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Blackouts Are a Fact of Life. Let's Deal With Them.

Four steps to making sure that outages do as little damage as possible

Let's just say it upfront: The idea that the electric grid can be made invulnerable is nonsense.

The U.S. grid contains 160,000 miles of high-voltage lines, five million miles of distribution lines, thousands of generators and transformers, and tens of thousands of other pieces of equipment. It is difficult to imagine hardening so massive a structure against random, natural disturbances; it is almost inconceivable that it could be hardened against deliberate and intelligent attacks.

Extremely smart engineers are working to make the grid more reliable, but the rate at which blackouts happen hasn't changed in the 30 years since we began keeping good reliability statistics. Cost-effective changes that can be shown to reduce the frequency of power failures should be made, but they are unlikely to eliminate all failures.

But that doesn't prevent us from making things better. Our research over the past decade has shown that instead of assuming success in the Sisyphean task of eliminating every grid problem, it would be much smarter to focus on continuing the essential services that the grid provides.

Economics tells us that the last dollar invested in grid-blackout reduction should have the same social benefit as the last dollar invested in maintaining essential services when the grid goes down.

How do we do that? How do we get the most social benefits for the least cost? Let me offer four basic steps.

1. What's Crucial

The first step is to have municipalities run an exercise in which businesses, nonprofits, communities, government agencies and residents list, in order of importance, the critical missions that are provided by electric power—and that, if not fulfilled, would have serious consequences.


A business, for instance, might identify what constitute essential data that should be duplicated at a remote location. The owner of a low-rise apartment building might decide that elevators are essential if the building has elderly residents. Or a city bus department might find that their diesel depot needs emergency generators to get fuel from underground tanks uphill into the buses.

In fact, when colleagues and I surveyed police stations in our city, Pittsburgh, we found that 60% of them lack on-site backup generation—even though most people would agree that keeping our police stations powered and officers' walkie-talkies charged is of critical importance during a power outage.

2. Been There, Done That

The second step is for cities to take the information from the first step, and help determine which missions are already protected and which aren't. For example, hospital emergency rooms already are required to have backup power, as are critical airport landing systems.

The Department of Homeland Security must back off its long-standing tendency to lock up all data of this sort and not let the real decision makers see data they themselves have generated.

Weak links in the chain are identified at this step. For example, while Newark and Kennedy airports quickly restored power for passenger screening and other boarding functions the day after the August 2003 blackout struck, LaGuardia could not; as a consequence, traffic on the East Coast was snarled. This summer, 60 flights at Charlotte were canceled and passengers had to stay in a powerless hot terminal overnight when a transformer failure cut power to the airline hub for 13 hours.

3. Fix It

The third step focuses both the private and public sectors on implementing cost-effective technologies that can fulfill the critical missions during the events.


We can ensure traffic flows in important urban corridors, for instance, by using LED traffic lights at critical intersections with batteries that can be charged with individual solar panels. Subway trains can have onboard energy storage that can allow them to creep slowly to the nearest station to discharge their passengers. And a supermarket chain may invest in backup generators that can keep freezers in some of its largest stores going when the grid fails.

4. Carrots and Sticks

The fourth step is to make cost-effective changes in our incentives and rules. Important private services such as grocery stores, gas stations and cellular phone service are vulnerable to extended blackouts. Tax incentives and permission to charge more for services during blackouts can nudge businesses in the helpful direction of buying a generator.

Businesses that have their own generators are now forbidden to sell power to other businesses. While we are investing in smart meters and other new devices, we should change the law so that these firms can sell power to others in need. A few projects that demonstrate emergency sharing of this type could go a long way to providing points of light during a blackout.


All these steps begin with engineers being candid with customers that the system can't be made completely reliable within a reasonable future. Then it is up to customers and governments to decide what they should do to protect themselves from outages.

If we think about the problem in this way, then when the wind blows or the earth shakes, many of our essential services will still be provided.

