Story thread · 3 reports / 3 sources

Our electric grid wasn’t built for this kind of demand

fastcompany.com · 15dShare

The U.S. electric grid is the largest and most expensive machine on the planet. Its interconnected pathways cover nearly 7 million miles, serve 400 million customers, and its value is placed at about $1.5 trillion. To build it today, the grid would cost almost $5 trillion. Despite that high price tag, the grid in its current form was built for a different era—one defined by centralized generation, shorter transmission distances, and long planning cycles aligned with steady, predictable load growth. That era is over. The grid is the bottleneck The grid wasn’t designed for the rapid acceleration in power demand that we’re seeing today. In addition, the industry that built the grid hasn’t changed how it deploys infrastructure in decades. Manual processes, legacy machinery, and construction methods have not fundamentally changed in decades. Expanding grid capacity has never been more urgent, yet we’re using outdated tools to do so. The difference is not simply that grid demand has surged;

First report: Massachusetts EV Drivers Can Sell Extra Energy to the Grid Under New Program — gizmodo.com, 17d