the grid is not getting better
I want to be clear about something upfront. This is not a rant. I am not pacing around the porch in a tinfoil hat telling you the sky is falling. I have a spreadsheet open. I've been looking at Department of Energy data for the better part of a week. The numbers are not ambiguous.
The U.S. power grid is getting worse. Not in a dramatic, made-for-cable-news way. In a slow, measurable, year-over-year way that shows up in federal data if you bother to look. Most people don't bother to look. The utility companies are counting on that.
what the numbers actually say
The DOE tracks major power disruption events through its OE-417 reporting system. Every time there's an outage affecting a certain number of customers or lasting a certain duration, it gets filed. These reports are public. You can download them yourself. I recommend it, because once you see the trendline you can't unsee it.
In 2013, there were roughly 3,200 reported outage events in the United States. By 2020, that number had climbed to about 3,800. By 2023, it was above 4,300. The most recent data available shows the curve continuing upward. Not a spike. Not a blip. A trend. A decade-long, unbroken, upward trend in the number of times the power goes out.
And that's just frequency. Duration is its own story. The average SAIDI score — that's System Average Interruption Duration Index, which measures how many minutes per year the average customer is without power — has been climbing too. In 2013, the average U.S. customer experienced about 250 minutes of outage per year. By 2022, that number had risen to over 500 minutes when you include major event days. More than eight hours a year sitting in the dark, on average. And that's the average. If you're in a rural area or a state with older infrastructure, your number is significantly worse.
SAIFI — System Average Interruption Frequency Index — tells the same story from a different angle. It measures how many times per year the average customer loses power. That number has gone from roughly 1.2 to over 1.5 in the same period. Doesn't sound like much until you remember that's a national average smoothing out places like Manhattan, which almost never loses power, with places like rural Mississippi, where it goes out every time the wind changes its mind.
These aren't my numbers. This is IEEE data. This is EIA data. This is the stuff the utilities themselves report to federal regulators. I'm just reading it out loud.
the infrastructure problem nobody wants to talk about
The American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. energy infrastructure a C-minus on their report card. That was generous. The average large power transformer in this country is over 40 years old. Some are pushing 50 or 60. These are not things that age gracefully. They're not cast-iron skillets getting better with time. They're complex electromechanical systems with a designed service life that many of them have already exceeded.
There are roughly 55,000 substations in the U.S. The majority of them were built between the 1950s and 1980s. The components inside them — transformers, breakers, switches — were designed to last 30 to 40 years. We're running many of them well past that window and calling it operational excellence.
The transmission system itself — the high-voltage lines that move power across long distances — totals about 160,000 miles. Much of it was strung up during the postwar infrastructure boom. It was good work for the time. But the time was 60 years ago. The lines are sagging. The towers are corroding. The rights-of-way are overgrown because the vegetation management budgets have been cut to protect quarterly earnings.
I wrote about some of the biggest failures in the worst power outages in U.S. history. Go read that list. Look at the causes. It's the same handful of problems over and over again: aging equipment, deferred maintenance, extreme weather hitting infrastructure that was never designed for it, and cascading failures because the system has no meaningful redundancy at the local level.
The grid was not built for what we're asking it to do now. It was built for a country that used less electricity, experienced less extreme weather, and had a population that was more concentrated along existing transmission corridors. All three of those things have changed. The grid mostly hasn't.
the money is going somewhere, just not into the wires
Here's the part that gets me. It's not like utilities are broke. The U.S. electric utility industry generates over $400 billion in annual revenue. Investor-owned utilities — the ones that serve about 72% of U.S. customers — are publicly traded companies with shareholders who expect returns. And they deliver those returns. Reliably. Every quarter.
What they don't deliver reliably is electricity.
Between 2000 and 2023, the average residential electricity rate rose by about 60%. Customers are paying significantly more. But transmission and distribution infrastructure spending, adjusted for inflation, has not kept pace. There's a gap between what customers are paying and what's being reinvested into the physical system. That gap has a name. It's called profit.
I'm not anti-profit. I'm not anti-business. I run this site and I'd like it to pay for itself. But there's a difference between earning a return and extracting one from a captive customer base while the product deteriorates. You can't switch power companies. You can't choose a different grid. You pay what they charge and you get what they deliver, and if what they deliver is 500 minutes of darkness a year, your recourse is to write a letter to your public utility commission and wait.
