It was hot in New England for nearly two full days this week. Not hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Not hot enough to parch the landscape or to threaten public health and safety. Certainly not hot enough to cause a calamity in the region’s power supply.

As air conditioners and fans cranked into action Monday and Tuesday (until a cold front blew through) New England was under a power warning. Demand edged dangerously close to supply. Radios emitted that emergency screech usually reserved for doomsday. Political leaders and utility officials urged the public to sweat it out in the dark. And, just to prove that there’s always a silver lining for some, spot prices for electricity soared as high as 25 to 30 times the usual megawatt-hour price.

Political leaders and utility officials are quick to blame the weather – who, after all, could have anticipated summer-like conditions the second week of June? It may sound silly, even pathetic, to expect something as notoriously unpredictable as the weather to be utterly predictable, but it’s preferable to admitting to bad planning.

Some 6,000 megawatts of generating capacity, roughly one-fourth of the region’s total, was down for routine maintenance when the mercury started to climb Monday. That’s three times the usual amount. That’s deregulation.

This would never have happened back in the bad old days before deregulation, back when electricity generators and transmitters knew what the other was doing because they were one and the same. The goal of benefiting the consumer by forcing transmitters to sell off their generating plants and creating competition won’t be reached unless the right hand takes a more active interest in the activities of the left.

The place for that to start is ISO New England, the Massachusetts-based not-for-profit corporation established in 1997 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to manage the region’s electric bulk power generation and transmission systems. ISO New England is the only entity that knows precisely which and how many generating plants will be shut down for routine maintenance. It alone has the authority to make generating plants change their maintenance schedules.

Call this a learning experience, but with deregulation occurring throughout the country, it should not be necessary for every regional ISO (independent system operator) to learn the same lesson the same hard way. As ownership of the nation’s generating capacity transfers from local utilities to ever larger and more distant corporate hands, the ISOs must protect the public interest. What the public needs to hear now from ISO New England is that never again will one-fourth of the region’s generating capacity be shut down for routine maintenance. If ISO New England cannot offer that guarantee, FERC has the rule-making authorityto do so.

In addition to this week’s hot spell being not all that unseasonable, the blame-the-weather excuse fails on another count – the generating shortfall caused by this poor timing of routine maintenance will continue through June 26, five days after the official start of summer. But by then winter will be just around the corner.