Johanna Mathieu

And thank you for having me.

Yeah, there's a variety of different types of failures that happen.

There's the really big ones that we hear about, like the one that you mentioned in Texas.

And there's also smaller ones that are always happening to us.

So you may have experienced in your own homes, power outages that last for short periods of time or maybe many days.

And often the ones that we see that are actually happening because our distribution system, the low voltage system that delivers power to our homes, that our utilities take care of that, that

sometimes fails because of weather and so forth, but it's not usually a massive area that's affected at once.

The bigger ones like this one in Texas and also the ones in California and the 2003 blackout that affected a huge swath of the country are because the transmission system failed in some kind of way.

So the transmission are those big poles and towers that you see, very high voltage.

And what can happen there is a small issue can trigger a large cascade that can affect a large swath of the network and those are harder to recover from.

So I think it's a combination of things.

We've had a power grid for over 100 years now.

Some parts of it are very old.

Some parts of it are very new.

We're always adding on to it.

It wasn't exactly designed, but sort of evolved organically over time.

Pieces and parts of it, of course, are designed, but the whole thing as it is together is

is a big evolved system, engineered system that is actually very complex and hard to control.

But we do it remarkably well.

You don't think about the grid too much when everything's working perfectly.