Fighter jets scream over Columbus Air Force Base, a sprawling military facility in eastern Mississippi that is especially busy these days training aviators for the war on terror. But for all the high tech aeronautics on display overhead, the bustling Air Force base often relies on an old-fashioned diesel generator to keep radar and communications humming and the jets from colliding. That's because the region's antiquated, overloaded power grid dishes out 25 blackouts a year, as well as another hundred or so voltage fluctuations that crash sophisticated flight simulators.

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