DEMOCRATS PUSH FOR ELECTRICITY RELIABILITY
LEGISLATION TO PREVENT FUTURE BLACKOUTS

Last August, our country experienced the most widespread power blackout in U.S. history and we are as much at risk for a power failure now as we were then. Since the blackout eleven months ago, Democrats have been urging the Republican leadership to bring separate electricity reliability legislation to the Floor to prevent another blackout. The Republican leadership in the House has ignored our requests and the Administration has failed to act. In response, the Democrats have filed a discharge petition on H.R. 3004, the "Electric Reliability Improvement Act of 2003," which would make transmission grid rules mandatory and enforceable.

Electricity reliability legislation would make transmission grid rules mandatory and enforceable.
Democrats have introduced stand-alone legislation that will give NERC the authority it needs to further protect our electricity transmission grid and our citizens from future blackouts by making transmission grid rules mandatory and enforceable. This legislation is virtually identical to language that was included in the House and Senate energy bills in the last Congress and is included in both bills again this Congress. These provisions enjoy broad bipartisan and bicameral support and deserve to be quickly passed and not held hostage to the more contentious provisions in the energy bills. A similar stand-alone electricity reliability bill, S. 2014, has been introduced in the Senate by Senators Cantwell, Clinton, Jeffords and Feingold.

How would enactment of this legislation help prevent another blackout?
Currently, the reliability of North America's transmission grid is encouraged through voluntary rules set forth by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC). In the years since its establishment in 1965, NERC adopted and encouraged the use of "rules of the road" for the transmission grid in order to avoid blackouts. The problem is that NERC's rules are not mandatory and it does not have the ability to enforce its standards through penalties. Unfortunately, those voluntary rules were not being followed, leading up to the August 14, 2003, blackout.

For example, in testimony to the Committee on Energy and Commerce in September 2003, NERC President Michehl Gent said NERC found over 500 violations of its rules that would have resulted in $9 million in fines if the ability to impose such penalties had been in place. The fact that some of the violations occurred in areas of the country that were later effected by the August 14th blackout is an ominous sign that perhaps those events could have been avoided if transmission grid rules had been mandatory and enforceable.

Electricity reliability provisions should be enacted now.
The final report issued by the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force confirmed that contributing factors to the blackout included violations of voluntary electricity reliability rules. The Task Force called for Congress to pass electricity reliability legislation, terming it "the single most important step" toward preventing another blackout.