From the well-lit and air conditioned vantage of a developed nation, it's tempting to view India’s massive blackouts last week as a groan from a rickety and overtaxed power grid—but don’t be fooled. Our own aging U.S. systems are primed for failure, experts say.

The exact mechanism behind India’s two widespread outages on July 30 and 31 is unclear, but there’s speculation that the likely cause was a failure to balance capacity with demand, causing a cascade of generator shutdowns as system safeguards kicked in to protect each generator from damage. While the result was the world’s first and second largest power failures, affecting 620 million and 370 million people respectively (according to the Associated Press), it’s a far cry from being the real problem.

Issues plague the Indian power system (for an excellent roundup, see this Dot Earth entry on the outages) but chief among them are the inability to make enough electricity to meet demand, fixed-pricing schemes and outright theft, and the failure to invest in needed infrastructure.

In this last issue, especially, India is not alone.

“Our day-to-day interactions are guided by technologies and innovations that rely upon the power grid,” writes Aaron Jagdfeld, president and chief executive officer of Generac Power Systems in Forbes. “But as we continue to develop technological mastery, our power grid is aging and fragile, and its susceptibility to outages means our way of life could break down in an instant.”

In the wake of the outages, much was made of the disparity between India’s ambitions to be a world player and its willingness to build the infrastructure to support them. According to Jagdfeld, the United States suffers from similar denial.

“Power quality is the measure of reliable power in our homes and businesses, and it has been declining steadily since 1990,” he writes. “During this time, demand for power has increased by 25 percent, but the infrastructure needed to transmit power to homes has increased by a mere 7 percent. We have become a digital society, but are burdened with an analog power grid—one that is inefficient and susceptible to weather, surging demand, and even terrorist attack.”

This fragility was evidenced most recently last September when an Arizona Public Service employee made an error that took a down a single transmission line, eventually leaving 2.7 million people in three states without power. While that blackout was found to be caused as much by lack of communication as it was by the infrastructure, it underscored the impacts of shutting off the juice to our hyper-wired world.

Hardening the grid against outages would be expensive. Jagdfeld puts the price tag for overhauling the American grid at two trillion dollars, with no plan in place or apparent political will to even begin that mountainous task. Meanwhile, he estimates the U.S. economy loses $104 to $164 billion per year to power outages.

And grid fixes aren’t all that are needed to move us into the future, writes John J. Licata, founder of clean energy consulting company Blue Phoenix, for CNNMoney. Americans need to focus on changing their consumption habits—perhaps with the help of technology that shows how much juice our gadgets are drinking. We also need to find ways to store energy from alternative sources.

“We need to develop more advanced and cost-effective battery technologies to help store power,” he writes. “We also need to implement management systems which allow power to be consumed ‘on-demand’ to best utilize renewable energy sources, especially during times of peak-energy use.”

Until there’s time, money, and inclination to institute such sweeping changes, we would do well to remember that electricity is a lot less of a given than we might think. While the U.S. grid is notably more reliable than India’s (a fact that actually makes India better prepared to face blackouts), when it comes to avoiding outages, there’s little difference between New York or New Delhi.

“We must commit ourselves to the knowledge that long-duration power outages are not something that happens elsewhere,” Jagfeld wrote. “India is only geographically distant from us; its current power outage is actually far closer than we might think.”