Stories
Guided tours of the North American power grid on the Wattlas map, each a series of stops with the history behind them.
All stories
- History of the grid: From Pearl Street to Data Center Alley, twenty-three places where the grid changed shape. 23 stops.
- History of renewable power: From a Vermont hilltop in 1941 to the wind, sun and batteries now filling the queues, twenty-one places where renewable power came of age. 21 stops.
- History of nuclear power: From a squash court in Chicago to the reactors rising in Wyoming and Tennessee, twenty places that made American nuclear power. 20 stops.
- History of coal power: From the largest turbine in the world in 1929 to data centers rising on old coal ground, fifteen places where coal built the grid and where it is now letting go. 15 stops.
- History of outages: From the 1965 blackout to Hurricane Helene, the failures that darkened the grid and the lessons each one left behind. 14 stops.
- History of gas power: From flares on the Texas Panhandle to the largest source of American electricity, thirteen places that made gas the grid's fuel. 13 stops.
- The retirement wave: The coal and gas plants scheduled to close by 2030, and what is rising in their place. 7 stops.
- Direct current: Long DC lines, and the seams between the grids. 7 stops.
- The hydro giants: The biggest machines on the map run on falling water. 6 stops.
- Powerhouses: A desert nuclear plant, a coal plant on the plateau, a steam field, a mountain battery and an oil field. 5 stops.
- The Eastern Seaboard: Generation, transmission and the data centers they feed. 4 stops.