Living in Cincinnati, I have become well acquainted with the National Football League's (NFL) "blackout rule." This rule states that if a game is not sold out by the Thursday before a home game (actually, 72 hours before a game for Monday and Saturday games), the game will not be shown on local television. I don't think the policy is necessarily fair, but I understand the thinking behind the rule --- why show a game on local television if the home team can not sell out the stadium? However, I think there are some extenuating circumstances this year that Commissioner Roger Goodell needs to consider.

First things first. At a meeting on Thursday with NFL writers, Goodell said as much as 20% of the NFL's games could be blacked out this season. Goodell noted that as few as 80% of this season's games will be carried in the home team's market --- a far cry from the 95% of the games that have been carried in the local markets in the past four years. In fact, last year just nine of the 256 regular season NFL games were blacked out for the home team.

New York City energy supplier Consolidated Edison of New York (NYSE: ED) is in the midst of an ambitious $1.4 billion investment program to ensure uninterrupted electricity delivery even during summer peak demand months. Con Edison is investing in upgrades in both its infrastructure delivery system and its emergency response system. On Long Island alone, Con Edison has spent $90 million to upgrade facilities in order to prevent another blackout like the one that hits Queens during summer 2006. Con Edison has inspected 6,000 electric structures; installed 25 miles of secondary underground cable; installed 101 network transformers; and added microprocessor relays to detect equipment malfunctions promptly.

Queens was not the only borough to receive attention. Con Edison spent almost $500 million on construction of three substations in the Bronx and Manhattan; allocated $739 million for distribution system upgrades and $137 million for transmission upgrades. Con Edison will spend $7.5 billion over the next five years to upgrade its transmission and distribution system, as well as to add capacity. Electricity demand in its service area has grown annually by close to 200 megawatts, the equivalent of adding an additional 200,000 homes every year to the grid. For summer 2007, Con Edison has projected a peak load of 13,575 megawatts, of which 80% is reserved for New York City use.

In case all these upgrades nonetheless fail, Con Edison has also beefed up its emergency response system, including an enhanced system for tracing outages; the installation of 500,000 smart meters that can automatically send outage messages; new procedures for dispatching repair crews; and 250 new telephone lines to tell them where they need to go.