China's Leading, Europe's Building, America's Stalling: The Supergrid Race Defining the Century

[Dr Alexander MacDonald]We've been lucky. The day could come where most of the world loses electricity at exactly the same time. So we have to modernise electricity centred around the supergrid that protects the flow of electricity because it is life-giving.[Nick Breeze]In this ClimateGen episode, I'm speaking with Dr Alexander McDonald, a former head of climate research at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, NOAA. Alexander outlines the need to urgently upgrade electrical energy generation in the US and around the world using supergrids. The vulnerability of existing grids was illustrated recently in Spain and Portugal, where an outage hit the entire Iberian Peninsula in May 2025.Without a massive transition to resilient electrification, we are all exposed to huge risks posed by power outages. In the next episode, I speak with Dr Sumitra Das about the proposed cooling plan for India. What we have found last year, 37 cities crossed 45 degrees Celsius and with humidity that means 55 degrees to 65 degrees Celsius, real fill that you'd have.90% of the people do not have air conditioning today. Dr Sumitra Das and his colleagues have proposed a national cooling policy plan in an effort to counter the deaths caused by extreme heatwaves. This includes geoengineering techniques that many will find controversial.And yet, as the emissions keep rising, so do the temperatures and the humidity. Thank you to all members and subscribers for supporting this channel. There are more episodes in the pipeline covering interrelated climate topics from experts across the globe.Thank you for listening. Alexander, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to me today. We're going to talk about the whole supergrid proposal that you're very involved in.And I just wanted to ask you to give a brief status quo in the US for electricity generation and transmission and also considering the future demand for, especially when we're talking about new technologies like AI, for example.