The enormous blackout that left 50 million people along the US East Coast without power occurred 10 years ago this week and Scientific American spoke with electrical engineer Jeff Dagle, a member of the task force and a specialist in power-grid resilience at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, to find out what caused the failure and what’s been done to bolster reliability since.

The interview touches on many important topics, but we found this discussion about how increasing distributed generation impacts the grid and utilities particularly interesting:

“The infrastructure itself is a very complex machine. And we’re integrating a lot of variable generation, wind and solar and things like that. We’re seeing a lot more natural gas because of its price and the retirement of coal-fired power plants. There are also new types of loads we haven’t seen before [like electric cars charging at night.] There are a lot of changes we’re going to see going forward and we’ve already been seeing. That change creates risk.

Are we on the threshold of some sort of real major disruption if the price of photovoltaics drops to the point where nobody wants to buy power from utility companies and just self-generate? What is the grid going to look like then?

Personally, I believe we want a big grid with the ability to pool resources. I don’t believe we’re going to abandon that, but that model is going to face some business challenges. Utilities that operate the system are going to be facing some fundamental challenges to continue to do so. It’s going to take a lot of effort by everyone from regulators to customers to suppliers to work that out.”