Dr. Apt is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. He can be reached at

Corrections & Amplifications
A power outage that affected 50 million customers in the Northeastern U.S. and Eastern Canada occurred in 2003. An earlier version of the map accompanying this article incorrectly gave the year as 1998.

Kevin Oge
Kevin Oge user

How to handle blackouts? Candles and flashlights.


It has become essentially illegal to have a functional fireplace in many parts of California. The government Air Quality folks believe that that option should not be available, period.

Matthew Danowski
Matthew Danowski subscriber

Blackouts are only going to get worse as the grid continues to rely more and more on less reliable renewable sources. Without new baseline sources (coal, nuclear, hydro, etc), there isn't a reliable "backup" source to pick up the load when renewable sources go out. This creates grid instability and supply/demand problems, regardless of how "smart" the grid is.


Some towns have adopted plans based on turning off the power during storms. They have found that damage to the grid is less and restoration is quicker. Critical facilities and functions such as hospitals are equipped with generators. Fort Walton Beach, FL is an example.

Allen Schaeffer
Allen Schaeffer subscriber

Beyond the "New Yorker lament" expressed by previous commenters (let them have their say) this "how to" piece was harmless enough ..... right up to the point where the author recommends installing natural gas generators at a schools, hospitals and other critical installations. This is fundamentally flawed. Without a self-contained fuel supply, you can not control your own power destiny.

What happens during the time the earth shakes and the natural gas pipelines are fractured or shut down by the utility to avoid fires and explosions? You won't be generating very much back up power then.

This is why diesel powered back up generators are the technology of choice for critrical systems-- their fast (10 second) response time and load carrying capacity and self contained fuel supply provide the kind of control and performance needed for those grid interruptions and required in many fire and safety codes.

Finally, there are other solutions that the author avoided here-- for example on the point of selling power to other businesses -- there is in fact such a thing today - known as demand response - where owners of back up generators can be called into action to run their generators during times of peak electrical demand to provide for their own electrical needs as well as shouldering part of the grid load (and by extenstion businesses without generators) . They are selling power back to the grid during pre-brownout conditions, then reverting back to normal emergency-only operations. Combined Heat and Power systems also are a great way for businesses to take on more of their own electrical needs by turning a waste product into electrical energy.

At the end of the day assuring uninterrupted electrical power is in everyone's best interest for safety and economic reasons. Diesel powered back up generators offer a valuable tool for helping shore up a frail electical grid during the worst of times.

Finally, the map of historical grid outages seemed to have missed the big East Coast/NYC outage of 2002-- where NYC was in the dark for over 6 hours.

That night there was however the normal glow of lights at Ellis Island on the Statue of Liberty -- thanks to back up diesel generators.

karen kelly
karen kelly

I assume this article is a cover for the coming regular brownouts in major urban centers. As long as those brownouts include the upper west side of Manhattan, and Central Park West, I am fine with it. Let the people who voted for the coming world experience it first hand as often as possible.

Steven Farkas
Steven Farkas subscriber

Emergency diesel generators are also vulnerable to running out of fuel. The diesel fuel storage tank and day tank are single failure points. The on-site storage ought to be on a par with the typical grid-disconnect times for that section of the electric power grid. Natural gas is delivered via a network of pipelines meaning there is typically more than one pathway to supply customers. The last-mile connection may or may not be more reliable than the on-site diesel fuel storage tank.

In some states, residential heating is a preferred customer for natural gas leaving the utilities in an awkward position during winter storm induced electric grid outages. How is someone home bound in the cold and dark supposed to run the blower in the forced air system of the house? If they get past that hurdle, then what about the furnace control system and feedback loop without electricity?

Edward Burns
Edward Burns user

In fact, this may be the perfect way for those upper west siders to get to meet those living in other poorer areas and boroughs. Since they'll all be hunched over the same empty 55 gallon drums, burning trash to keep warm, the meeting may be something right out of a Currier & Ives scene - or not...

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