The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

Our economy literally droops when the voltage on our wires sags (brownouts), and it seriously stutters when the power breaks for real.

This is insane to me

The 2003 East Coast blackout, caused by an overgrown tree and a computer bug, blacked out eight states and 50 million people for two days. So thorough and vast was this cascading blackout that it shows as a visible dip on America’s GDP for that year. Six billion dollars lost: that’s $60,000 per hour per blacked-out business of lost revenues across 93,000 square miles.

For a lot of machines, an outage of fifteen seconds and one of fifteen minutes or fifteen hours produces precisely the same kind of damage and takes roughly the same time to put right again.

“black-start”

It can bring cold and hunger, as did the ice storms that blacked out the Ozarks in 1987.

Coincidentally there was another ice storm in the Ozarks in 2011, and we were without electricity (and for many people that also meant being without water) for almost 2 weeks.

On a lighter, if no less economically devastating, note in 1987, and again in 1994, the NASDAQ lost power because of squirrels gnawing on the electric lines that connect that stock exchange to the world.

This is so freaking funny

It turns out that transitioning America away from a reliance on fossil fuels and toward more sustainable energy solutions will be possible only with a serious reimagination of our grid.

The utilities can attempt to control them, but their efforts falter in the face of meteorological processes, planetary in scale.

I think this is important when trying to understand why people are against renewables. Yeah they have all these benefits but it's so easy for someone to focus on the one possible thing that could go wrong.

Coal may be on the way out; the Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that roughly a fifth of total coal capacity will be retired between 2012 and 2020, and even the chief executive of the American Coal Council admits that the industry has abandoned any plans to replace the retiring fleet.

I wonder what these statistics ended up being

One 2012 study estimated that if the industry were to let leak only 3.2 percent of the gas produced, it could be worse for the climate than coal.

excess power on the grid causes bits of it to shut down self-protectively—a

causing the bills of their customers without home solar to rise precipitously.

Okay, so because other people aren't using your dirty energy, you're going to raise the price for those who continue to use it for whatever reason? Seems legit

In Texas, one blustery September day in 2015, the price per megawatt-hour of electricity dropped to negative 64¢. The utilities were actually paying their customers to use power. Everything has gone a bit topsy-turvy.

No stranger to chaos, in its earliest days America’s electric grid grew haphazardly, not radiating out from one imaginary center point but spreading instead like a pox, appearing only in spots with dense enough populations to ensure a profit.

when the government intervened and brought the grid and electricity to the rural folks whom capitalism would have happily left behind.

it is a jury-rigged result—highly inventive in places, totally stodgy in some, fantastically Rube Goldberg in yet others.

The Executive Branch, in 2013, finally admitted that “grid resilience is increasingly important as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of severe weather,”

As a result the military is in the process of converting all their domestic bases to microgrids.

But we would do well to wise up to the fact that both impressions belie an intense seething change in the very structure of the power machine that keeps us all warm, lit, and, relatively speaking, well off.

It’s also that the culture of electricity making has to be transformed.

institutions they work for, have long had one way of doing things, and now they are scrambling to adapt to a changed landscape.

The grid must be balanced; consumption must always match production, for there is as of yet no real means of storing that electricity for later use.

For now, no household has a cookie jar full of watts secreted away for later use; no nation has a strategic electricity reserve.

It’s a precipitous curve graphed on a screen; it’s a red warning light blinking in mechanical panic; it’s a buzzer irritating in its insistence; it’s a nerve-jangling phone ringing and ringing and ringing. Someone on the other end needs a fix and he needs it now.

Humans have grown to expect everything to work or be there right when they need/want it, they've forgotten how to be patient.

But in electricity time, which is what matters to grid stability, five minutes might as well be infinity. In five minutes, electrical current generated by a power plant outside Muncie, Indiana, can go to Mars.

you can actually see a gust of wind as it tops the Rockies and

then hits one set of turbines after another all the way to the coast. You can see it in the power spikes—bang, bang, bang—of wind farm after wind farm shooting electricity into the system.

Even Los Angeles can’t absorb all the electricity made on a seriously blustery day in the Pacific Northwest.

A massive uncontrollable, unmanageable, unstorable, undumpable electricity surplus. Chaos on the lines. And what is worse: it’s May.

