The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

the grid, in America we actually have three of them: one for the West that includes a tiny bit of Mexico and much of western Canada; one for all of the East; and a separate, smaller one for Texas. For the most part Mexico has its own grid, but Canada does not (except for its errant province, Quebec, which, like Texas, has chosen to keep its options for secession open by managing its infrastructure for itself).

More than 70 percent of the grid’s transmission lines and transformers are twenty-five years old; add nine years to that and you have the average age of an American power plant.

America has the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation—coming in at about six hours per year, not including blackouts caused by extreme weather or other “acts of God,” of which there were 679 between 2003 and 2012.

on “any given day in the U.S. about half a million people are without power for two or more hours.”

overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.

Sustainable energy sources provide something else: an inconsistent, variable power that our grid is unprepared to adapt to.

It is estimated that by 2050 “nearly every single power plant in the U.S. will need to be replaced by new plants.”

America’s infrastructure is being colonized by a new logic: little, flexible, fast, adaptive, local—the polar opposite of the way things have been up until now.

As a result the electricity we use, day in and day out, is always fresh. So fresh, that less than a minute ago, if you live in wind farm territory, that electricity was a fast-moving gust of air.

Picture it. The electricity you are using right now was, about a second ago, a drop of water.

This is our grid in a nutshell: it is a complex just-in-time system for making, and almost instantaneously delivering, a standardized electrical current everywhere at once.

Coal-burning plants, at 50 percent in five minutes, are one of the fastest; natural gas (from a cold start) takes about ten minutes to get up to speed, while nuclear takes a full twenty-four hours to turn up, though it can be shut down in seconds.

coal-burning power plant, which pulverizes and combusts, on average, 125 tons of coal every five minutes.

Anywhere in the nation with a high concentration of wind turbines or a high concentration of photovoltaics always runs the risk of generating more electricity than can be easily consumed.

Germany’s Enercon makes a 7.5 MW model (only slightly smaller than the largest offshore turbines, which come in at 8 MW), whereas in the United States the most common turbines remain the 1.5 MW GE model and the slightly bigger 2 MW Gamesa. This has nothing to do with how fast the wind blows across American plains versus German ones; it has everything to do with the wires these massive machines feed into.

There is no backup system to the grid. If we can’t make it work, then it doesn’t. It’s as simple as that.