system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do we keep having power issues such as "lines are down" or "rolling blackouts" or "rolling brownouts".

Should not have the electric company by now figured out some different way or a more rugged set up that will not be affected by the harsh environments?
gpt
In the US (where these sorts of things are more common then many western european countries) power lines and utility polls are **ridiculously old**, since we didn't have the same sort of damage on our land as many european countries in World War II.  So since the lines worked, we kept using them, and expanding them, and so on and so on.

Now we have super old, above ground lines.  We also have pretty harsh weather in many places, which makes it even worse.

Rolling blackouts and rolling brownouts aren't **that** common, and those are caused by too little power generation.

Lines are down almost always because of weather, and that's based on the lines being above ground.  We could put lines underground, and a lot of new construction is underground.  One of the problems with that is that we need to do a massive construction project if there is an issue with the line, which does happen underground sometimes, even if it's less common than above ground.  That cost is not always worth it, and if the above ground polls are working, it's almost always not worth the cost to replace them with below ground.

Also, lines being down is normally visible because we are really bad at telling where outages happen.  Did you know that for most americans, if a line is taken down leading to your house, the utlity company has no idea?  Only when someone calls about it do they send out someone to fix it.

We (I work for a utility) are working on upgrading the electricity grid to fix some of these problems, but it's absurdly expensive so it takes some time.