Thousands lost power in triple-digit heat. The fix is a grid with more than one way in.

On the first day of July, with temperatures above 100 degrees, a single vehicle crash knocked out power to thousands of Loudoun County customers. Families with young children and seniors without air conditioning waited for crews in the heat. It was over in hours, and it was a reminder of something most of us only think about when it fails.

Electricity reaches a neighborhood through a path. If there is one path, one accident, one storm or one failed transformer can close it. If there are two, the lights stay on while the first is repaired. Engineers call this redundancy. Residents call it the difference between an inconvenience and an emergency.

Redundancy has to be approved

Here is the part that connects an outage to a board meeting. Every additional path into a community is a transmission line, a substation or a distribution upgrade that someone had to propose, site and approve. These are among the least popular projects in Northern Virginia. Lines are fought at the State Corporation Commission, substations are opposed at county boards, and the result is a grid with fewer ways in than a growing region needs.

The strain is not hypothetical. Two weeks after the Loudoun crash, during the same stretch of heat, the utility reported that it had been minutes away from asking every data center in Ashburn to switch to backup generators to keep the rest of the grid stable.² That is the margin we are living on.

What we ask

We don't ask anyone to welcome a power line through their backyard without questions. Routing, screening and property impacts deserve a real review, and the process exists for that. What we ask is that the review start from the right premise: the homes and businesses already here, and the ones being approved every month, need to be served. Approving the demand and refusing the supply leaves everyone stuck in the dark on the next hot day.

There is a fair way to pay for it, too. The large employers whose demand drives the need for new lines and substations should fund the connections that serve them, and the best projects in this region already do. Done that way, the second path into a neighborhood is built by the growth that needs it, and every home on the line gets the reliability for free.

Reliability is built before the day it is needed. A region that keeps saying no to the wires will keep having days like July 1.