The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

And where there was a stable, if aging system—our grid—there is now a fantastically unstable, old one with new bits and more modern logics soldered into the joints and around the edges.

Many more of those same Californians lived through the deregulation-generated blackouts and brownouts in 2000–2001 and still just hunkered down and waited for the government or the utility or some regulator somewhere to put the system right again.

Sandy did something in New York similar to what the Great Coastal Gale did in the Pacific Northwest. People who had been considering a plug-in electric car stopped considering it. Most of the people who got out of that storm’s blast zone after the fact did so because they had access to a car with a full-enough gas tank. They packed up that car and drove away, south usually, to friends and relatives anywhere beyond Sandy’s disastrous reach.

Resiliency means the ability to take a blow and not be bowled over by it; it means designing ones and structures that can bend but not break; it means blackouts that bounce back into brightness rather than cascade across the continent; it means backup systems so seamlessly integrated into primary systems that one doesn’t even notice the switch between them. Resiliency means accepting that sometimes things do break and then imagining and engineering ways not so much to make them unbreakable, as to consider how they might be less thoroughly broken in the first place and thus also easier to fix.

resiliency, or the soft path, was just another radical thing that certain enthusiasts argued for with modest success (like building sustainable communities, eating locally sourced food, or practicing voluntary simplicity).

Though nobody talks about it, our physical infrastructure is not just exposed to weird weather, it’s also shockingly vulnerable to weird people.

Or when, upon entering a cubicle for a meeting with its inhabitant, one finds him beneath his desk, khakied butt in the air, snuffling around like a pig for truffles, trying to figure out what’s gone wrong with his surge protector.