Steve Orr and Jim Stimson of the Democrat and Chronicle, take a long look at our aging power grid and point out what is needed to bring it up to where is should be.

Issues old and new

“The grid. It is what National Geographic, in its July issue, called the world’s biggest machine. There are three different parts of it in North America. That portion known as the Eastern Interconnect includes New York — where the very first pieces of the nation’s grid were built 128 years ago in Manhattan at Thomas Edison’s direction. The father of America’s electric industry remains on the minds of grid managers these days.

“If Alexander Graham Bell came back to life today, he wouldn’t recognize the telecommunications industry. If Thomas Edison came back to life today and he looked at the electric grid he invented 100 years ago, he would recognize it. He could probably fix it,” said Robert B. Catell, a former chairman of National Grid U.S. who now chairs the New York State Smart Grid Consortium. “I tell it as a joke. People don’t really laugh.”

New and old issues continue to vex the state’s grid managers: Growth. Maintenance. Storms. Weather, trees and vegetation. Consumer demand. New gadgets that demand more power.

RG&E, like its sister company, New York State Electric and Gas Corp., is only a small part of the international power grid, the one that caught our collective attention when, on Aug. 14, 2003, cascading failures in Ohio caused outages from there through Ontario all the way to the Big Apple. Almost 90 percent of New York state residents, including many in Rochester, lost power.

Years after that worrisome 2003 blackout, problems continue, albeit on a less dramatic scale.

And while RG&E has its detractors when the lights go out, the electricity-delivery company gets high marks from the state PSC for reliability.

But what can make the grid better, more efficient, cheaper and smarter?”

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