America’s aging power grid faces new demands
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What are the vulnerabilities of America's power grid?
It's not if, but when the next big power grid failure will happen. Major recent failures have exposed the grid's vulnerabilities from the massive Northeast blackout in 2003 to the deadly Texas power outages during the winter of 2021. Add to that the critical fire risk caused by aging transmission lines. the cause of California's deadliest and most destructive fire that decimated the town of Paradise back in 2018. How can we shore up the infrastructure that powers both our economy and our lives while meeting the needs of evolving demand and supply? Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Monday, March 23rd, 2026. Here to discuss the current state of the U.S. power grid, the challenges ahead, and what solutions might help keep it reliable is Johanna Matthew, an associate professor at the University of Michigan.
What recent power outages have highlighted grid issues?
Thanks for joining me on The Excerpt, Johanna.
And thank you for having me.
As I just mentioned, there have been some major power outages across the US in recent years. Tell me about some of the most worrying failures from your perspective.
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.
How does aging infrastructure contribute to power grid failures?
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.
Johanna, when you step back and look at the U.S. power grid today, aging infrastructure on the one hand and rising demand on the other, what are the biggest problems you see?
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.
What challenges do data centers pose for grid stability?
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. But when there's an outage, you think, oh, something big has happened. And that's when we think of the power grid. So we often focus on the failures as opposed to the successes of the power grid.
Data centers are becoming massive electricity users. Some tech companies are exploring their own power systems while grid operators worry about big clusters of data centers suddenly ramping demand up or down. From where you sit, what kinds of challenges do both of these situations create for grid stability?
This is a great question and one that I'm getting a lot these days. I think with data centers, there's a lot of interesting challenges. There's also some new opportunities. There's a lot of data centers in the queue now. Different companies want to build data centers. It's not clear all of these will come about, but we're often looking at the worst case of building them all out. How is the grid going to supply that? And it's not just a question of sufficient generation, but also sufficient capacity to transmit the power across the network. So I was mentioning before transmission and distribution systems.
How is demand growth impacting the power grid?
Those have to enable power to be transferred from the power plant to these new data centers and other types of large loads.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the vulnerabilities of America's power grid?
0:04–1:00
2
What recent power outages have highlighted grid issues?
1:00–1:44
3
How does aging infrastructure contribute to power grid failures?
1:44–2:31
4
What challenges do data centers pose for grid stability?
2:31–3:51
5
How is demand growth impacting the power grid?
3:51–5:19
6
What role do extreme weather events play in grid reliability?
5:19–7:29
7
How can everyday buildings contribute to grid reliability?
7:29–9:58
8
What innovations can improve the reliability of the power grid?
9:58–12:55
Speakers
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