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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 problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century.”
The most diabolical outcome of a return to a system of private plants, which could easily happen in the next couple of decades in sunny places like Arizona, Hawaii, and southern California (and to some degree has already happened in Germany) is that it threatens universal access to quality electrical power.
Some even argue that it wasn’t until after the Great Depression that the notion that one could make money by selling lots of cheap things to lots of relatively poor people made any inroads at all. Most, however, agree that the idea of a “mass market” or “consumer culture” came about in part because utility company entrepreneurs needed new ways to make a profit from electricity.
he ushered in an era in which one of the most powerful things one could do with money, and to make money, was to use information to manipulate public opinion and influence public investment.
Thus did America lose one kind of knowing—that involved in managing a low-tech household—without gaining another kind of knowing—that of the distant complexity undergirding a high-tech household.
Each of these replacements, while helping to protect us from the pollutants and waste produced by earlier generations of power plants, complicates life for the grid, mostly by introducing variability without storage (chapter 1) and radically distributed, privately owned generation without oversight (chapter 8). 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.
It is surprisingly easy for little things to go wrong; little things that can become big things with a remarkable speed.
Most radically what the act did was oblige the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which governs the grid, to separate electrical generation from electrical distribution. Utilities, obliged since the late 1970s to buy power from small producers at the same price it would have cost them to make it themselves, were, with the act, taken even more thoroughly out of the generation side of the electricity game. The Energy Policy Act mandated absolute competition in the wholesale power market.
And while there was at the time no national standard for how tall trees near high-voltage lines might be allowed to grow, it is generally agreed that fifty feet is about a decade more growth than is acceptable.
we do know that PG&E managed to transfer about 80 million ratepayer dollars into directors’ and shareholders’ pocketbooks using the same kinds of minor shifts in scheduling.
in the United States today, as in 2003 (and as in 1994), the greatest threat to the security and reliability of our electrical infrastructure is foliage.
Rather, electricity will take all possible routes available to it simultaneously with a preference for that with the least resistance even when that is not the shortest or most rational (to our minds) way to move from point A to point B. The
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.
There is no need to “communicate” with electricity in any other way—our grid, indeed the whole of our world, might be thought of as a symphony of varying resistances, each beckoning or shunning electric current in its own way.
“What’s wrong with the electric grid?” Eric J. Lerner. Published online with Physics Today on August 14, 2014.
“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.”
The sink remained despite the fact that too much current, rather than too little, was causing it.
As in New York, so also in Pennsylvania, the western half of Michigan, Ontario, all trying to “island” themselves from Ohio and its great energy sink. This process of islanding, or decoupling one’s local grid from the system as a whole, is not easy given the current organization and size of our interconnections. And though it was a wise protective measure (in 2003 islanding kept a great many power plants and power lines in New York State from being destroyed by massive swings in voltage), it also caused the blackout in that state.
In the case of the 2003 blackout the error on the grid took the form of overgrown trees and the error on the computers took the form of a line of code that disallowed simultaneous incoming data reports. Each error had small but significant effects on the actual physical infrastructure they came into contact with, while the way in which this physical infrastructure was designed—its logic—allowed for stochastic propagation of negative effects. Which is to say: the cascade and then the blackout.
All of which becomes the oft-quoted $60,000 per hour per business of lost revenues and an upsurge in blackout-conceived babies nine months later.
In order to understand why the grid has become so much less stable since the early 2000s (and it has), it is important to return again to a more careful consideration of the aftereffects of the Energy Policy Act and accompanying Order 888. Much like the 1996 deregulation bill in California (that made Enron momentarily very rich and that state by equal measure poor), the Energy Policy Act did not separate generation from transmission and distribution just for shits and giggles. It did so for a reason, and that reason was energy trading. The act turned electricity into a commodity—a
Electrons, from the point of view of the market, have never looked so much like pork bellies or pig iron.
