Our electric grid wasn’t built for this kind of demand

The U.S. electric grid is the largest and most expensive machine on the planet. Its interconnected pathways cover nearly 7 million miles, serve 400 million customers, and its value is placed at about $1.5 trillion. To build it today, the grid would cost almost $5 trillion. Despite that high price tag, the grid in its current form was built for a different era—one defined by centralized generation, shorter transmission distances, and long planning cycles aligned with steady, predictable load…