electric grid? I mean, what should we be thinking about now?īAKKE: There's two different things that need to happen to the electric grid right now. M MARTIN: So what is the broader lesson here? What needs to happen now with the U.S. You don't expect your wind turbines not to work.īut all of these things are merely slight changes or more care taken to the upkeep of the actual physical infrastructure that then is compounded by the fact that you can't actually import electricity into Texas - not all of Texas, but the parts which have lost power. You don't expect a coal pile to freeze solid so that you can't get the coal into your power plant. So within this tiny kind of electricity community, not that much money is being put into infrastructure, into very simple things that we know we need, which is like a little jacket, for example, that you put on an instrumentation panel which stays outside, right? Because you don't expect the natural gas pipelines to freeze in Texas, right? This is another problem. So there's been a lot of worry or a lot of attention paid to how to make money in this very tiny - I mean, Texas is big, but not compared to, like, the West Coast power grid. And there's a very fierce market - right? - that's happening there too. GRETCHEN BAKKE: With Texas, because they are not connected, because they're making their own electricity for themselves, they've had all of this freedom, right? But at the same time, that means that they've had no oversight. When we spoke earlier today, she explained the problems in Texas are partly due to its independence from the U.S. She is the author of "The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans And Our Energy Future," which examines the history of electrical power and its current challenges. We wanted to learn more about this, so we called Gretchen Bakke. energy infrastructure a D-plus, stating, quote, "without greater attention to aging equipment, capacity bottlenecks and increased demand, as well as increasing storm and climate impacts, Americans will likely experience longer and more frequent power interruptions," unquote. In their most recent report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. infrastructure can be, and so you might wonder if this problem extends beyond Texas. The storm in Texas highlights just how fragile U.S.
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