“Wow, we really dodged the bullet. Maybe a million customers lost service, but none of the grids went down. Anyway, you can’t really prepare for freak events. Congrats on a job well done!” You can just imagine the imaginary manager of the imaginary US electric grid control center telling that to the frazzled staff after that fierce winter storm dubbed Fern. Of course, a number of power plants (largely gas-fired) stopped operating, power lines went down, and in some parts, even a week later, there was still no power, and water systems were endangered. But it could have been worse.

We don’t doubt that it could have been worse, but could the damage have been mitigated or prevented, and in the future, can it be mitigated or prevented? As a start, meteorologists first predicted that global climate change would breed more storms and more violent storms at least 30 years ago, and the drumbeat of warnings has only accelerated over time. Admittedly, the electric industry isn’t big on research and development (the percentage of revenue that goes to R&D has been persistently to the right of the decimal point for decades). Yet, presumably, somebody must get paid to keep up on scientific knowledge and brief the board of directors, unless they don’t want to know. However, the North American Electric Reliability Corp, the industry’s own reliability watchdog, has been putting out warnings, too. In its December 2024 reliability report, it listed 11 of the 20 reliability areas as heading into an elevated or high risk rating within five years, and its December 2025 winter report warned of tight margins of safety. That situation did not just happen. It built up over time.

Why? Well, we would argue that restructuring of the industry, which took place at the beginning of the century, created a far more fragmented electric utility system, in which, in some places, as many as seven entities share the production, delivery and regulation of electricity. Basically, failure of any one of those entities can affect reliability or bring down the grid, but nobody is in charge of assuring that all these various entities work to the end of providing reliable service. To further complicate matters, the various components of our electrical system rarely have to take either financial or moral responsibility for lapses in service, unless the lapse is egregiously outrageous, such as burning down a large swath of the service territory (i.e. California). As a final problem, in order to create more competitive markets, restructuring led to enlarged and more complicated regional systems, which, we suggest, increases the likelihood that any failure will affect many customers at once.