We almost ran out of power this week. Meanwhile, Congress is trying to make it harder to get new power onto the grid.

We almost ran out of power this week. Meanwhile, Congress is trying to make it harder to get new power onto the grid.

We got through the week without any blackouts. That shouldn’t be news, but it is.  Three times this week PJM Interconnection, which runs the 13-state (plus District of Columbia) electric grid that Virginia is part of, issued a “Maximum Generation Alert,” in which it instructed utilities to crank out as much power as possible. That was the fourth such alert this year, twice as many as last year. The prompt this week was a brutal heat wave, but th…