joining me now, paul bledsoe who also served as communicationings director under president clinton, paulhat do we need to get to the smart grid? what are the big things we need here and there? >> part of it is a vision for more decentralized power. chances are when you turn on the power at your house you get power from a power plant that is huge that powers everybody around you. so everybody relies on one power source and one set of lines. and that is why we have these huge cascading outages. now as you said we don't know what caused these problems, but what we know is extreme weather is getting worse because of climate change. and we'll have more and more outages unless we create a more reliable system. and creating a smarter grid. not the perfect one, but a smarter one can help do that. >> and explain to me a little bit. this idea of smart grid, right, sounds great, but also a bit vague. so you talked about, we all get our power from big power plant, a 700 megawatt plant. so what happens with the smart grid? >> think about the current system like a bike wheel. you have a huge power sou