Susan Eisenhower: It’s Time To Modernize Nation’s Energy Infrastructure

Editor’s note: Susan Eisenhower, the author of this guest commentary, was a guest speaker at the Clinton School of Public Service last month. She is the CEO and Chairman of The Eisenhower Group, Inc., a Washington D.C.-based consulting company that provides strategic counsel on business development, public affairs, and communications for Fortune 500 companies around the world.

It was a hot afternoon on August 14, 2003. I was in New York City on business when what became known as the Northeast blackout occurred.

Initially, the public’s mood was almost celebratory. People befriended strangers. Bars served patrons with nothing else to do. But those early carefree moments departed as night approached. Navigating a congested, 24-hour city in the dark was the first challenge.

The next rude awakening came when people realized that water supplies had been interrupted. Then came the bitter reality that there was no escape by car because even gas pumps need electricity.

Things quickly devolved from there. A day after merchants charged excessive prices for food items, they were giving perishables away for lack of refrigeration. In all, that power outage affected more than 50 million people and cost the economy $10 billion in 2 days.

I was well into a career that was focused on other aspects of national security when the blackout occurred. But that experience changed my thinking, driving home for me how pivotal the electric grid really is.

The rapid fallout from that short-lived, but massive outage forever changed my thinking about energy and national security. That episode exposed the vulnerability of our national grid, which has been cobbled together from the time of Thomas Edison until now.

My experience in New York also called to mind one of the many lessons my mentor, General Andrew J. Goodpaster, imparted to me. As Supreme Commander of NATO, the general was among our country’s great strategic thinkers. And one of his enduring legacies was his big-picture thinking about the challenges that confront America.

As a strategic leader, he often lamented the penchant of some to incessantly focus on issues of relatively smaller national significance, while neglecting those things most important to our long-term peace and prosperity. General Goodpaster often analogized America to a large tent structurally supported by poles.

“Think of the United States as a tent,” he would say to me. “Think about which poles really hold up the tent. If one of the long poles falls down, the whole tent comes down.”

The point is, we need to focus on the important, strategic things and there is no question that our electric grid is one of them. Indeed, the grid is the backbone of our energy infrastructure, and by extension our way of life. If you think about it that way, the modernization of our grid is not a luxury; it is a key component of our national security—which is arguably the longest pole in the tent.

Change occurs rapidly in modern society and the energy sector is adapting to those trends amid a multitude of highly complex external factors that outlast any one political cycle. Those who work in the energy sector constantly grapple with these considerations.

Among them: regulatory regimes that evolve and thereby influence how electricity is generated, geopolitical trends and instability in certain regions, cyber security concerns, weather-related power outages and their economic impact, and the continued incorporation of natural gas and renewables into the coal and nuclear energy mix.

The presence of those variables places the energy sector in the middle of a revolution that can be difficult to comprehend. That transformation requires, as one policy think tank put it, to move from the ‘Edison era to the Google era’ in electricity.

In other words, we need a modernized system for this modern age in which we’re living.

Getting there, regardless of the source of electric generation, necessitates a reliable and secure transmission grid. That is particularly true for renewable energy, whose reliability varies more than power generated from traditional natural resources.

It is critical for this nation to devise a strategy that factors in long term compatibility with our security needs and the changing world around us.

This nation must approach energy policy and infrastructure strategy in a coherent way and this requires serious leadership, which is never easy. When it comes to energy infrastructure, policymaking that affects it occurs at all levels of government. And at all levels of government we are going to have to put aside our political differences and come up with a plan that will work for all Americans.

It is absolutely critical to sustaining and developing a prosperous America – whether you live in the populated Northeast or more rural parts of the country like Arkansas. Proper planning for the energy infrastructure needs of this country present not only the key to our future, but a magnificent opportunity for national betterment.