Why Does the U.S. Have Three Electrical Grids?

Electricity is the key to modern life as we know it, and yet, universal, reliable service remains an unsolved problem. By one estimate, a billion people still do without it. Even in a modern city like Mumbai, generators are commonplace, because of an uncertain electrical grid. This year, California once again saw rolling blackouts, and with our contemporary climate producing heat waves that can stretch from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains, they won’t be the last. 

Electricity is hard to store and hard to move, and electrical grids are complex, creaky, and expensive to change. In the early 20teens, Europe began merging its distinct grids into a continent-wide supergrid, an algorithm-based project that IEEE Spectrum wrote about in 2014. The need for a continent-wide supergrid in the U.S. has been almost as great, and by 2018 the planning of one was pretty far long—until it hit a roadblock that, two years later, still stymies any progress. The problem is not the technology, and not even the cost. The problem is political. That’s the conclusion of an extensively reported investigation jointly conducted by The Atlantic magazine and InvestigateWest, a watchdog nonprofit that was founded in 2009 after the one of Seattle’s daily newspapers stopped publishing. The resulting article, with the heading, “Who Killed the Supergrid?”, was written by Peter Fairley, who has been a longtime contributing editor for IEEE Spectrum.