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.''