Each of these replacements, while helping to protect us from the pollutants and waste produced by earlier generations of power plants, complicates life for the grid, mostly by introducing variability without storage (chapter 1) and radically distributed, privately owned generation without oversight (chapter 8). The legislative actions put in place to streamline and open up the business end of power production and sale further compromised an infrastructure already weakened by age, decades of incompatible patches, and general inattentiveness.
