Energy Crisis Conference: Red tape and "local selfishness" have been blamed for holding up plans for new power lines in Europe aimed at avoiding a repetition of the electricity blackout which struck Italy in September 28th.
A satellite image of Europe taken at 3.30 a.m. that night shows the entire Italian peninsula in darkness, though this did not last as long as the more extensive blackout that struck New York and the north-eastern US and Canada six weeks earlier.
Mr Antonio Tiberini, president of the European Energy and Trade Association, told a conference in Geneva yesterday that the supply of electricity had become a "supra-national task" and needed to be looked at in an EU-wide context.
He said it was essential for the safety of supply that network managers would have the support of national and regional authorities for the construction of new power plants and electricity transmission lines.
But despite the "immense benefits" of reducing or even eliminating bottlenecks and overloads on the existing European network, plans to create new transmission lines often were held up "because of local selfishness and red tape".
In Ireland, the ESB has faced intense local opposition to proposed new power lines, notably in the Cork harbour area, and has had plans for another major power line in Co Donegal rejected on environmental grounds.
The conference, organised by FEDRE (the European Foundation for Sustainable Development of the Regions), was told that there was a need for a "control tower-type entity" to take charge of the situation.
Mr Roberto Borghini, general manager of AlpEnergie Italia, said such a supra-national agency would be given the task of co-ordinating the flow of energy across Europe with the aim of preventing the spread of power cuts. Otherwise, he warned, a power cut of apparently modest magnitude "entails the risk of spreading rapidly across far wider areas, bringing in its wake potentially disastrous results for communities and companies alike".
Mr Borghini said it was of the utmost importance that credible initiatives were taken "to prevent this sort of thing from happening", and these would involve "reconciling local vested interests with those of the nation as a whole".
But another Italian speaker, Mr Giovanni di Stasi, said there was nothing any government could have done to prevent the September blackout, and he suggested the development of local initiatives based on renewable energy.
