The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

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.” As a result, significant power outages are climbing year by year, from 15 in 2001 to 78 in 2007 to 307 in 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. Compare this with Korea at 16 outage minutes a year, Italy at 51 minutes, Germany at 15, and Japan at 11. Not only do we have more outages than most other industrial countries, but ours are getting longer. The average U.S. power outage is 120 minutes and growing, while in the rest of the industrialized world it’s less than ten minutes and shrinking. According to Massoud Amin, a power systems engineer, on “any given day in the U.S. about half a million people are without power for two or more hours.”