight.

Utilities, reliability councils and grid operators are working to fix as much as possible before temperatures rise.

While weather is a big variable, electricity demand could rise from last year as the economic recovery gathers steam.

In the mid-Atlantic region, the grid operator is forecasting potential record demand for electricity this summer, while New York state also is forecasting higher demand.

The U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, which was assigned to examine the Aug. 14 blackout, recently declared that the system "is likely to be more vulnerable to cascading outages than it was in the past."

A separate audit, of the Midwest grid operator conducted by the North American Electric Reliability Council, or NERC, which is responsible for grid reliability and safety, found additional problems, though it noted improvements.

But FirstEnergy Corp. (FE) of Akron, Ohio, the company most deeply implicated in the August incident, contests many of the findings of the blackout report. FirstEnergy says it has fixed some problems.