This past January, Tennesseans received a chilling reminder of how electrical power actually works… and where it fails. Winter Storm Fern blanketed Middle Tennessee with heavy ice, tree branches buckled, power lines snapped, and a peak of 230,000 households were left without power in freezing temperatures. Statewide, 23 Tennesseans lost their lives due to the storm, and for many families, power didn’t return for nearly two weeks. While power plants were operating during the storm, the “distribution grid,” the network of poles, wires, and equipment to move the power from plants to homes, was the failure point that led to the outages.

Before the storm even hit, Nashville Electric Service (NES) had cut its tree-trimming budget by one-third—even though its own internal auditors had warned that untrimmed branches hanging over power lines would make outages significantly worse. Trees were the culprit on nearly every street. Despite operational power plants, Tennessee being home to the first small modular nuclear reactor breaking ground in........

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