CON ED'S NEXT CRISIS
DON'T BET AGAINST BLACKOUTS
Posted: 1:08 am
June 30, 2008
NINE thousand Con Ed workers might go on strike this week, making it harder for the utility to prevent a blackout in the heat. But the strike isn't New Yorkers' only power problem. Even if Gotham avoids a blackout this summer - far from assured - the bigger worry is that it's impossible to tell whether Con Ed is doing what's needed to avoid large-scale blackouts down the line.
To be fair, Con Ed performs better than the national average. But the uncertainty over a repeat of summer 2006 - when tens of thousands of customers in Queens lost power for a week and Con Ed seemed to have no idea what was going on - is unacceptable in a world-class city.
Unpredictable power cuts add to the city's growing reputation as unable to provide a 21st-century infrastructure.
The massive 2003 blackout of the whole Northeast wasn't Con Ed's fault. But two protracted brownouts and blackouts in the last decade were: the 1999 upper Manhattan failure and the 2006 Queens one.
The trouble isn't so much producing the power; it lurks in how to carry the electricity from a Queens power station to where you are. Con Ed's aging distribution and transmission infrastructure is struggling to handle the power pushing through it - and summers smash power-usage records in electricity-hungry New York.
Because the lines and transformers are mostly underground, it's hard to pinpoint failures until they've caused outages. (That's also why a possible strike is dangerous - this isn't really an automated business.) After the 2006 blackout, state officials found an "alarming rate of corrosion among . . . underground transformers, and . . . no reason to believe this high rate of corrosion does not exist" elsewhere in the city.
And the system that failed was 25 percent newer than elsewhere in the city - making you wonder about how the older infrastructure will fare in future heat waves.
But Con Ed itself is a problem, too. It claims that, since the Queens nightmare, it has improved its infrastructure and procedures to keep small problems from turning into big ones. It also points to its $1.7 billion worth of upgrades this year as evidence of greater reliability.
But the utility also touted a $1.2 billion investment in 2006 - six weeks before the blackout.
We can't rely on competition to ensure that Con Ed does its job: You can't fit two sets of competing power lines beneath New York. But one fix proposed by Con Ed's critics - having a regular expiration and recertification of its franchise - wouldn't work, either: The company couldn't get debt financing if it risked losing its only assets every decade or so.
What Con Ed needs is a regulator who knows what's going on and who acts as an honest broker - making sure the utility gets the money it needs to upgrade the system without fleecing ratepayers who have nowhere else to turn.
