ASHINGTON, Aug. 15 — The blackout will give new urgency to an energy plan that has languished in Congress for more than two years, lawmakers said today, and they asserted that elements of the plan aimed at upgrading the power grid will gain in importance.

"We simply cannot afford to wait any longer," said Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "Our economy and our way of life are at stake."

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Mr. Tauzin said his panel would open an investigation into the cause of the blackout, convening a hearing on the massive power failures within days of Congress's return after Labor Day. Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat on the Senate energy committee, called for similar hearings in the Senate.

When they return the week of Sept. 2, House and Senate negotiators are to begin already scheduled negotiations to merge broad energy bills that have been stalled since 2001 over a range of environmental, partisan and regional disputes.

The Senate measure became so bogged down this month that Republican leaders, eager to pass something just to start talks with the House, agreed to pass the bill from last year, even though it was written when the Democrats were in charge.

The House and Senate plans contain provisions intended to increase the capacity for power transmission and to protect against widespread failures. But a serious disagreement remains over a plan by a federal energy panel to require utilities to participate in regional power organizations able to share electricity nationwide. Many southern and western lawmakers oppose that approach.

In addition to the disputes over transmission, passage of the overall measure, which grew out of the 2001 energy report by the Bush administration, depends on the ability of its authors to work out resolutions to unrelated fights over oil and gas exploration, subsidies for nuclear power, global warming and other contentious issues.

The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said that the insistence of President Bush and his Congressional allies on approval for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had helped stall measures that could have led to improvements to the power grid.

"President Bush and Tom DeLay put the interests of the energy companies before the interests of the American people by insisting we drill in A.N.W.R. and other environmentally sensitive areas rather than modernize our energy system," said Ms. Pelosi.

Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader from Texas, is a strong advocate of increased energy production.

Republicans said improvements in the power delivery system had been held up by environmental and other resistance.

A spokesman for the House energy panel, Ken Johnson, said: "If the accepted public policy in America becomes `not in my backyard,' there are going to be a lot of people walking home from closed businesses to dark homes in the future."

There was wide agreement that the blackout would give new momentum to the energy bill, which has been a secondary priority of Congressional leaders who for much of the year focused on other issues.

"This outage clearly demonstrates how close the nation is to its energy production and distribution limit," said Senator Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who is chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "I hope that when Congress returns in September the House-Senate conference on an energy policy bill will make rapid progress."

But the prospect of agreement on an energy bill was worrisome to environmental groups, which have opposed both the House and Senate bills and contend that they are backward looking on energy issues.

"Everyone is going to jump on this, and the problem is that neither the House or Senate's energy bill nor the president's energy plan is going to do what it takes to give us a cleaner energy future," said Anna Aurilio, legislative director of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

The electrical provisions of the bill had taken a back seat to issues like oil drilling and gas mileage. But they were followed closely by the industry, state regulators and lawmakers.

To move the Senate energy measure, the leadership agreed to requests from lawmakers, including Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, to seek a lengthy delay in the new transmission market that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has proposed. Mr. Shelby and others say the plan, the Standard Market Design, would usurp state authority and penalize local utilities that have made their own investments in upgrades. The critics prefer new enforceable standards of reliability for the grid.

"It appears," a spokesman for Mr. Shelby said, "that the cascading power outages throughout the Northeast only reinforce our need to focus on reliability and transmission infrastructure development rather than creation of a new national market system."

But Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, senior Democrat on the energy panel, said the blackouts should push lawmakers to consider changes in a grid that has been largely built and regulated state by state.

"Times have changed, and our policies need to change with them," Mr. Bingaman said.

Mr. Schumer urged Congressional negotiators to drop all the electricity provisions from the bill until a cause of the blackout is pinpointed, to make certain that the legislation does not worsen the problems.