Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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.
Chapter 4: 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.
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Chapter 5: 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. And I also want to mention, we've been talking about data centers, but large load growth. Load growth is something that we always are dealing with in the power grid. Years ago, it was air conditioner growth. More recently, we've talked about electric vehicle growth.
Now we're talking about data center growth. They all present similar problems, but different problems. So as you mentioned, some data center companies are thinking about building generation We say behind the meters or at their site so that they can supply some of the load themselves. And that helps because it solves some of these bottleneck challenges with respect to the grid.
Even if we have sufficient generation on the grid, if we can't get the power to the data center, it helps for the data center to have some things to generate power on its own side.
But I think a big issue here that we face is that whenever we connect anything big to the grid, either a new generator or a data center or something else, we have to run something called an interconnection study to determine when we do that connection, are we going to be able to supply power? Is it going to be reliable? Is it going to affect grid stability, et cetera?
And those studies take a while to run because you're doing a lot of engineering calculations to figure out if everything's going to work. And that's why you're seeing some kinds of hangups now where Things are taking a long time and then companies want to build their own generation to be able to expedite that process so that they don't look as large of a load to the grid.
What other sources of demand growth are starting to matter for grid operators? You mentioned air conditioners and electric cars. Which ones are hardest to plan for?
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Chapter 6: What role do extreme weather events play in grid reliability?
That's a great question too. Electric vehicles certainly is something we talk a lot about. We also have been talking a lot about electrifying heating, like heat pumps, and also industrial processes that use heat that traditionally use fossil fuels to generate heat, but now we can use electricity for that as well.
Companies and homeowners that want to consume more renewable power, green power, often want to electrify things that traditionally use fossil fuels. So all of these lead to load growth. And so I work on a variety of these different topics, including thinking about converting our home heating and cooling systems into electric systems. So replacing that gas furnace with an electric heat pump.
Extreme weather like that 2021 winter storm in Texas is no longer a rare stress test. It's becoming routine. So how does that change the way grid operators think about reliability and risk?
I think it changes a variety of things. So we always are very risk averse in how we operate the power system because we want to make sure that failure has a very low chance of happening. We don't want power outages to happen and for people to experience them regularly. So we often operate the system very far from any chance of an outage.
And when outages happen, it's sometimes because we didn't forecast a situation, right? So either something happened that has never happened before, something was unforeseen, or these extreme weather events that we just haven't experienced before happening at a degree or at a scale that we haven't seen before. There's a variety of ways we can change how we do risk planning.
We can be more risk averse, which means basically bulking up our system, generating more power, building more power lines, all of that, so that we can make sure that we have a higher margin towards any kind of failure. We can also control the power grid more intelligently.
so that we can do more with the infrastructure that we already have for example in my work i look at how to make the demand side of the grid so our consumption more flexible so instead of just turning on the lights turning on the tv turning on my air conditioner whenever i want that electricity are there ways to do that a little bit more intelligently so that my load can be shaped to match when power is available in the system to react to system needs
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Chapter 7: How can everyday buildings contribute to grid reliability?
And some people frame this as a little bit scary, like you don't want the utility company playing with your air conditioner and changing your temperature set points in your house. But you can do this in very intelligent ways where nobody would notice the impact because your house would be comfortable and you get to turn on anything you wanted.
Basically, just be small tweaks on when that happened. And that makes the whole system much more efficient. reliable and resilient so that you're basically making the demand side as responsive as the supply side of the system. And this is what we mean when we say flexible electricity demand.
Many people tend to think grid reliability lives at the power plant or transmission level. How much of the solution could actually come from everyday buildings and devices and what would have to change to make that work?
Yeah, that's super exciting. That's exactly the sort of thing that I work on. So I think a massive resource could come from the demand side, the buildings, the electric vehicles, the data centers themselves that we're worried about. All of these things can provide flexibility to the grid.
There's technical questions around how to do that because like I mentioned before, you don't want to bug people too much by manipulating their air conditioner or their electric vehicle charging and have their car not charged when they're ready to go. But all of these loads are flexible in the sense that you just want some service satisfied. You want your vehicle ready to go.
You want your home comfortable and that's all you need. You don't actually care about the exact timing of power consumption. So the trick is that I don't want every home individually to look like a flexible load, a power plant itself, but I want to aggregate large numbers of these load side resources together. and collectively they can behave like a power plant.
So we call this a virtual power plant where instead of flexibly producing power like power plants do, we're flexibly consuming power and that helps balance the grid because the grid has actually very little storage in it. So you always need to make sure supply and demand are balanced. And you can also do this with data centers.
So you can shift data center loads across the grid to different locations. You can also change when you do the computing in a data center and shift that slightly over time. And again, make that resource look flexible to the system. And then it looks like a virtual power plant as well.
The internet is awash in headlines that say the grid is heading towards failure. Johanna, from where you sit, what do those headlines miss?
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Chapter 8: What innovations can improve the reliability of the power grid?
We know how to better control our grid to optimize operations. We have a lot of experience with fast load growth in the past from air conditioning load growth, but also even before that, industrial processes, manufacturing in the 1950s and 60s and so forth when our economy was booming on the manufacturing side. So all of these things
taught us how to build out the grid, make it more reliable, more resilient, and we can react to these things. I think a key here is we need to invest in a stronger grid and one that is more controllable and able to react to things that might come.
Regarding reliability of our power grid, what do you think most people need to understand?
I think the key is when we think reliability for the grid, we think immediately of outages at our home. And I think a lot of those outages are triggered by small local things. Like it could be an animal on a power line, choose something they shouldn't chew. or a branch hits a line.
Those are things where our utility companies are responsible for ensuring that these systems are maintained and properly built out to serve customers. And usually we can recover from those things quickly. The big headlines where we talk about reliability when these massive outages happen Those are different sorts of issues that are more systemic that we have to fix at a higher level.
And we really need to be thinking about cross coordination across regions of the country where the grids are operated by different entities. And there's an additional layer of electricity markets on top of that. So reliability is a very complex issue at the national level. And it's different at the local level where it's also very complex, but there's different levers that you can pull.
Johanna, thank you so much for making the time to join us on the excerpt.
Thank you so much. This was fun.
Thanks to our senior producer, Kaylee Monahan, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA Today's The Excerpt.
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