In an Oct. 20 talk co-sponsored by SIIS and the World Affairs Council of Northern California, Philip Zelikow, executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- better known as the 9/11 Commission -- discussed the United States' continued vulnerability to terrorist attacks; the intelligence reforms that are needed to better protect the country; the attacks and accusations he has endured as head of the controversial commission; and his satisfaction that the body's final report has been widely disseminated to the American public, in a book that has become a best-seller. Zelikow's talk was held at Kresge Auditorium on the Stanford campus.

Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and is director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs (also at the University of Virginia), the nation's largest research center on the American presidency. Before assuming his present positions in Virginia, he served in government with the Navy, the State Department and the National Security Council, and then taught at Harvard University. He was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and served as executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former Presidents Carter and Ford. He was also the executive director of the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in the Information Age.

Zelikow's books include The Kennedy Tapes (with Ernest May), Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (with Condoleezza Rice), and the rewritten Essence of Decision (with Graham Allison). He has also been the director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a policy program of the Aspen Institute.

Zelikow's talk was covered by the Stanford Daily and Stanford Report.

CDDRL director Michael A. McFaul weighs in on the mass murderers who seized the school in Beslan, Russia, this month committed one of the most heinous acts of terrorism in world history. Other murderers have killed children, and other terrorists have slaughtered more people, but it is hard to imagine anyone purposely killing this many innocent children in one attack. Russian President Vladimir Putin is most certainly right when he declares that he will not give in to the demands of these killers. Citizens deserve protection, and their killers deserve unflinching justice.

Anton Eberhard writes that South Africa will experience routine electricity blackouts in a few years unless new electricity policy and investment decisions are formulated and implemented this year.

South Africa will experience routine electricity blackouts in a few years unless new electricity policy and investment decisions are formulated and implemented this year.

This is the inexorable conclusion that emerges from scenario and modelling exercises undertaken separately by the National Electricity Regulator, Eskom and large energy-intensive industries.

Growing electricity demand will outstrip existing national supply capacity next year or the year thereafter, assuming a prudent reserve margin to allow for maintenance and unscheduled plant shutdowns.

Hydro-electricity imports, mainly Cahora Bassa in Mozambique, will provide respite for about another year. Thereafter, we need further generation capacity or significant energy savings and demand-side measures.

Eskom has started re-commissioning old moth-balled coal-fired power stations to meet this challenge. Camden, the first plant, will be relatively easy to re-commission and work has commenced. Grootvlei will be more difficult and Komati, the last plant that Eskom plans to re-commission, will be the most uncertain and expensive.

If successful, these old generating stations will give us a breather until around 2008. And then we need new generation capacity.

2008 might seem years away, but investment decisions, environmental impact assessments, plant construction and commissioning take many years. For a hydro-electric or pumped storage scheme, this could take ten years. A coal-fired power station could take six years or more, and gas turbines - two to four years.

If our economy grows faster, or we are not able to implement effective demand-side measures, new power generation capacity might be needed even earlier.

Government is aware of this situation. The President confirmed, in his state of the nation address in parliament in May, that a tender for new capacity will be awarded early in 2005.

The Department of Minerals and Energy has appointed technical advisors to prepare and manage this tender. However, their work schedule indicates that the contract with a new Independent Power Producer will only be concluded early in 2006, and this will only happen if the bid manages to comply with National Treasury's Public Private Partnership regulations. The DME will have to show that Eskom cannot build a new plant more cheaply - an interesting possibility given Eskom's competitive cost of capital and the potential for transfer-pricing with its current portfolio of extremely low-cost generating plant.

Given these tight time constraints, it is not unlikely that we shall have to resort to buying, on an emergency basis, a series of highly expensive, paraffin-burning open-cycle gas turbines.

There is a dangerous assumption that the current tender process for new generation capacity answers concerns about supply security. It does not.

The challenge is not only to manage the current tender process within tight time-constraints. We need to make decisions this year about procuring much more capacity than the approximately 1000 MW anticipated in the current tender.

A likely planning scenario indicates that this year, 2004, we need to make investment decisions on a new pumped-storage scheme, a new pulverised coal-fired plant and a green-field coal fluidized-bed combustor or a combined-cycle gas turbine. In short, we need to start placing orders for a range of new power plant. In ensuing years we shall need to continue to order new plant.

These challenges raise the question of whether a part-time committee of government officials, assisted by consultants, is the most appropriate and sustainable mechanism to continue to procure new power? It also provokes debate about what market structure is appropriate to encourage the most efficient and cost-effective investment decisions?

Following the 1998 While Paper on Energy Policy, and a number of subsequent studies, Cabinet decided, in May 2001, to restructure the power sector by unbundling Eskom's electricity transmission division into an independent company and selling-off 30% of Eskom's generation plants. New capacity would be provided by private investors and an electricity trading market would be established comprising a power exchange and a parallel market for bilateral power contracts and financial hedges. None of this happened.

