The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

Wrapped up in this is how the utilities established themselves as monopolies and saddled the industry with the long-term inertia a lack of competition too often begets. In part because of its protected status as a regulated monopoly, the grid worked reasonably well from the moment of near to universal electrification in the late 1930s through the end of the 1960s. But when it stopped being true that utility profits were assured by an ever-increasing rise in demand, and as their fundamental strategy of grow-and-build simultaneously faltered, the grid began to slip into a state of disrepair. The utilities, which for so long had thrived on being the least inventive, least flexible, most run-of-the-mill companies in America, didn’t know how to change. This indifference, even from within the industry, when coupled with legislative attempts to make the electricity business more profitable as the digital economy rose to prevalence in the final years of the twentieth century, have made the grid an ever more uneven technology. The parts that can be leveraged to make money get a lot of attention while the rest silently molder.