It sounded like many here would agree with it.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2013/06/its-time-to-invest-in-a-21st-century-power-system
A modern power system takes advantage of the latest technologies to meet the growing demand for reliable energy. Increased distributed generation will protect homes, businesses, and industries from cascading blackouts by mitigating the impact of any single power station or transmission line failing. Intelligent grid solutions — such as demand response, advanced inverters, and energy storage — enhance the ability of the grid to ride through potential disruptions, while locally balancing all vital dimensions of the power grid: energy, voltage, and frequency. Importantly, distributed generation integrated with intelligent grid solutions delivers power without sags, surges, or other disruptions in voltage or frequency that currently plague manufacturing lines and sensitive electronics. In addition, modern grids lay the foundation for standalone energy "islands" to provide continuous power for essential services during widespread grid failures, which several universities and research facilities successfully relied on for power during Hurricane Sandy's costly and prolonged outages.
Despite broad claims that renewable energy is unreliable and expensive, the exact opposite has been proven true. As Germany and Denmark have shown, renewables are intermittent but not unpredictable, and superior grid reliability can be achieved even with far higher penetration levels of renewables than the U.S. is anticipating within the next 10 years.
A failure by the U.S. to invest in a 21st-century power system would prove significantly more expensive than the cost of transitioning to a modern power system. The Galvin Electricity Institute estimates that the annual cost of power outages is more than double the annual cost of preventative intelligent grid investments. To even maintain our antiquated power system, massive investments estimated at $673 billion are needed by 2020. Why not invest this money into the creation of a modern power system that is actually capable of meeting the full set of America's energy needs?
The Clean Coalition has developed a roadmap for the United States to achieve a timely and cost-effective modern energy system. The roadmap includes summaries of the key technologies and policy solutions for getting there efficiently. As long as the nation continues to rely on centralized energy generation and over 280,000 miles of transmission lines, the power system will remain overly vulnerable to widespread failures from accident, weather, and intentional attack. It's time for America to invest in a 21st-century power system, rather than spending hundreds of billions of dollars maintaining a pitifully outdated one.
= new reply since forum marked as read