The potential fate of America's electric future can be found on Puerto Rico, where a sustained indifference to improvements, maintenance and innovation brought not one but two widescale blackouts within months — the second covering the whole island.

Some might dismiss the island's struggles as irrelevant to the mainland's far more extensive energy grid, suggesting it was an anomaly on an island in constant need of long-ignored infrastructure investment. But that would be shortsighted. Ignoring these warnings is like shrugging off an incoming Category 5 hurricane. We cannot afford that kind of denial. If we don't act now, the crisis ahead only becomes more difficult and costly to fix.

As we consume more power, analysts predict that in five years our nation will increase its electricity de

See Full Page