Insert your own Mayan calendar joke here.
Outages are not inevitable. The German power grid has outages at an average rate of 21 minutes per year.
The winds may howl. The trees may fall. But in Germany, the lights stay on.
There’s no Teutonic engineering magic to this impressive record. It’s achieved by a very simple decision: Germany buries almost all of its low-voltage and medium-voltage power lines, the lines that serve individual homes and apartments. Americans could do the same. They have chosen not to.
Of course, he goes on to say that burying the power lines would be a wonderful way to borrow and spend some more so-far-failed stimulus money. But still. Buried power lines. It’s not a bad idea.
