It's been two years to the day since a transmission line failure in Ohio led to a now-infamous blackout that left much of the Northeast in the dark. Today you're reading this article using electricity from a grid that has changed little, if at all, to prevent similar blackouts. Does the long-awaited comprehensive energy bill provide a solution?

Two major provisions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 indicate that the administration believes more transmission lines are the answer. First, the bill grants increased authority to the federal government in disputes over the placement of new transmission lines. The government can declare imminent domain to allow necessary lines to be built, immune to private landowner court battles that can tie them up for years. Second, the bill calls for a US$217 million high-voltage transmission line that would run underground to serve the Northeast.

Transmission lines are part of a century-old philosophy of centralized power production. Large lines connect regional utilities with large power plants using coal, natural gas, or atomic reactions to generate high-volume electricity.

Today's advanced technologies have led to recommendations for a much more sophisticated and resilient approach: distributed generation. In this approach, many small power production sources are tied together with a smart grid. The failure of one plant, or one small part of the grid, would not be catastrophic. In addition, the distributed sources of energy can be as small as a single wind turbine.

Various high-level groups, including Pacific Northwest National Laboratories and Bonneville Power Administration, have been developing the components of the smart grid. Their project names, including "GridWise," "IntelliGrid," and "EnergyWeb," are suggestive of technologies perfected in the growth of the internet and telecommunications networks.

On this anniversary of the Northeast blackout, a group of thought leaders at the opposite end of the country are promoting a plan to get started now with these grid components. The existing Northwest grid would be upgraded using a new generation of equipment and software that would monitor the grid and make adjustments quickly.

But the energy bill is supporting the status quo. Will more steel towers make the grid more resilient against equipment failure, weather, or attack? Probably not by large measure, unless their technology is significantly better than what Edison started with a century ago. Unfortunately, the concept of a self-healing grid modernization is a distant vision.

"I'd venture to say that we're five to ten percent of the way there, but not as the result of one centralized orchestrated effort," says Zarko Sumic, a utility industry IT analyst at Gartner Inc.

What about the other 90 percent? The comprehensive energy bill does not call for modernization of the grid in any specific terms, much less back a particular technology.

Acting Undersecretary of Energy David Garman says that no single technology or approach provides the answer. Instead he explains how the bill offers a carrot and a stick to grid operators:

"What the bill does really is first of all require mandatory reliability standards," Garman told NPR in a recent interview. "It also provides for incentive-based rates that promote new investment in transmission."

That's a beginning. Meanwhile, hundreds of less-publicized blackouts have hit every region of the U.S., and they're not likely to end any time soon. Centralized generation is a system of interconnected points of failure. A weakness in any one of them can bring down several others, as it did in the Northeast two years ago.

"We will always have blackouts, and there's nothing we can do to ensure one hundred percent reliability," Garman conceded, "but what we want to do is to limit the frequency, scope and duration of any blackout we might find in the future."