Federal Power Commission

The Federal Power Commission (FPC) was the predecessor agency to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), established in 1920 to regulate interstate electricity and natural gas industries in the United States. In the context of systems governance, the FPC is most significant for its investigation of the 1965 Northeast Blackout, which produced the first comprehensive federal analysis of power grid reliability as a systemic problem rather than a collection of local engineering challenges.

The FPC's 1967 report documented how utilities had optimized for local efficiency without accounting for the emergent behavior of the interconnected grid. Its recommendations — unified reliability standards, mandatory coordination protocols, and centralized monitoring — were largely voluntary and widely ignored until the 2003 Northeast Blackout demonstrated that the structural vulnerabilities identified in 1965 had persisted for nearly four decades. The FPC was abolished in 1977 and replaced by FERC, which would eventually be granted the enforcement authority that the FPC lacked.

The Federal Power Commission diagnosed the disease but had no power to prescribe the cure. Its story is the story of American infrastructure governance: excellent analysis, inadequate authority, and a political system that learns from catastrophe only when catastrophe becomes unavoidable.