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And as seen in New York City this past July, breakdowns in 100-year-old underground local distribution systems are now leaving tens of thousands of people in the dark, and must be replaced. A couple of years ago in Philadelphia, workers for PECO Energy found that some underground utility cable still in service dated to 1899. In July 1999, the failure of outdated cable was blamed for power outages in Manhattan affecting 200,000 people. West Virginia to Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware. In March, PJM identified transmission constraints in its region, which were standing in the way of "bringing resources to a broader market." PJM identified two transmission paths requiring significant investment: a high-voltage line from the coal fields of West Virginia to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. While Virginia and Maryland utilities are considering such new builds, most of the nuclear power plants that are under consideration by utilities are in the semi-rural Southeast, where there is political support for new plants, and building more high-voltage transmission lines to carry the power is unlikely to be held up for 15 years by "environmental" court challenges. On Monday, July 17, 2006, in the midst of an intense Summer heat wave, one of Con Edison's 22 primary feeder lines failed, below the streets of the City of New York.

The New York City blackout was the result not of a Summer heatwave, but of the decades of underinvestment in the infrastructure that distributes electric power from central feeder lines, through transformers, to the wires that deliver power to each home, school, factory, office building, small business, and hospital. Some of Con Edison's underground infrastructure goes back almost as far as Thomas Edison's first central generating station and underground cable, on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, in 1882. It was a length of 59-year-old cable whose failure was a factor in the July blackout. Before deregulation, companies like Con Edison would make investments in infrastructure that were deemed necessary, to maintain a level of service and reliability that met industry-wide standards, assured that state regulators would allow them to recover the costs, and maintain their financial health. Today, thanks to deregulation, a company can earn more profits by not building anything, and instead charging more for what they already produce, by creating shortages. Transmitting Power, what are electric cables or Just Profits? In the case of switch-provided power, AC-DC rectification was an imperfect art and there was a need for a backup capability in any case, and so the telephone switch would get its loop power from a very large battery.

It is also the case that entire regions, in particular the West and East Coasts, have so much congestion on their transmission lines, that they cannot import the power they need. It oversees 56,070 miles of transmission lines, and plans regional transmission expansion to maintain grid reliability and relieve congestion. However, these lines, hundreds of miles long, would not be necessary, if the mandate existed to build new nuclear plants where the capacity would be near the load centers. Some of that new nuclear-generated power from the Southeast will be used locally, for growing demand, and some will be wheeled to the energy-short regions of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, which refuse to build their own capacity. The engineers, who have among them, more than five decades of experience in the electrical utility industry, insist that "new transmission lines will not by themselves improve reliability. They may increase transfer capacities, and hence improve commercial use of the grid," but will not necessarily improve performance of the system.

To "save money," the industry has turned to a policy of "run to failure," where a company waits for a failure before replacing aged power lines and other equipment. Industry-wide, there is agreement that weaknesses due to the age of the underground distribution cable have been exacerbated by the way the system is run in today's deregulated world. Estimates are that about 27% of its underground cable needs to be replaced. But "consumer advocates" opposed the utility's request to recoup the $145 million cost of replacement, on the grounds that the utility's records were not adequate to ensure the worst cables would be replaced first. It is spending about $25 million per year, and at that rate, the utility will not finish until 2024. By that time, some of its replacement cable will be 38 years old. Today, the average age of a power lineman is 50 years. This strategy was implemented to perfection six years ago by Enron and other power pirates in California, which withheld power to raise prices through the roof, allowing them to steal tens of billions of dollars out of the pockets of electricity consumers throughout the West Coast.