From our porch, you can see the pond's surface being gently ruffled by the wind that's also keeping the mosquitoes at bay on this late summer afternoon in central Maine. Each summer, the week or two we spend here at Catherine's family cottage on an island in Goose Pond is a time when we are forced to slow down, enjoy each other and rediscover what's really important in our lives. This year, the quiet, comfortable life we have out here with no phone or electricity is also a most welcome chance to rest up from the Northeast blackout that rocked our world last month and to reflect on its aftereffects.

Out here where the cottage's energy consumption for the entire summer amounts to a hundred pounds of propane and a couple of dozen D-cells, I'm nursing my laptop's batteries and trying to make sense of the political and economic fallout that threatens to do more damage than the blackout itself. Unless something is done, we'll likely see billions spent to patch the most obvious problems without planning for the longer term. That will likely mean more nuclear power, more coal-burning plants and a few new transmission lines built to serve as "arterial bypasses" to provide temporary relief for an overtaxed system. Sadly, we could do much better for the same dollars.

Instead of simply patching our electricity supply's problems with traditional solutions the nation should initiate a Manhattan Project-style program to rethink energy. Rather than focus on generating capacity, we should re-engineer distribution infrastructure. We can model our power grid after the Internet, making it an intelligent and resilient distributed network much more resistant to collapse-and more open to innovation.

The IEEE's new standard for intelligent power generation would allow both small and large generating systems to negotiate how to handle changes in the overall load much as Internet routers handle packet traffic. Besides producing a more resilient network, the system's standards-based open architecture would make it easy and economical for small-scale energy producers to hook up and supplement the existing suppliers. Small-scale producers come in many forms, from conventionally fired or fuel-cell-based co-generation plants at a factory or office complex to homeowners with surplus energy to sell from their solar panels and windmills.

Between dramatically reduced transmission losses and the ability to quickly use wind, solar and other renewable technologies as they arrive, a net-centric power grid would eventually allow us to produce the same amount of power we use today while reducing our dependence on native coal reserves and the natural gas that we import in great quantities.

Equally important, an open generating infrastructure would encourage an unprecedented level of entrepreneurial initiative and technical innovation that far surpassed today's so-called "deregulated" power system. A distributed grid could help create many new industries to repower our economy.

Well, it's time to kayak over to the mainland to file this column at the local cybercafe. Hopefully, we'll have the sense to choose technologies that will keep the lights shining for our grandkids.

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