The supplemental appropriations bill making its way through the appropriations process this week directs an additional $48 billion over four years to the modernization of the electrical grid — its high-voltage transmission, its substation hardening, its interconnection capacity for new generation. The figure will be debated; the necessity will not.

A nation that cannot move its power from where it is generated to where it is needed is a nation that cannot industrialize. The grid that emerged piecemeal from the last century was adequate for the demand pattern of that century. The demand pattern of the present — data centers drawing a hundred megawatts in a single warehouse, electric vehicles charging in suburban garages, manufactures reshoring with their full load behind them — is not the demand pattern the existing grid was designed to serve. The choice is not whether to invest; the choice is whether to invest deliberately and through the public hand, or to suffer the consequences of an under-built system through the slower medium of recurrent failure.

The conditions on the appropriation matter. I would urge: interconnection-queue reform to actually deliver the generation now waiting; transmission siting authority sufficient to overcome local objections to facilities of regional benefit; and a clear federal preference for long-haul direct-current backbones rather than the patchwork the prior decade subsidized. The iron of our day is not the rail; it is the wire. Spend wisely on it.