The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

It’s the world’s largest machine and the twentieth century’s greatest engineering achievement and we are remarkably oblivious to it.

According to the industry expert Peter Asmus, we rely on twice as many power plants as we actually need because of “the massive inefficiencies built into this system.”

The average U.S. power outage is 120 minutes and growing, while in the rest of the industrialized world it’s less than ten minutes and shrinking.

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.

Not every blackout is caused by a world-class storm. Many are made by wildlife, squirrels most especially, and even more originate with trees—so many that overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.

between us and everything we envision stands this technological monument to recalcitrance. The grid is there.

Electricity is not like this, ever. It cannot be boxed or stored or shipped. It is always used the same instant it is made, even if the person using it is a thousand miles from the source. If electricity is made, it’s shipped; if it’s shipped, it’s used. And all of this happens in the same singular millisecond.

As a later speaker in the day’s proceedings would point out, 60 percent of men who run our electricity system are within five years of retirement.

We were already making power and using it, yet with electricity we were slowly freed from the obligation to do both of these things in the same place.

an electrical current doesn’t seek the easiest or shortest route from one point to another; to electricity all pathways are equal.

What an electric grid does, then, is first forcibly divorce happy electrons which hold a negative charge from their atoms which hold a positive charge (generation) and then provide an easy route (the wires) for them to reunite again.

All of these developments combined to confound the economic truisms of power production: the price of electricity had always dropped; the cost of making electricity had also always dropped, while plant efficiency had always risen and electricity consumption too had always risen. That all of these factors changed at once was a series of blows to the utilities not at all unlike the final moments of a boxing match. Their surprise was that of the man about to hit the mat, caught so thoroughly off guard by a sudden volley of well-placed fists that he failed to protect himself against them, flailing a little bit more as each blow hit home.

So good (about oil crisis, environmentalism, conservation, carnot limit all emerging in the 70s)

It was a stagnant sector that promised no adventure and a steady paycheck. As a result, the most risk averse and least facile minds were running the game.

“By 1990, California had become home of 85% of the world’s capacity of electricity powered by the wind and 95% of the world’s solar power electricity.”

By 1989, a decade after the passage of PURPA, the average time a California wind turbine worked at capacity before breaking down and needing repair was seven hours.

The legislative actions put in place to streamline and open up the business end of power production and sale further compromised an infrastructure already weakened by age, decades of incompatible patches, and general inattentiveness.

So long as resistance is equal on all paths the electricity that takes a longer, more confused or circuitous route will arrive at the same instant as the one that took the shorter path. Distance is irrelevant to it, only resistance matters.

As one physicist explained, “any change in generation or transmission at any point in the system will change loads on generators and transmission lines at every other point—often in ways that are not anticipated or controlled.”

People use a little more electricity; the utilities produce a little more electricity. Demand is usually within limits the utility can meet. In fact, 98 percent of the time this is the case. The problem is that 10 percent of the utilities’ resources are devoted to the other 2 percent of the time.

“Anywhere there’s air-conditioning, smart grids will likely prosper.” This is not just because these devices use a lot of electricity (they do), but because everybody uses them at the same time and because when it’s very hot outside the utilities are already having a difficult time for a variety of reasons: long-distance wheeling goes up, spot markets get expensive, and lines sag and grow less efficient.

The grid is awesomely complex. It is the largest machine in the world. To the Lovinses, however, the grandeur of this complexity is less impressive than it is foolhardy.

“In Austin, Tex., squirrels have been blamed for 300 power outages a year. Other utility companies have claimed that between 7 and 20 percent of all outages are caused by some sort of wild animal, and a 2005 study by the State of California estimated, hazily, that these incidents cost California’s economy between $32 million and $317 million a year.

At the moment there is only one battery on our grid: a 22,000-square-foot, 1,300-ton nickel-cadmium battery that was built outside Fairbanks in 2003. This can supply 40 MW of power for about seven minutes, though it is most often used for twice as long at half the power.

Oh how things have changed!

distributed solar is flooding the grid with electricity, at least for part of the day, while starving it of money.

A conversation about storage today is 85 percent a conversation about present-day and future battery technologies and 15 percent a conversation about weird ideas that somebody made work once, someplace suspect, like Alberta.

lol

anything we add to the grid must have the capacity to interface effectively with everything that was there before, while everything we subtract from it must not disrupt the flow of power that we are so reliant upon.