On August 14, 2003, a cascading failure blacked out significant areas of the US and Canada. This incident was a fundamental failure to maintain system reliability, or “keep the lights on”. With the interim report of the outage task force just released, some already apparent lessons are being re-affirmed. In a heavily interconnected system it is essential to manage reliability on a regional basis – rather than through a large number of disparate, utility-based control areas. Regional Transmission Organisations (RTOs), independent of individual utilities, are the logical entities to provide this management. read more →