Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) is the frequent shout of people who want energy but they want it to come from "somewhere else". The problem is that to get the power from "somewhere else", you have to run high tension powerlines, prompting further cries of NIMBY*. Something has to give.

The power grid is operating pretty close to max capacity, which defeats the purpose of the grid in the first place. Back in 1996, a grass fire in California happened under a high tension powerline. It was a hot summer day so the line was at max capacity. The fire caused an outage and the other lines couldn't handle the load. The result was an outage across 9 states, including Colorado. Odds are something similar happened yesterday - a simple outage in one place caused a cascade of failures across the grid. Fortunately, our outage didn't last as long or affect as many people as this current outage. Still, it illustrated the point that for the grid to work, there has to be excess capacity in the grid to take up the slack when an outage occurs. Unfortunately, powerlines are ugly and no one wants them around, so there's usually a lot of opposition to building new ones.

Building more powerplants is useless without building more distribution capacity. However, we need to look at building more powerplants, too, to meet the rising demand.

* For the record, I wouldn't want a powerline literally in my back yard either. However, I do have one 10 feet behind my rear property line. It isn't the prettiest thing around and there is discussion about burying it. I'd like that a lot but I'm not holding my breath.