By Jim Krane and John Seewer
The Associated Press

CLEVELAND - With all the headaches involved in commandeering strips of land for new power lines, interest is growing in several new technologies that can wring more capacity out of the existing electricity infrastructure.

Whether they're cables that can carry more juice or digital switches that can make rapid-fire routing decisions, experts say there is no shortage of ways to improve upon the 1960s-era technology that pervades today's delicate electricity grid.

"The existing rights of way are going to be the first areas to be exploited," said David Kurzman, an alternative energies analyst with New York investment bank H.C. Wainwright.

Technology is the easy part. A knottier problem is the regulatory morass the industry finds itself stuck in.

"Most of these problems could be fixed today with existing technologies," said Eric Prouty, an energy technology analyst with Boston investment bank Adams, Harkness & Hill. "It's more a legislative and policy issue than it is a technology issue."

The Department of Energy said as much three years ago.

The agency's report on a wave of power outages that hit East Coast cities in 1999 found that utilities' cost-cutting had "considerably eroded" the grid's reliability.

Now the system is under heightened scrutiny again because of the Aug. 14 blackout, in which a cascade of failures and automatic shutdowns turned out the lights for some 50 million people in parts of Ohio, Michigan, Ontario, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Many feel that the blackout will turn attention toward adding more capacity to the grid - especially in heavily populated swaths of the United States and Canada - but not necessarily by erecting new transmission towers and lines.

Two companies are developing wires made of ceramic-based superconductors that can carry as much as five times the power of current steel-reinforced aluminum cables, while withstanding the high temperatures that produces.

In the shorter term, 3M Co. and other manufacturers have developed high-capacity overhead power lines made of an aluminum-zirconium composite.

Other grid-boosting solutions include software and switches to steer power around bottlenecks and onto less crowded wires, and line sensors that transmit temperature and wind data to a utility control room, telling computers to reduce a load when wind stops cooling a power line, for example, said Luther Dow of the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif.