In August 2003, cascading electric blackouts across the northeast United States left roughly 50 million people without power and cost billions of dollars in economic losses. That incident called into question the reliability of America’s electric power grid.

To the extent anyone still had doubts, that question was answered decisively by the prolonged power outages in New York City that followed Hurricane Sandy. The interconnected system of transmission and distribution networks commonly known as America’s “electric grid” is broken.

“The North American energy grid is aging, increasingly fragile, buffeted by deregulation and market forces, stressed by relentlessly increasing demand, operating at near capacity with decreasing staffs and reliant on electronic components,” according to Paula Scalingi, an expert on critical infrastructure protection.

via Natural Gas: America’s Future Electric Grid? – Forbes.