August 13, 2004—As the one year anniversary of the Northeastern blackout approaches, Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) recently sponsored a staff briefing by industry experts on technologies available to improve the U.S. electric grid. Rana Mukerji, Vice President in the Power Technologies Division of leading transmission technology company ABB, told Congressional aides about technological improvements that could help us avoid another blackout and could make the grid much more energy efficient.
“It has been one year since the blackout, and still our grid is badly in need of upgrading,” Lieberman said. “Upgrading the electric grid would be a classic ‘win-win’ situation: we could make our grid more stable, while at the same time lowering our polluting emissions through efficiency gains that a new grid would provide. But instead of passing much needed electric reliability legislation, Congress has buried it deep in the pork-laden energy bill. I call on my colleagues to support efforts to pass electric reliability legislation by itself before we leave for the year.”
ABB, whose American headquarters is in Norwalk, CT, is one of the largest technology companies in the world, and the Power Technologies division is one of its two core pursuits.