What is emerging is a quite different market model. In her budget speech, the Minister of Minerals and Energy stated that "the state has to put security of supply above all and above competition especially". The Minister of Public Enterprises has indicated that Eskom will not be privatised and that a strong state-owned utility is important for social and economic development.

Eskom is thus likely to continue to dominate the market. It may even be permitted to build new generation plant. Private sector investment will be permitted only on the margins in the form of Independent Power Producers. They will sign long-term power purchase agreements with Eskom (or with an independent transmission company or system operator, if these are eventually separated form Eskom).

Government will now need to clarify whether the emerging market model for the electricity sector is its preferred model or is merely a temporary measure to secure emergency supplied. This is not a trivial question - for it strikes at the heart of the cost and efficiency issues in the power sector, and will have long-term consequences for electricity prices in this country.

Few remember the controversial electricity price-hikes by Eskom in the late 1970s and 1980s when it made investment mistakes that resulted in huge unused power generation capacity. History demonstrates the potential weaknesses of the old industry model where state-owned monopoly utilities simply pass the costs of poor investment decisions to consumers.

The current tender process is also full of risk. A small number of officials and technical advisors will decide how much new power is needed, using which fuel sources, when and where. While a degree of (once-off) competition might be possible through the tender bids, long-term power purchase agreements could tie-up non-competitive electricity prices for decades.

Plans for a new market structure, where investors have to compete to sell their power in a power exchange or a contract market, have been sacrificed in the face of security of supply concerns.

Periods of supply uncertainty and shortages are never a good time to design and implement new competitive market structures. The long period of large capacity surpluses that provided a window of opportunity for major reform has disappeared. Now we have to patch the current system and prepare for the future.

The default IPP/ single-buyer model that is emerging now requires the establishment of a robust and sustainable institutional structure (probably best attached to the power system operator) that will be responsible for long term planning, security of supply and procurement of generation capacity.

We can avoid future black-outs. But we need to act now.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded a 15-month $1.65-million contract to the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford Institute for International Studies. CISAC's program will be run as part of a joint project with the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey.

CISAC co-director and professor of political science Scott D. Sagan and former co-director and professor emeritus (research) in the School of Engineering Michael M. May are the Stanford co-principal investigators of the new program.

CISAC's portion of the project entails a homeland security seminar and fellowship program, which will bring eight research fellows to campus in 2004-05. Fellows will join CISAC and other faculty to conduct research on some of the most daunting issues confronting the homeland security mission, such as how national and local agencies can learn to cooperate quickly and effectively and how they can learn from past emergencies, real and simulated. CISAC will undertake in-depth scholarly research that can help inform DHS efforts to improve the design and evaluation of future terrorism exercises of national and local response systems.

Scholars will study diverse approaches to learning--and failing to learn--from emergencies, including those of armed forces, medical emergency rooms, police and fire departments. Researchers will also investigate how government organizations can stay ahead of potential attackers in the "competitive learning" situation that terrorism presents--one in which terrorists and law enforcement officials alike try to learn from vulnerabilities exposed in public emergencies.

The DHS research contract resulted in part from CISAC's observation of the spring 2003 State Department-DHS sponsored full-scale exercise called TOP OFFICIALS-2 (TOPOFF-2), designed to prepare national, state and local officials to respond to potential terrorist attacks within the US. CISAC led 11 Stanford scholars in observing and analyzing the exercise involving officials from 25 federal, state, and local agencies. DHS Secretary Tom Ridge received a briefing of CISAC's findings, prepared under May's direction as principal investigator.

Lynn Eden, CISAC associate director for research, will manage Stanford's participation in the new project and mentor the homeland security fellows. Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, assistant professor of law at Stanford, will contribute research on how judicial review processes affect responses to terrorism. Dean Wilkening, director of CISAC's science program, will model uncertainties in biological weapons use, such as effects caused by different exposure rates and different doses of contaminants like anthrax.

The Organizational Learning and Homeland Security fellows chosen for 2004-2005 are Charles Perrow, professor emeritus of sociology at Yale; Marc Ventresca, university lecturer in strategy and fellow at Wolfson College in Oxford's Said Business School and visiting associate professor of organizations and strategy, Graduate School of Management at the University of California-Irvine; Michael Kenney, assistant professor at the School of Public Affairs at Penn State University-Harrisburg; Laura K. Donohue, Ph.D., history, Cambridge University and student at Stanford School of Law; Tonya L. Putnam, J.D., Harvard Law School and Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford; Manas Baveja, a graduate student in the Scientific Computing and computational Mathematics Program in Stanford's School of Engineering and Dara K. Cohen and Jacob N. Shapiro, graduate students in political science at Stanford.