From the Lovinses’ point of view, the power outages that occur regularly in the United States regardless of their cause—whether big storms or changing legislation or computer bugs or terrorist hackers—are a natural and utterly predictable side effect of having such a big, centralized electrical grid. “The size, complexity, pattern, and control structure of these electrical machines,” they wrote, “rotating in exact synchrony across half a continent, and strung together by an easily severed network of aerial arteries whose failure is instantly disruptive … make them inherently vulnerable to
...more
