Winter Storm Fern: If a Million Outages Isn’t a Failure, What Is?

“Wow, we really dodged the bullet. Maybe a million customers lost service, but none of the grids went down. Anyway, you can’t really prepare for freak events. Congrats on a job well done!” You can just imagine the imaginary manager of the imaginary US electric grid control center telling that to the frazzled staff after that fierce winter storm dubbed Fern. Of course, a number of power plants (largely gas-fired) stopped operating, power lines went down, and in some parts, even a week later, there was still ...