The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

Before the blackouts began in earnest, apart from a few concerned engineers and environmentalists, among them Amory and Hunter Lovins, not many people cared much about the consequences of this protracted inattention. In 1979, in the wake of America’s second energy crisis that decade, the Lovinses prepared a report for the Pentagon on the state of America’s domestic energy infrastructure. Their conclusion was surprising: national security was threatened more by the “brittleness” of America’s electrical grid than by possible future disruptions in the flow of imported oil. As prophetic as that report would turn out to be, few were really listening, apart from Jimmy Carter, who would lose his presidential power soon after its publication. And so years passed. Decades passed. And time transformed the system the Lovinses had labeled weak and brittle into an even more fragile version of itself.