Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure

Flip a switch; lights turn on. Electricity is reliable enough that you can spend your entire life not knowing how it works. But with limited resources and environmental change, we can't afford to ignore our electric infrastructure. Maggie Koerth-Baker, author of Before the Lights Go Out, explains how our flawed and surprisingly precarious electric system evolved, how it controls what we can do to solve our energy crisis, and what we can learn about the future of energy by studying its past.