Why blackouts, power outages are becoming more common

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America is being hit by a huge surge in blackouts — and it's only going to get worse

. As a result, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gradually streamlined the nation's electrical grid as part of the New Deal into publicly owned regional organizations. And local commissions were given clear authority to regulate the system and hold people responsible for failures.

When Carl Wood was on a utility maintenance crew, he said every power plant would be overhauled every four years.Carl Wood, a former commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission, explained that for the next 60 years,"the local utilities controlled all the parts of the system," so"it was very easy for them to predict how much power was going through the high-voltage lines.

But that system of local control over the grid began to erode in 1992 when Congress passed the federal Energy Policy Act. This policy established a wholesale energy market and deregulated power generation so new entities could enter into competition with the existing local utilities to sell the energy produced at their power plants. The government encouraged competition for the new market by incentivizing private utility companies while constricting existing utilities.

Driven by an ideological conviction after the Cold War that the future belonged to free and deregulated markets, these policies were designed to expand private markets into new frontiers. In reality, the laws created a complicated web of different private and public entities managing a chaotic electrical grid. In Ohio, for instance, residents buy their electricity from a private company like AEP, which generates electricity and distributes it to many parts of the state.

 

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Where?

Yup

Not to mention that privatization of energy in some states--for example in CA the private sector handling electricity is unable or unwilling to do the upgrades needed to keep the energy flowing & safe from causing forest fires (see the Camp fire & others.)

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