Rock Doc

Some say it’s the most complicated machine we’ve ever built. We rely on it not just each day, but each moment of each day. It reaches into our homes, factories, offices and stores. And at times it’s surprisingly fragile and subject to massive failure.

I’m talking about the electrical grid. We’ve recently seen it tested by Superstorm Sandy. And I’ve been reading up on it in several sources, including an interesting book appropriately called The Grid by Phillip F. Schewe.

I think of the grid as that miraculous machine that starts with energy sources like coal or water behind a dam and ends up wi...