Imagine that you get up one morning to the sight of trucks and cars cutting across your front lawn, carving a new short cut on their way to the city.  Their new route is a few feet shorter, but your yard is in ruins.  Of course it's far-fetched -- cars and trucks need concrete.  And besides, there are laws to protect your property rights.

But as stories go, it comes surprisingly close to describing the world of electric power transmission.  That’s because electrons obey the laws of physics, not the laws of man.

That's a simple truth that few of us give much thought to when we flick our light switches up as we enter a dark room.  Until we experience something like what just happened to the 50 million people and millions of businesses between Detroit and New York who lost power, that is.

It’s a pity that it has taken this dangerous, frightening disruption in something we have always taken for granted to get us to focus on the issues confronting our electric power transmission grid.  And given its complexity and size, the sudden avalanche of attention and calls for action pose a new danger -- that the cure might be worse than the disease.

But thus far the new attention has been a breath of fresh air, providing a much-needed dope-slap to the regulators, activists, and various utilities and transmission operators who have participated in an arcane debate, mostly outside the public eye, effectively holding up much needed improvements that might have headed off the debacle of mid-August.

Ever since George Westinghouse's alternating current system of power generation prevailed over Thomas Edison's direct current network in the nineteenth century, we've had the ability to site power generation facilities hundreds of miles away from where their output is consumed.  In the decades that followed, this has produced a situation where the eastern part of the country does not generate all of the power it consumes, whereas the Ohio valley generates a surplus.  Power transported over high voltage wires, a ubiquitous part of the modern landscape, makes up the difference.

But adding load at one end and generation at the other puts a strain on the wires in between.  That's brewed a situation that everyone in the industry has known about for years -- the need for more transmission capacity, particularly between the east and the Ohio valley. 

Yet the pursuit of other agendas has frozen efforts to do anything more than simply wish the problem away.  It’s been almost twenty years, for example, that American Electric Power, the nation's second-largest investor owned electric utility, has been trying to build a new high-capacity line across the Appalachians into Virginia.  During that time, the new line's approval has been held hostage to an ever-growing list of demands by those with the power to stop it.

When you consider that transmission lines are typically of very little value to those who lie in their path, and that any regulatory obstacle that blocks even a few miles of wire renders the entire line useless, it seems remarkable that they are built at all.  AEP's line is finally under construction, but many of the engineers who planned it have long since retired.

That regulatory bottleneck might start to clear, if the warning shot fired on August 14 served any useful purpose at all, and it’s not a moment too soon.  The electrons that flow overhead will always take the path of least resistance, whether our political system or our power grid is ready or not.