In a small Orange County warehouse, a machine fashions fibers of carbon and glass into a composite material that someday may help prevent electrical blackouts.
Composites -- used in high-tech bicycle frames and tennis rackets -- also can be formed into power lines that don't stretch and sag like conventional wires. Drooping wires have been known to hit trees or other objects, triggering electrical outages.
The company behind the technology, Irvine-based Composite Technology Corp., is a small start-up whose shares were trading at about 50 cents on the morning of Aug. 14, the day of the big Northeast power outage. In short order, Composite Technology's stock price leaped to nearly $3 a share before settling in the $2 neighborhood.
Electricity chart -- A chart in Saturday's Business section depicting retail sales of electricity from 1975 to 2000 should have stated sales totals in millions of kilowatt-hours. The chart incorrectly listed the sales in billions of kilowatt-hours.
As the blackout showed, the nation's power grid is stressed out. But science and companies like Composite Technology are poised to come to the rescue.
The federal government, for instance, is helping fund research into replacing power lines with supercooled cables that can carry up to five times the electricity. And some scientists are thinking even further ahead -- ditching power lines altogether and zapping energy to homes and businesses by microwave or laser.
Research into these technologies has been proceeding for decades. But the Northeast blackout, which hurled 50 million people into darkness, has charged up activity after years of declining investment in the grid.
"Ever since Aug. 14, everybody's interest level is much higher than at any time I can remember," said James Daley, who runs a superconductor research program at the Energy Department.
The blackout shined a bright light on weaknesses in the nation's transmission grid, the complex interconnected system made up of more than 150,000 miles of high-voltage wire owned by more than 3,000 utilities.
The grid takes electricity from power plants and, through transformers and substations, moves it to lower-voltage distribution wires that connect to homes and businesses. Much of the equipment is decades old, and the technology has not kept pace with rapidly evolving electricity markets, utility authorities say.
A significant amount of the research in recent years has involved computer systems and devices to better monitor and control power as it flows at the speed of light, and to react to problems in a fraction of a second. Efforts also are underway to ease the strain on the grid by placing power sources closer to customers and by creating intelligent meters, thermostats and appliances that react to electricity prices or emergency instructions.
