>The mess with the Texas power grid is only the beginning. In the years to come, American infrastructure will fail more and more often, as America becomes less capable of maintaining the core elements of a First World country. >Texas’s struggles are only a standout example of a problem that has been building up for years. Last summer, California suffered rolling blackouts because electrical providers were unprepared for a surge in demand during a heat wave. But the problem is greater than that. America’s electrical reliability has been declining, almost everywhere, for decades. The United States of America now trails competing nations, often dramatically. >According to an analysis by Climate Central, major outages (affecting more than 50,000 homes or businesses) grew ten times more common from the mid-1980s to 2012. From 2003 to 2012, weather-related outages doubled. In a 2017 report, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported that there were 3,571 total outages in 2015, lasting 49 minutes on average. The U.S. Energy Administration reports that in 2016, the average utility customer had 1.3 power interruptions, and their total blackout time averaged four hours