What A Storm 93 Million Miles Away Means For Your Power

Our most important piece of infrastructure–the grid–is also the most vulnerable to an unpredictable, strange kind of weather. Severe solar storms could knock out power to millions of Americans. And critics say new regulations don’t go far enough to protect the grid.

Why Smart Meters Don’t Make A Smart Grid

In 2009, President Obama promised to modernize the electric grid, using stimulus money. The new power grid would be smart and efficient, bringing the tech revolution to electricity. It would incorporate more renewable energy. It would have the ability to fix blackouts more quickly. And, it would save customers a whole lot of money. So whatever happened to that plan? (Blackout: Reinventing the Grid #3)

When The Largest Machine In The World Fails

If you could peer behind an electrical plug in your house, you’d find a massive network of transmission lines and power plants and a whole army of people bringing power to the socket in real-time, 24 hours a day. It’s the largest machine in the world: the power grid. Most of the time it operates invisibly, in the background, but when it fails, it often does so memorably. To most people, those outages seem like isolated events, but when you look at the trend, they’re not. (Blackout: Reinventing the Grid #1)