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Power outages are becoming increasingly common in the United States. The average American experienced more than eight hours of power outage in 2020, with the overall duration of a power outage in the US more than doubling since 2015, according to the US Department of Energy.

“This is not because the grid has changed, but because there is a much bigger threat from extreme weather,” said Alison Silverstein, an independent consultant at the American Council for Energy-Efficient Economies. “And the number of extreme weather events of each type has increased significantly over the last decade, in particular.”

Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to remedy the situation, recent actions would demonstrate that the federal government lacks the capacity to enforce network modernization.

There were a total of 549 policy actions and deployments on grid modernization during the second quarter of 2022, but of the $12.86 billion in investment under consideration, regulators only approved $478.7 million, according to the NC Center for Clean Energy Technology.

“The electrical system is a shared federal and state jurisdiction,” according to Romany Webb, senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “The fact that we have authority divided between the federal and state governments is one factor that contributes to the complexity of such a network modernization and building additional infrastructure.”

Moreover, certain state and regional regulators often have political incentives to resist changes to the power grid.

“The state entity that regulates electric utilities is called the state public utility commission,” Webb said. “In some states, the commissioner is elected. So if we are talking about making an investment that will be very expensive and will increase the utility bill, they may see a lot of resistance from customers about it and that might affect [the commissioners] chances of being re-elected. “

Those directly impacted by network modernization efforts say there are valid reasons to fight the disruptive projects.

“We’re not against solar, but it doesn’t belong on farmland. It doesn’t belong in agricultural zone areas and certainly doesn’t belong on forest lands,” said Susan Ralston, president of Citizens for Responsible Solar. “These projects are very destructive to the land and at the end of the day, we are trying to do what is right in our area. We are trying to preserve the rural nature of our country and really convincing our elected officials that rural character is more important than giving up on developers.”

Watch the video to find out more about why the US power grid has become unreliable.

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