The continent-spanning network of generators, transmission lines, transformers, and substations that carries electricity from where it is made to where it is used — commonly called the largest machine ever built — and now the central chokepoint of the transition to clean energy.
On the evening of September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison threw a switch in a small brick building on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, and electric lights came on in a few dozen offices and homes within about a mile. It was not the first electric light, and it was not the first generator. What was new was the system: one source of power, wires running to many customers, a bill at the end of the month. Edison had not just lit a building. He had invented a new way for a civilization to organize its energy — and that system, grown from a city block to a continent, is the grid that runs everything today.