America’s Power Grid

The biggest machine on Earth delivers more than $400 billion of electricity a year across nearly 7 million miles of transmission and distribution lines. It’s the U.S. power grid, an interconnected system of generating plants, wires, transformers and substations that keeps the lights on for the homes, offices and factories of the world’s largest economy. It’s also an aging dinosaur that sorely needs an upgrade to its more than $1 trillion in infrastructure. Improvements would make the grid more r