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, 26th.

Here to discuss the current state of the U.S. power grid.

The challenge is ahead and what solutions might help keep it reliable?

Is Johanna Matthew, an associate professor at the University of Michigan?

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 U.S. 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.

The bigger ones, like this one in Texas and also the ones in California and the 2003 blackout

...