national leadership working hard on this problem

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US electrical grid on the edge of failure

the national grid is concerned simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse.

That is according to a mathematical study of spatial networks by physicists in Israel and the United States. Study co-author Shlomo Havlin of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, says that the research builds on earlier work by incorporating a more explicit analysis of how the spatial nature of physical networks affects their fundamental stability. The upshot, published today in Nature Physics, is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse1 (http://www.nature.com/news/us-electrical-grid-on-the-edge-of-failure-1.13598#b1).

The electric grid, which operates as a series of networks that are defined by geography, is a prime example, says Havlin. “Whenever you have such dependencies in the system, failure in one place leads to failure in another place, which cascades into collapse.”

http://www.nature.com/news/us-electrical-grid-on-the-edge-of-failure-1.13598

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Power grid increasingly vulnerable to severe weather,

A decade after a vast power outage shut down the Northeast, the electricity grid remains "highly vulnerable" to blackouts because of extreme weather fueled by climate change, a report by the White House and the Energy Department concludes.

The Aug. 14, 2003, blackout occurred when an alarm failed in an Ohio utility control room, leading to a cascade of blackouts that affected 50 million people from Michigan to Massachusetts. More recent power outages have been caused by severe weather, such as storms in the East and wildfires in the West.

Between 2003 and 2012, 679 blackouts occurred because of weather events, each affecting at least 50,000 customers. Over the same period, weather-related outages cost the economy between $18 billion and $33 billion annually, depending on the number and severity of events.

"The aging nature of the grid — much of which was constructed over a period of more than 100 years — has made Americans more susceptible to outages caused by severe weather," the report said.

The analysis of the power grid, released Monday, was conducted in response to a plan that President Obama laid out in June to combat climate change and better prepare for it. Already, weather shaped by human activity has hit the United States faster than had been predicted, threatening infrastructure, water supplies, crops and shorelines, according to the draft Third National Climate Assessment, a federal report released in January.

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-77009064/

Like the big banks and water/sewage, the entire electrical power grid should be nationalized and taken out of the hands of investors.

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and that's the current grid.

We need lots of new grid to bring wind and centralized solar onto the grid.