The utilities will tell you they're investing billions in grid modernization. And they are, technically. But a lot of that spending is on smart meters and software — things that help them manage billing and demand response, which save them money. The boring stuff — replacing transformers, upgrading conductors, hardening substations, burying lines — that work is slow, expensive, and doesn't generate the kind of press releases that make shareholders feel good at earnings calls.
the regulatory capture problem
Public utility commissions are supposed to be the check on all of this. They're supposed to ensure that the rates customers pay are reasonable and that the service they receive is adequate. In theory, this is a sensible system. In practice, the commissioners are often former utility executives or lawyers, the proceedings are arcane enough to discourage public participation, and the utilities have entire departments of people whose only job is to manage the regulatory process in their favor.
The incentive structure is upside down. Utilities earn a guaranteed rate of return on their capital investments. The more they spend on big capital projects, the more they earn. So they're incentivized to spend on shiny new things — big solar farms, new natural gas plants, transmission upgrades that cross state lines and require federal approval — because those generate rate base. They are not incentivized to spend on maintenance, because maintenance is an operating expense, not a capital investment. It doesn't grow the rate base. It doesn't increase shareholder returns. It just keeps the lights on, which apparently is not a compelling enough business case.
This is why the grid keeps failing. Not because nobody knows what to fix. The engineers know exactly what to fix. It's because fixing it doesn't align with how the people who own the grid make money.
the PR versus the reality
Every major utility has a website with a section about reliability. They use words like "commitment" and "resilient" and "world-class." They publish glossy sustainability reports with photos of linemen in hard hats restoring power after storms, which is genuinely hard work done by genuinely skilled people who deserve better than to be used as marketing collateral by the companies that underinvest in the system those workers have to fix.
Duke Energy's website talks about grid modernization. So does Southern Company's. So does PG&E's, which is impressive given that PG&E's equipment literally started the Camp Fire in 2018, the deadliest wildfire in California history, because they didn't maintain their transmission lines. Eighty-five people died. PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. Their stock recovered within two years.
That's not an outlier. That's the system working as designed. The consequences of failure are socialized — spread across customers, taxpayers, and insurance ratepayers. The profits are privatized. The executives keep their jobs or get severance packages that would fund a small town's grid upgrade. The press release goes out. The commitment to reliability is reaffirmed. The SAIDI numbers keep climbing.
I don't say this to make you angry, though it probably should make you angry. I say it because understanding the incentive structure is the first step toward understanding why nobody is coming to fix this. The system is not broken from the perspective of the people who run it. It is working exactly as they've arranged it to work. It's just not working for you.
what weather is doing to all of this
Layer onto this the weather situation and the math gets worse. NOAA data shows that billion-dollar weather events in the U.S. have increased from an average of about 8 per year in the early 2000s to over 20 per year in the 2020s. Each one of these events stresses grid infrastructure. Ice storms. Hurricanes. Heat waves that push demand past what the system can handle. Wildfires that force utilities to shut off power preemptively because they know their own equipment might start a fire.
The grid was engineered for the weather patterns of the mid-20th century. The weather has changed. The grid has not been re-engineered. That mismatch is showing up in the outage data, and it will continue to show up because retrofitting 160,000 miles of transmission lines and 55,000 substations for a different climate reality is a generational project, and we haven't started it in any meaningful way.
Some regions are worse than others. Texas learned this in February 2021 when the entire ERCOT grid nearly collapsed. The Southeast learns it every hurricane season. The West Coast learns it every fire season. But no region is immune. The 2003 Northeast blackout affected 55 million people because a software bug in Ohio combined with sagging lines nobody had trimmed. That's the nature of an interconnected system with deferred maintenance — the failure point is wherever you didn't look.
what slim makes of all this
I sit on my porch and I read these reports and I think about the version of me from a few years ago. The guy sitting in the dark suburban kitchen, listening to his kid cry, assuming somebody was going to fix it. Somebody was going to restore the power, somebody was going to upgrade the lines, somebody was going to make it so this didn't happen again.
Nobody did. The utility restored the power — eventually — and then went back to doing what they were doing before. Nothing changed. The next ice storm hit. The power went out again. The cycle repeated.
Here is what I think is happening, stated plainly. The people who run the grid have no meaningful incentive to make it more reliable for you. They have a regulatory framework that rewards capital spending over maintenance. They have a customer base that can't leave. They have a PR apparatus that converts every failure into a story about heroic restoration rather than systemic neglect. And they have a political environment where serious infrastructure reform is less interesting than whatever is trending that week.
So the grid will continue to get worse. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just a little bit more, each year, in a way that shows up in the data but doesn't generate enough outrage to force change. A few more minutes of darkness per year. A few more events. A few more families sitting in cold houses wondering when somebody's going to fix this.
I'm not telling you to do what I did. Moving off-grid is not practical for most people and I know that. But having a plan is practical for everyone. A whole-home standby generator and a week's worth of fuel is not a luxury. It's the rational response to a trendline that is not going to reverse itself because you asked nicely.
This isn't fearmongering. It's a spreadsheet.