The idea behind the act was twofold. First, it would liberalize and thus also reform (by means of the market) electricity production. This has indeed happened. There are many more kinds of fuel feeding the power plants that supply the grid today than ever before, and much of the innovation we see in power production—from the rampant adoption of rooftop solar to the new popularity of natural gas fracking—is the direct result of competition in this sector. And second, it was to make a unit of electricity into a tradable commodity with a price set by relations between supply and demand rather
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The introduction of market forces to grid management has, after some initial bumps in the road, also had a profound effect both on how much electricity we as a nation use (less) and on the way that electricity moves through the grid (farther).
Long-distance wheeling and the unlinking of generation from local consumption habits has meant that a lot more data is now needed to manage the electricity moving on the system at any given moment.
Indeed, this “guessed-at” way of insuring grid stability was largely how Enron managed to manipulate California’s grid so profitably.
Enron’s market-manipulating machinations to the side, almost all contemporary electricity traders engage in forms of electricity arbitrage (buying cheap here, selling dear there) made possible by the critical combination of the Internet and the Energy Policy Act.
The unfortunate side effect of this was to make the flow of information less free as the flow of electricity has become simultaneously more complex.
Long-distance wheeling is to their benefit; it is to the plant owners’ benefit; it is to the energy traders’ benefit; in theory, at least, it is also to our benefit. In fact, the only thing that really suffers from this arrangement is the grid.
One result of this is that, according to a 2014 White House report, roughly 90 percent of power outages in the United States now start on distribution systems that have not been the object of the same care or recipient of cash.
Problems like power surges (when voltage leads current) or brownouts (when current leads voltage) normally happen in the transmission of electricity, not its production.
The physics and the economics of the system today have no choice but to work at cross-purposes.
Lefty clean green energy types love it because at long last they have the right to buy power from less polluting, often more proximate sources, or even better, to make it themselves.
Building electrical generation, betting on electricity markets, making solar and wind mainstream technologies—it seems that whatever (social) way you look at it, the Energy Policy Act is a winning gig. It may also spell the end of the utilities as we know them. It may even spell the end of the grid as we know
Finding a good way to control peak demand would offer the possibility of continued plant retirement, easing coal ever more thoroughly out of the number one spot for American electricity production and replacing it with smaller, more efficient, and relatively speaking cleaner natural gas combustion turbines (and occasionally even wind and solar power).
Likewise, the more electricity the lines are asked to carry the less efficiently they function. Peak demand doesn’t just mean making more electricity with our least efficient plants. It also means losing a much higher percentage of that electricity in transit. This further lowers the amount of the potential power in a lump of coal that actually makes it into your reading lamp—down to right about 2 percent.
Xcel, a Midwestern utility with an eight-state reach, decided to build a prototype of a future grid in a place where, they deemed, people would be receptive to high-tech means of reducing energy consumption.
model for how electric companies might transition from government-regulated monopolies to customer-oriented service providers.
We might, in other words, lose a lot of wires in
the coming decades.
because their vision for both the city, and the future of the grid, was so much grander.
The utilities vastly underestimated the degree to which reforming the industry would negatively impact them.
“the utility death spiral.” It’s melodramatic, but nevertheless suggestive.
many of the utilities alive today will emerge from the singularity to bill us on the other side.
not since the consolidation of power in the 1910s brought whole regions under the purview of a single service provider, had it been fiscally sound to be electricity independent. Then, quite suddenly, it was.
This, then, is exactly the problem. The utilities don’t know how to upgrade existing technology without putting themselves out of business.
The utilities’ panic is real; it’s not aesthetic, not even greedy, and not particularly malicious. As improbable as it might seem, it’s real structural, organizational panic.
Some blame can also be apportioned to global warming: thirteen of the fifteen hottest years on record (since the start of record-keeping in 1880) have been since 2000, with 2015 being the hottest year ever recorded. Even though summers are getting hotter, driving up air-conditioner usage nationwide, there have also been some spectacular cold snaps as well, the polar vortex in 2014 being among the most memorable in recent times. All of these extreme weather events, including entire years that are hotter than they should be, cause more crisis points for the grid.
they need a way to control peak demand. At issue is not how much electricity we collectively use but when we use it.