Though the second might sound like a good option, sadly for them, it also happens to be illegal. Because, in May, the fishlings are running, tiny silver slivers that will, in two to three years, grow into beautiful, fleshy oceanic salmon. If the dams flood their spillways, these fingerlings will be ravaged. Their numbers will be decimated year by year, and not only will the commercial salmon industry be threatened, but the species itself will slip slowly from plentiful to endangered, from dinner plates to Grandma’s memory bin.

Power production isn’t just an industry, it’s an ecology.

Once people with politics and profit motives get their fingers into the briar patch, it seems at times like there is no room to act at all.

They called up the corporation that developed, built, and still manages most of the wind farms in the Gorge, the Spanish-owned conglomerate Iberdrola, and asked them to pretty please, and yes, immediately, turn off their many hundreds of wind machines, whipping around just then at absolutely ferocious speeds in the onslaught of wild air.

Turning off their turbines at a moment of maximal productivity? Well, it’s just not a sensible course of action. Most especially because the federal subsidies that have helped them to build and maintain their almost three thousand American-sited turbines only accrue if those machines are turned on and running.

that sometimes, in America, we can have too much of a good thing.

Over and over, investments in renewable sources of power generation are failing or falling very short because America’s electric grid just isn’t robust enough or managed well enough to deal with the electricity these machines make.

WOW

And the developer, the local oilman T. Boone Pickens, thought it was a travesty given how much he was investing to build the farm itself that he would be expected to also build the transmission infrastructure.

Renewables and their scattershot siting are not what make America’s electricity difficult to manage in the second decade of the twenty-first century. They just bring to light a problem that has been characteristic of our grid for more than half a century: it was made to be managed according to a command and control structure. There was to be total monopolistic control on the supply side of great electric loop—which included generation, transmission, and distribution networks—and ever-increasing yet always-predictable consumption on the customer side of things. Electricity would move from one to the other, while cash would move in equal measure in the opposite direction.

The 1950s were not the 1970s. People lived in different parts of the county, they bought different products in different quantities, they consumed different amounts of power at different times of the day, they lived in different-sized houses, pursued different professions, and raised their children with different values. Yet the grid of the 1950s was in many ways the grid of the 1970s. And the grid of the 1970s was in many ways that of the 1990s. For the most part it is still our grid today.

Considering how much our population has grown since 1950, I'm surprised it even still works

it’s the product of cultural values, historical exigencies, governmental biases, and the big money dreams of financiers.

Edison, however, not being an educated man but rather a diligent one, had a tendency to disregard the laws of physics when pursuing technological solutions to irritating problems, occasionally with success and often with failure.

Lightning, earth’s wild electric force, is several hundred million volts, and best avoided.

Though we tend to overlook it, hot water and cold air can, much like electricity, be produced more economically in densely populated areas by central stations than by individuals.

If our nation is grounded in the notion of equal opportunity for all, then there cannot be partial, or unevenly distributed, electricity.

Rural people had virtually no access to electricity until the passage of the Rural Electrification Act in 1936 during the darkest days of the Great Depression.

Today, for all our worry about carbon emissions, we at least no longer suffer crop failures and fish die-offs from acid rain.

Americans were by definition people who had refrigerators, hot water heaters, air conditioners. We had electric lighting, wall outlets, and a multiplicity of things to plug into them. Increasing numbers of people, especially in the West, cooked on electric stoves and heated with electric radiators. We paid our bills in a timely manner, without much understanding how much electricity we were using, for what, and how much it actually cost. And though since the 1970s things have slowly begun to change, both culturally and in the business of electricity, for the most part these truisms still hold—we buy our power from a sole provider at a reasonable price, that we don’t understand, and they insure that it stays on most of the time.

Distance reduces the carrying capacity of lines, whereas long-distance wheeling increases the amount of electricity transported over precisely these same lines.

The free trade of electricity meant that there was too much electricity traveling too far. Lines were getting overburdened, heating up, sagging, shorting out, arcing, and filling with harmonic resonances. All of which are both very bad for reliability and wasteful, and thus bad for efforts at conservation.

If we follow the flow of modern money, a new terrain of investment and of privation emerges into view. And where money doesn’t go, where people don’t want to spend, starts to give us a good idea of which bits of our grid are given to falling apart. This is the landscape of collapse—imminent and actual.