In April, 1949, a group of European engineers was welcomed by their American hosts, and presented to the press at a location not far from the White House in Washington D.C. The conference they attended there kicked off a five-week tour of power plants and control centers around the United States. The visitors from Europe, most of them system operators in their respective countries, flew across the Atlantic to see firsthand the American state-of-the-art in the electricity industry. This Technical Assistance (TECAID) Mission was an integral element of the electricity programs set up within the framework of the European Recovery Program (ERP), also known as the Marshall Plan. The overall intention of the ERP with regard to electricity was to expand generation capacity, by building national and international power plants on the one hand, and making better use of new and existing capacity by creating European power pools on the other. These power pools, should be brought about by building both physical and institutional interconnections between countries.

To Paul G. Hoffman, administrator of the ERP, the mission was about more than increasing the amount of electricity available in Europe. In his address to the European engineers, Hoffman named two other important aspects of the TECAID Mission, which also applied to the ERP general. First, increasing the availability of electricity should help increase productivity in industry. Hoffman linked productivity to welfare, stating that it was “impossible for any people to enjoy a better standard of living unless within the confines of that country the people produce more”. At the same time, expanding generation capacity was directly related to economic recovery. The ERP's most prominent advisor on electric power, Walker Cisler, considered electricity to be “one of the greatest resources for the revival of Western Europe”.

The adjective “Western” reflected the absence of Central and Eastern European countries in the ERP. What is less obvious in Cisler's mention of “Western Europe” is that, Scandinavian engineers also did not come to Washington as part of the TECAID mission. In this, the meeting was a harbinger of how Europe would eventually be organized electrically.