WHATEVER the lessons eventually drawn from the huge power
failure—the worst in American history—that cascaded across the
north-eastern region of the United States and Canada on August
14th, two things have become clear. The first is that managing
the supply of and demand for electricity on a modern
distribution grid—with thousands of generating stations being
cranked up and wound down, and millions of independent users
flipping equipment on and off—is the most daunting balancing act
in the whole of engineering. Let demand momentarily outstrip
supply by the tiniest fraction and generators quickly become
overloaded, circuit-breakers trip and the lights go out.  The
second thing to become clear is that while deregulation has
increased competition and lowered prices for consumers, it has
slowed the pace of modernisation of the grid. In particular, it
has failed to offer local power generators a big enough carrot
(or threaten them with a big enough stick) to upgrade their
transmission links and make all the softwa