[uncommonsense]

"Instead of having centralized powerplants costing several billion along with an expensive distribution system, put thousands of these small plants across the country for a distributed power grid of 50 MW plants. But our expensive and tedious process for approving such plants proved too much for Toshiba, and the plant that was supposed to be going live soon may never happen.

You hit the nail on the head. I lived in a neighborhood in Baton Rouge during Katrina and Rita. The older part of my neighborhood had underground utilities. My house was just past the underground sections. Due to lack of distribution redundancy and switching, everyone lost power for at least a week during 99 degrees and 99 % humidity.

There are large inefficiencies in Generation (power plant), Transmission (high power lines), and point-to-point retail Distribution (step down connections).

There are better ways, but unless stakeholders demand their unelected bureaucracies stop protecting statist, monopolistic lobbyists, we’ll all be in the dark.

[sefarkas]

Thanx for using the proper vocabulary. Transmission is high-voltage, and distribution is low voltage. DC area has a load imbalance, generation relatively far from load which makes the power grid less reliable than it could be. See map