The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

In FirstEnergy’s “Annual State of Power Report” for 2001, filed with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, or PUCO (a local regulatory body), they had what might be considered a reasonable if not exactly admirable track record of repairs and upkeep. They reported having fixed 75 percent of known “common” problems—like broken wires or poles, leaving 25 percent of these issues for the following year. But in 2002, the year of the near miss at Davis-Besse, they completed only 17 percent of the maintenance and repairs on their To Do list, leaving a backlog of almost eleven thousand items for 2003—the year of the blackout. During the same period, the utility laid off five hundred skilled workers whose jobs were to keep basic infrastructure, such as electrical lines and power plants, in good working order.