About GridClue

The electric grid is America’s keystone infrastructure, the infrastructure upon which all others depend. Water and sanitation plants run on electrically driven pumps. Food distribution systems require refrigeration to keep food fresh and electronic payment systems to transact with customers. Hospitals use electric power—far beyond what their backup generators can provide. Telecommunications systems need continuous electricity and therefore have backup generators, but these have on-site fuel durations of only 24-72 hours. Banking and other financial services use electricity for their computer systems and also rely on telecommunications. Traffic lights depend on electricity and without their operation, roads would quickly become clogged and impassable. Refineries supplying fuel use grid electricity. Gas stations and truck stops rely on electrically powered fuel pumps. Electronic control systems connected to grid power are used in every infrastructure, including the natural gas pipelines that supply fuel to electric generation plants.

Decades of poorly considered policies have left the United States and other countries with unaffordable and polluting energy systems that are at the same time unreliable and non-resilient. A fundamental cause of this failure has been policymakers working in the absence of authoritative facts and without quantified analysis. Cheap energy and decarbonization have been preeminent goals, but explicit consideration of reliability and resilience has often been missing. Poorly informed policymaking increases the risk of long-term blackouts over wide geographic areas. We developed GridClue to bring better information to electric grid decisions.

Please consider giving your financial support to GridClue by visiting the Donate page at the Foundation for Resilient Societies website.