PUBLIC POWER FAILURE: In the midst of the blackout frenzy, we got our August electric bill yesterday. It said we used 645 kilowatt-hours in the July billing period, for which we owe the utility $80 and change. That's 12.4 cents per kilowatt-hour.

If you read this blog on Monday you saw a link to the PUCO's Ohio Utility Rate Survey for July, wherein we learn that the average cost of a residential kwh in Dayton this Summer is about ten cents; in Columbus and Cincinnati, about nine cents; in Canton, about seven cents. Of course the private utility corporations serving those cities are selling the same product -- 110 volt AC power -- that we get here in Cleveland, and making a profit doing so. Somehow they manage to do it a lot cheaper.

But okay, you say, we already knew that First Energy bills are ridiculously high, especially CEI bills... what's your point?

Well, you see, my bill didn't come from CEI. My ridiculously high bill came from Cleveland Public Power. Good old "Muny Light".

That's right, children. Cleveland Public Power is now one of the highest-priced utilities in the state. In the summertime, Muny Light bills are right up there with Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison, though still a little cheaper than CEI. CPP's Winter rates are a penny lower than its Summer rates, but averaged over the whole year the cost per kwh still tops eleven cents.

That's for a utility that generates none of its own power -- so when First Energy's surrounding grid went down Thursday, CPP's voltage went to zero in an instant, and stayed at zero until First Energy came back on line. That's for a city utility that wasn't even able to provide emergency power to the city's water system.

Over twenty years ago, Dennis Kucinich destroyed his mayoralty to preserve Muny Light as a competitor to CEI. Conscious of the large voter majority that supported Muny then, and continued to punish its enemies in subsequent City Council races, all mayors since Dennis have been vocal public power supporters. They renamed the system Cleveland Public Power, pushed a bond issue to expand it to the Southeast Side and the airport, sold its discount service to big commercial users as well as residents, and bragged about how much they were saving us. They also beefed up CPP's interconnection with "the grid", successfully pursuing a Federal case to force CEI to provide transmission services for power bought elsewhere -- from Niagara, from Kentucky, from downstate utilities and then from CEI/First Energy itself. CPP -- once the third rail of Cleveland politics -- became a consensus issue, a sacred cow.

There were flurries of controversy in the '90s over blackouts in CPP's decrepit West Side system, and some Councilmen made a stink about one modest increase in base rates. But for the most part, CPP receded from Cleveland's political consciousness. Which probably suited CPP's managers just fine -- because nobody was watching as their bills started climbing, and climbing, and climbing.

I'm proud to have been part of the fight to save and expand Muny/CPP many years ago, and I'm as committed as anyone in this city to the idea of a competitive public power system. But I think the time has come -- is, in fact, way overdue -- for a serious airing of CPP's operations and strategy. Why are the bills so high? Why is the system still totally dependent on expensive purchased power, with no baseload generating capacity of its own? Does this system have a plan for the future, and what is it? And how is it going to benefit the city's consumers, for whom the whole point of municipal power is to keep electric service reliable and affordable -- as opposed to vulnerable and expensive?

DEAD CENTER: Well, it wasn't exactly an act of political courage. But it was an act of definitive common sense. And it will cost her politically, though not as much as the thumping she would have taken on Election Day if she'd stuck with the plan. So... two cheers from the bleachers for Mayor Campbell for pulling the plug on a Convention Center sales tax.

The Plain Dealer, in its usual tin-eared fashion, editorializes that "Public support for a tax increase to build a new convention center evaporated, in part, because public officials made the fatal error of never trying to convince their constituents of the need for such a facility." Wrong, wrong, wrong! Public support never existed for a tax increase for this thing, and no amount of "arts and culture" window dressing was going to change that. Despite endless hours of friendly public forums, and acres of front-page newsprint, the real Convention Center enthusiasts -- the Growth Association, Cleveland Tomorrow and the PD editorial board --never made their case in a way that made a lick of sense to ordinary voters. Why did they expect City Hall to do it for them?

We expect a lot of things from elected officials, but telling us what to think is not usually on the list. Nor is walking the plank for something their constituents just don't want.

So the Mayor has spared us an expensive, annoying and pointless election fight. It's the right thing to do, no matter how awkward it looks and no matter how much abuse she's letting herself in for. And politicians who do the right thing deserve some applause.

So here's mine. Good for you, Mayor!

Now can we move on to some real issues? We've got this water plant that needs a backup power supply...

BLACKOUT FALLOUT 3: Two more interesting takes on the Great Blackout and First Energy's role in it:

Ohio Citizen Action asks the NAERC to protect First Energy employees from reprisals for cooperating with the blackout investigation. We've been through this before with the Davis-Besse mess, says CA's Shari Weir.

And Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute says "We told you so twenty years ago!" The right answer, says RMI's Kyle Datta in this essay (PDF format), isn't more power lines and centralized generating plants, but local distributed generation systems combined with efficiency. All you geeks should find this part interesting:

Datta likened our current grid to a centralized mainframe with limited access points. The worldwide web, on the other hand, distributes computing power, and by its dispersed nature means information is at much less risk, he said.

