WASHINGTON-An engineer/consultant that focuses on electricity reliability told a think-tank seminar Monday it is impossible to protect against blackouts like the one that crippled the Northeastern United States and parts of Canada last year.
“We are unable to protect ourselves from blackouts,” said Steve Fairfax of MTechnology Inc.
Fairfax was a panelist at The Future of Electricity Policy sponsored by the Progress & Freedom Foundation.
Wireless carriers learned how intimately they are reliant on the electricity grid during last year’s blackout. Most towers have backup generators, but even these failed when the power didn’t come back on after several hours. Portable generators were hard to get to places with such a widespread outage. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a persistent critic of the wireless industry, called a press conference to complain that in addition to the lights not going on, mobile phones also did not work or stopped working.
The reliance on the power grid is one of the key differences between wireless and wireline telephony. Wireline carriers have exploited this difference in arguing that wireless carriers should not qualify for universal-service subsidies because their systems are not as reliable as wireline, which has its own power generation.
One concern for continued reliability is the move toward electricity deregulation, but Rob Gramlich, economic adviser to Pat Wood, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, argued that competition allows end users-including wireless carriers-to go to a variety of entities for different power options and services instead of being tied to a single utility.
“There are more customer options. With wholesale markets there are all sorts of ways to bundle the package from the local utility. The end user goes to the local utility and gets power-there was no choice. Now you can package that in all sorts of ways so that you can get something from your local utility and go to someone else for your backup power and ancillary services, including short-term energy and long-term capacity. It used to be one; now there are many more options,” said Gramlich.
