John Oliver takes a deep dive into the messy, troubling world of America’s power grid

Electricity is one of those things we only really pay close attention to when it suddenly cuts off.

As John Oliver explains at the beginning of Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, this has been happening more and more frequently in the U.S., with extreme weather due to climate change being a major culprit — and due to our increasing electrical use and the added pressure this will place on the grid, it could well get worse in the coming years.

In the video above, Oliver digs in to the history of the power grid, its issues, and why they haven’t been fixed yet, including the difficulties associated with rearranging the grid due to the growing focus on renewable energy (something hampered by a need for more transmission lines, which is in turn hampered by good old bureaucracy).

“The key thing going forward here might be to start thinking about this differently than we currently are,” Oliver concludes. “Because for far too long, whenever we’ve experienced blackouts, we’ve tended to think of it as the power grid failing. But the truth is, it’s not failing us — we are failing it. By asking it to do something that it was not designed to do, in conditions that it was not designed to handle.”

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