''The web is a very good model of what we should be doing with electricity. The grid should exist, but it should complement electricity storing and generating devices on our office buildings, our homes, roofs, in our basements, and ultimately in our fuel cell driven automobiles. Putting all our eggs in one basket is a predictable catastrophe waiting to happen.''

BLACKOUT FALLOUT 2: Whenever a politician (or CEO) says "It's not the time for finger-pointing", you know there's something they hope won't come to your attention. Thus we saw Congressman Steve LaTourette on Action News last night as the anti-Kucinich, asking us to refrain from blaming anyone for the Great Blackout, and regretting that the Creaky Old Grid Issue had been sidelined in Congress by less urgent energy controversies like wilderness drilling. For some reason the Action NewsDroids did not take the opportunity to ask LaTourette how he had voted on a 2001 proposal by California Congressman Sam Farr to create a Federal financing fund for power grid upgrades. Here's an excerpt from Buzzflash's (very partisan) take on the story:

In June of 2001, Bush opposed and the congressional GOP voted down legislation to provide $350 million worth of loans to modernize the nation's power grid because of known weaknesses in reliability and capacity. Supporters of the amendment pointed to studies by the Energy Department showing that the grid was in desperate need of upgrades as proof that their legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) should pass.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration lobbied against it and the Republicans voted it down three separate times: First, on a straight party line in the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, then on a straight party line the U.S. House Rules Committee, and finally on a party line on the floor of the full House [Roll Call Vote #169, 6/20/01].

I personally think finger-pointing is a vital political exercise, and it sure looks like some important people screwed up royally in this case -- starting, it now appears, with our old friends at First Energy Corporation, who failed to notice and/or notify their neighbors that something very bad was happening to their transmission lines.

First Energy's current position is that it might not have been them, after all. We'll see.

Meanwhile, here are two things you might bear in mind as the utilities and their political friends try to get those fingers pointing elsewhere -- e.g. at revenue constraints, regulators and environmentalists getting in the way:

1. First Energy's Ohio subsidiaries -- CEI, Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison -- are collecting lots more money for their product than other electric companies in the state... you know, the ones that didn't crash. See the Public Utilities Commission's latest Ohio Utility Rate Survey (July, 2003) for details.

2. First Energy has proposed exactly one new transmission project to the Ohio Power Siting Board since 1999 -- the thirteen-mile Hanna-Shalersville line in Portage County. The application to the OPSB was filed in March 2000. It was approved in ten months flat, and completed and energized by April 2002. The OPSB staff report shows no opposition from environmentalists or anyone else -- and if there was any, it sure didn't slow the process down. Neither First Energy nor its subsidiaries have any other transmission grid upgrade applications pending. You can look it all up at the Power Siting Board's website.

BLACKOUT FALLOUT: As I write this at 4 pm, the lights seem to be back on in most of greater Cleveland -- at least intermittently -- but people are still boiling water or picking it up from the National Guard. And it looks like nobody got killed driving home through blacked-out intersections. But among the questions emerging from this incident, here's one for the top of the local list: Why wasn't backup power available for the City's own water pumping stations and traffic lights?

Hospitals were able to use their emergency backup systems. So did Hopkins Airport, which reportedly had air traffic control back in operation by 8 pm. So did most radio stations... but not the City's Divisions of Water and Traffic Engineering.

This is especially puzzling because the City has its own electric utility, complete with engineers, expert system operators and line crews. Cleveland Public Power has spent more than $50 million on expansion since 1990. In recent years, CPP has also invested a fair amount to improve the reliability of its older transmission stations and distribution lines. But as many customers learned last night, none of that really matters if the power you're distributing suddenly cuts off, and you have no alternative source to turn to.

Why CPP hasn't done something in the last twenty years to rebuild its own generating capacity is a topic for another day. But at the very least, you would think the City utility could have taken steps to create backup power for the City's own vital facilities.

Wouldn't you?

An alert reader might notice that the last entry in this "diary" is fifty-one days old. It's like this: First I went to a conference. Then a week later I went with family to Yellowstone, where we stayed for two weeks out of range of cell phones, let alone Blogger. When we got back it was already a month since I'd posted, a lot of work was backed up and I just kept letting it slide.

Until now. Hi there. Did you miss me?

Hmmm. Well, anyway...

THE FERRY AGAIN: My personal favorite downtown development project, the Cleveland-to-Port-Stanley ferry, was in the news yesterday with this PD article and a WCPN story. The good news is that the Port Authority is moving forward with its Federally funded feasibility study, and hyping the concept. The bad news, from the PD:

The port doesn't plan to subsidize the service, beyond lobbying for federal money to build a terminal, so it needs to find an operator willing to shoulder the risk.

Now this is bizarre. The Port, which has used its bonds to finance everything from the Rock Hall to the Applied Industrial Technologies headquarters in Midtown, doesn't want to invest a penny of its own resources to draw new international passenger and freight business to its own docks!

Stay tuned, more to come.