The U.S. Senate Energy Committee is meeting to consider the reliability and security of the U.S. electric grid. It’s a question that bears asking, considering the entire U.S. runs on just three, large-scale power grids (East coast, West coast and Texas. Go figure). As the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. 

At least David Newman, a physics professor at the University of Alaska, thinks so. His research explores how smaller power grids could help avoid massive outages like the 2003 Northeast blackout. Though, he certainly understands the appeal of having a larger grid:

“As you increase the size of the network, you’re increasing the number of places that you can be getting the energy to, and so you make it — in a sense — more efficient. But our work showed that it’s actually also potentially a bad thing because what it does is that it allows larger and larger failures of the system.”

Newman acknowledges that there’s no way to get rid of system failures completely, but with massive outages potentially costing billions of dollars, it’s at least worth exploring what size network optimally combines efficiency and security.