Half a million in U.S. lose power a day

If you're sitting in the dark at the moment and running on laptop battery, you're not alone.

Roughly 500,000 people a day in the U.S. don't have electric power, according to Clark Gellings, vice president of innovation at the Electric Powe Research Institute. The power infrastructure is old and weak-that's one of the main problems.

Worldwide, of course, the picture is worse. Nearly 2/3 of the people in the world don't have access to electricity.

Gellings spoke at the Foresight Nanotech Institute's conference on Nanotechnology taking place in Burlingame, California this week.