Lawrence J. Kahn, Tulane Law '95, Director, Tulane Utility Vegetation Management Institute & Distinguished Research Fellow, Tulane Center for Environmental Law
This past weekend marked the 22nd anniversary of the afternoon in August 2003 when more than 50 million people across the northeastern United States and parts of Canada suddenly found themselves in the dark. What began as a seemingly routine transmission line failure in Ohio quickly cascaded into the largest blackout in North American history, cutting power to major cities including New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Ottawa, and Toronto.
For many who lived through it, the 2003 blackout was more than an inconvenience—it was a turning point in how we think about energy reliability, grid management, and resilience.
The blackout started in Ohio, where high-voltage transmission lines heavy with load from demand on a hot summer day sagged into overgrown trees and tripped offline. Normally, a well-managed grid would reroute power automatically, but a series of software and communication failures meant the growing problem went unnoticed. As demand surged on the remaining lines, the grid became unstable. Within hours, the disturbance spread across eight U.S. states and Ontario, tripping off over 100 power plants, including 22 nuclear reactors. By 4:15 p.m., much of the Northeast, and nearly all of Ontario, was without power.
Eleven people died. More than 50 million were without power for two days. Around 62,000 megawatts were lost from the grid, causing as much as 10 billion dollars in losses - the impact on Ontario was so tremendous that Canada's GDP dropped by nearly a full percentage point for the month of August. Canada and the United States formed a joint commission to investigate the incident.
Scarcely more than a month after the North American Blackout of 2003, on September 28, 2003, Europe experienced one of its most disruptive power failures. The event plunged nearly all of Italy and parts of Switzerland into darkness. More than 56 million people lost electricity.
The chain reaction began in Switzerland, when a tree branch contacted a transmission line near Lake Maggiore. A second line overloaded and tripped shortly afterward. Normally, redundancy in Europe’s highly interconnected power grid would have contained the problem, but in this case, cascading failures rippled across the Italian transmission system, which was already strained by high power imports from neighboring countries. Within minutes, Italy’s grid collapsed entirely, forcing the nation into an overnight blackout. Electric-powered transportation was halted, with over 30,000 passengers stranded on trains, hundreds trapped on elevators, and major disruptions to air traffic throughout Europe. Without power to traffic signals, vehicle traffic ground to a halt. Electric-powered water pumps throughout southern Italy failed, cutting water service. The blackout caused over 1.2 billion euros in losses and damage. The EU formed a commission to determine the cause.
In both blackouts, the primary cause was determined to be inadequate vegetation management, which caused a conflict between high voltage electric transmission lines and nearby trees. An excellent comparison of the subsequent - and very different - approaches and actions taken in North America and Europe can be found in a paper published by Tulane Law '24 graduate and Porter Hedges LLP associate Lakshmi ("Lex") Kumar: Lakshmi Kumar & Lawrence Kahn, 20 Years On: What Have We Learned About UVM from the 2003 North American Blackout and the 2003 European Blackout?, in Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Environmental Concerns in Rights-of-Way Management [125-132] (Environmental Education, Research & Policy Conf., Oct. 9-12, 2022, Charlotte, N.C.), a copy of which can be found here: https://www.rights-of-way.org/past-proceedings/ (see Symposium #13, p. 125). You can also hear her podcast interview on this subject here: https://www.theuvmpodcast.com/1797138/episodes/12468143-21-us-vs-europe-response-to-the-2003-blackouts-lex-kumar. Better yet, you can hear Lex speak on this topic at the upcoming Future of Energy Forum at Tulane September 9-12.
In North America, a determination was made that this type of disaster can never happen again. And it hasn't. Part of the reason for that was a substantial restructuring of the manner in which FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and NERC, the North American Reliability Corporation, interact. Through regulatory change and the widescale adoption of new standards for vegetation management and new technology - the use of LiDAR to monitor proximity of trees to transmission line infrastructure - there has not been a repeat of this occurrence from the same cause for over 20 years. Utilities across North America are now regularly using this laser technology to take precise measurements of their transmission systems to gain an understanding of where vegetation is encroaching on the space needed for our powerline infrastructure and how to efficiently target and prune or remove inappropriate vegetation along our Rights-of-Way.
In the process, the concept of "Integrated Vegetation Management" (IVM) was substantially advanced: the process of using appropriate vegetation to crowd out the space that might otherwise be occupied by inappropriate vegetation has not only helped keep major blackouts from recurring in North America, building the resilience of our electric transmission system and making its operation and maintenance more efficient, but it has also opened the development of pollinator superhighways along our Rights-of-way, providing a safe space for the propagation of numerous at-risk species of bees, butterflies, birds and other wildlife, as well as the preservation of a wide variety of endangered and at-risk plant life in nearly every biome throughout North America.
Powerful, long-lasting positive change can happen - and swiftly - when government, industry, technology, academia and the public come together to solve problems with determination and purpose, and work together to implement intelligent and well-considered solutions.
This paper represents the research and views of the author(s). It should not be construed as legal or investment advice. It does not necessarily represent the views of the Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center. The piece may be subject to further revision.
