You're probably wondering why we can't prevent blackouts like the one last weekend. And when we have one, why we can't bring the power back sooner? What can we do to improve the odds?

The finding so far is that lightning hit or surged into transmission lines leading to the Kahe and Waiau generating plants, resulting in cascading shutdowns, shedding load and plunging us into darkness. HECO will be filing an outage report with the PUC, so we should know more soon.

You can't just turn the generators on again because they can't take the load. HECO technicians have to go to assigned substations around O'ahu and switch the circuits off. The system is inspected for damage. Once any damage is repaired, a generator is restarted. The technicians then bring neighborhood circuits back up in a coordinated sequence.

Every outage is different. The recovery Dec. 26 was focused on the power plants — when the last generator at Kahe tripped, the technicians had to do a "black start." After that, they started the iterative process of turning on neighborhood circuits and increasing the power to bring things up.

Things were back to normal by 6 p.m. Sunday.

If you don't balance the power on the way back up, you could damage the generator. If could take weeks to repair or replace a damaged generator, delaying restoration of power for an intolerable period. And when you come back up, the load is huge because most people have left their appliances on. If a generator isn't ready to take the load, it may trip and you have to start again. Some neighborhoods had false starts like that.

HECO has not found significant damage in the transmission lines or the generators. The lightning apparently brought the system down without damaging the equipment, so the supressors may have saved the equipment but not prevented the blackout.

We'll know more when the report is issued.

INCREASING CAPACITY

Blackouts around the world have dramatically increased since 2000, largely because of aging infrastructure. Replacing this aged equipment reduces the risk, but that can be very expensive.

As the energy demand of a community grows, you also need to expand energy capacity. If you don't maintain capacity sufficient for your load, you have a greater risk of failure. We count on HECO to expand capacity to meet O'ahu's demand, but we don't want HECO to overbuild capacity because of the huge costs involved. It's a balancing act, but most of us would rather have too much capacity than too little.

If you put more plants around the island, when one goes down you can borrow from the others. O'ahu has a total capacity of 1,729 megawatts. There are two primary generating plants, Kahe and Waiau. When they both go down, there is no one they can borrow from. The new quick-starting 100 megawatt biofuel plant opening at Campbell this August will help. The next plant HECO wants to build at Campbell will help also but will take another seven years to build.

The $800 million undersea cable called for in the Clean Energy Initiative will change the game — it will give O'ahu lots of additional capacity from Maui and Lana'i. Including the Big Island and Kaua'i would be even better. These other islands can contribute renewables — geothermal, wind, biodiesel, solar and ocean energy — to enhance capacity and thus reliability throughout the state. We want the best grid possible, and we're willing to pay for it, right?

For conservation, you can stretch existing capacity by managing the load. HECO has introduced the Energy Scout direct-load device which can remotely switch off your water heater to manage load on the grid. It's deployed 25,000 of these among its 293,000 customers and plans to extend the program to more appliances, like air conditioners. HECO also plans to deploy Sensus wireless smart meters. These will establish two-way communications by which HECO will be able to manage load around the grid. The smart-meter program awaits approval by the PUC.

BUILDING THE BACKBONE

We should not be put off by the blackout — we should be moving ahead with all of our recently announced energy initiatives. But we should treat the grid as the backbone of these efforts, and make it as reliable as we can. We need a new mantra — Hawai'i, leader in renewable energy, and home of smart grids and dependable power. Building reliability is not as glamorous as announcing new initiatives, and will be costly in a recession, but we really need to put our money where our grid is.

We are increasingly dependent on electrical power, so reliability is not optional. Even the recent electric car initiative assumes the existence of a reliable grid to keep those cars running. We want the world to see us as a leader in clean energy technology, but how can we move to electric cars that rely on the grid when the grid itself may not be so reliable? It wasn't lost on anyone that fossil cars worked very well last weekend. Would electric cars have done as well?

Without reliable power, our tourist economy is toast. Without reliable power, we can't get the things we need for our homes and families. Personal PV and home generators are comforting but they are not the larger answer. We need to modernize our infrastructure, increase our capacity, build a smart grid and, yes, put our old wires underground.

STEAMING AHEAD

Five days before the blackout, the PUC entered an order finding that HECO's actions were reasonable and it should not be penalized for the 2006 blackout. See www.thinktechhawaii.com/2006.pdf. Although the PUC's order is more an affirmation of HECO's efforts in 2006 rather than a mandate for further upgrades of the infrastructure, clearly there are other factors that would motivate HECO to expand those upgrades.

The Clean Energy Initiative calls for the rapid migration of power generation from HECO to independent renewable producers. The joint proposal for a feed-in tariff was filed, on schedule, by the state and HECO at the PUC last week. See www.thinktechhawaii.com/feed-in.pdf. Hopefully, that tariff will be finalized this summer and — investors willing — independent power producers can then build new power generation infrastructure and in that way increase statewide energy capacity.

Public confidence is everything. The blackout left a lot of people with lingering doubts about the frailty of the system and continuing concerns that it can and will happen again. The thing about blackouts is that in the dark they make us more thoughtful. So let's think about how to make this one an opportunity, for technology, for HECO and for Hawai'i.

Jay Fidell is a business lawyer practicing in Honolulu. He has followed tech and tech policy closely and is a founder of ThinkTech Hawaii. Check out his blog at www.honoluluadvertiser.com/blogs.