grids. When the Blackout of 2006 occurred, these policy makers said this event revealed the fragility of Europe's current power grid system and called on a formal centralised government. On the flip-side, however, because the power disturbances were quickly contained and dealt with, the power sector spokesperson cited this event as a confirmation of the reliability of the current, transnational power grids and praised the decentralised governance model in place at the time. Security Since the 2003 blackout, the security system had gone unchanged. The security system did not account for an increase of liberalization of electric supply which caused an increase in cross-border trades, which are not properly accounted for when reviewing the security of the system. Also, due to the decentralized form of government at the time, the transmission system operator, or TSO, would each control their own area, and exchange little information with other TSOs. This inevitably resulted in a slow response time to contingencies. To repair these fallacies so something like this would not occur in the future, a new mode of coordinated operation for real-time security would be needed. But in order to do so, those implementing this would need to overcome a series of psychological, organizational, and legal challenges. The alternative of this would be to risk yet another major blackout or run the current system very conservatively, which would cause an astronomical cost to the consumers. See also Cascading failure References External links BBC News report UCTE Final Report Power outages 2006 in Europe November 2006 events in Europe