How The U.S. Power Grid Is Like A Big Pile Of Sand

Last month, The Wall Street Journal gave us quite a scare.

"The U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine of the country's 55,000 electric-transmission substations on a scorching summer day," Rebecca Smith wrote. It's no secret that North America's three massive power grids, the interconnected systems that transmit electricity from power plants to consumers, are not invincible. The U.S. power grid is, in fact, big enough to fail.

In other words, the grid may be not be the "right" size—big enough to distribute power efficiently, but small enough to prevent widespread blackouts, such as the 2003 blackout that cut power to 50 million people in the U.S. and Canada for two days. So, breaking up the system into smaller grids could reduce the likelihood of power outages, according to a new study in the journal Chaos, published by the American Institute of Physics...