The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

It’s the world’s largest machine and the twentieth century’s greatest engineering achievement and we are remarkably oblivious to it.

plant. According to the industry expert Peter Asmus, we rely on twice as many power plants as we actually need because of “the massive inefficiencies built into this system.”

2011. America has the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation—coming in at about six hours per year, not including

blackouts caused by extreme weather or other “acts of God,” of which there were 679 between 2003 and 2012.