Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/nationwide-heat-wave-strains-u-s-power-grid Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Utility companies warned Wednesday that rising demand may place a strain on the nation's power grid over the next few days. An expert discusses the impact of the heat wave on electricity demand and ways to conserve energy. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. GWEN IFILL: Three Augusts ago, 50 million consumers were plunged into darkness in eight states and part of Canada. It was the largest blackout in American history.Now, with temperatures soaring into the triple digits from coast to coast during the last two weeks, Americans are again consuming record levels of electricity. Is the latest heat wave placing new strain on the nation's power grid?For that, we turn to Ashley Brown, executive director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group at the Kennedy School of Government. He's also served as Ohio's public utilities commissioner from 1983 to 1993.Welcome, Mr. Brown. ASHLEY BROWN, Harvard Electricity Policy Group: Thank you for having me. GWEN IFILL: How severe is the electricity crunch this year? ASHLEY BROWN: Well, it's quite severe. The heat wave is extraordinary. It cuts across a broad geographic swath of the United States, and it puts a lot of pressure on the grid and the people that operate it. GWEN IFILL: How would you compare it to 2003, when we went through that big blackout? ASHLEY BROWN: Well, the irony is in 2003, of course, it was not a particularly hot day. There was no record usage. This is a natural development; that was a failing in the system, but that had relatively nothing to do with the weather. GWEN IFILL: Well, when you talk about a failing in the system, describe for us again — I remember at the time talking a lot about what went wrong. It was very complicated, but it involved the electricity grid. ASHLEY BROWN: Yes, it hasn't gotten any easier. It's still complicated. I mean, the problem was, there was — the control room was not getting adequate information in northern Ohio. They were about to pass actually the control onto the Midwest Independent System Operator, who was not up and running. There were some — the lines that fell a little bit towards the trees that hadn't been adequately trimmed.And as a result, you had an outage that should have been localized. There should have been control mechanisms in the neighboring systems to prevent the outage from cascading across the Northeast. But in a number of places, it didn't work. And it moved so rapidly that it blacked out much of the Northeast. In some utility systems, it did work, and they were protected.