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Your Call

Today on Your Call: How does the electrical grid work in the US?

On today's Your Call, we’ll talk about the US electric grid.  Recently, a power failure cut electricity to approximately 670 million people across Northern India.  Could the United States be susceptible to such a widespread outage?  How is our system structured?  What are its strengths and weaknesses?  How are we shifting to a more sustainable grid for our future power needs?  Join us at 10am PST or post a comment here.  Is our current system preventing a real shift to renewables?  It’s Your Call with Rose Aguilar, and you.

Guests:

Clark W. Gellings, professional engineer and a fellow with the Electric Power Research Institute

Carl Zichella, Director of Western Energy Transmission with the Natural Resources Defense Committee (NRDC)

Resources:

Electric Power Research Institute

NRDC Switchboard:The Future of the Grid: Why Modernizing our Nation's Aging Grid is Critical

Reuters: California braces for power-grid test as heat-wave approaches

NPR: Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid

NPR: Power Hungry: Reinventing the US Electric Grid

Energy.gov: Final Report on the August 14, 2003 Blackout in the US and Canada -- Causes and Recommendations

Discovery: ANATOMY OF A POWER OUTAGE

CNBC: US Blackout coming soon?

NPR: India's Power Woes A Classic Story Of Supply, Demand

NPR: A Country Divided: Japan's Electric Bottleneck

Wikipedia: Electricity Transmission

NPR: Germans Confront The Costs Of A Nuclear-Free Future

Wall Street Journal: The Coal Age Nears Its End