The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

On very hot days, or less often on very cold days, the utilities literally pay lumber mills and smelters, prisons and public schools, to stop drawing power from the grid. Most of these big consumers don’t have microgrids. They are 100 percent grid dependent, and using less power means making life pretty unpleasant for their workers and other inhabitants.

The smart meter thus functions as a single stone meant to kill two birds. First, it allows them to monitor and control for themselves your electricity use, a functionality that has already been operationalized in many markets. Second, ideally if not yet actually, it would provide you with sufficiently accurate information to enable you to monitor and control your electricity use for yourself.

As if, once the meters had been installed, there would be no way for established utilities to stop customers from taking precisely the kind of control they had been promised and then using it to kill the utilities by a thousand cuts. In many places, each such cut looks rather a lot like a solar panel plus a battery pack as people begin to chart their own course out at the edges of the grid.

There is no IKEA of alternative energy systems, and thus each of the solutions they have individually come up with is different in its details and particular in its priorities.

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.

A triumvirate of force whose fierce wailing breath whipped up the waters at exactly high tide over the most densely populated 56,000 square miles in the nation.

On both the East Coast and the West, after both Sandy and the Great Gale, “resiliency,” rather than “independence,” has become the watchword for reform.

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 is a different way of thinking about security than is usually taken after significant disasters, when the aim is to rebuild stronger, bigger, more solid systems (or structures) that can withstand the same stressor that felled their predecessors.

Amory Lovins, who coined the term “the Soft Energy Path” in 1976 as a means of articulating an alternative way of thinking about national security, argued that our hardened infrastructure, far from making things stronger, in fact increases infrastructural brittleness and thus also the ease with which the systems that sustain us can be broken.

“Our reliance on these delicately poised energy systems,” they continued, “has unwittingly put at risk our whole way of life.”

From the Lovinses’ point of view, the power outages that occur regularly in the United States regardless of their cause—whether big storms or changing legislation or computer bugs or terrorist hackers—are a natural and utterly predictable side effect of having such a big, centralized electrical grid. “The size, complexity, pattern, and control structure of these electrical machines,” they wrote, “rotating in exact synchrony across half a continent, and strung together by an easily severed network of aerial arteries whose failure is instantly disruptive … make them inherently vulnerable to large-scale failures.”

For the Lovinses, reconceptualizing and then rebuilding our systems-in-common as smaller, more flexible, more self-contained, less polluting, and closer to home was the wisest way to proceed. Soft energy technologies, the adoption of which they considered to be the first necessary step toward ensuring energy security in the United States, have

First, they rely on renewable energy resources, like wind and solar, but also biomass, geothermal, wave, and tidal power. Second, they are diverse and designed to function with maximum effectiveness within specific circumstances. Third, they are flexible and relatively simple to understand. Fourth, they should be matched to end-use needs in terms of scale, and fifth, they should also be matched to end use in terms of quality. All of this is nested within a larger cultural commitment to energy efficiency that is built in to our structures and our life-ways from the ground up. For the Lovinses, the soft energy path is not about privation but thoughtful, thorough integration of energy use into social life.

Lovinses argued that an organism’s longevity consistently relies upon “local back-up, local autonomy, and a preference for small over large scale and for diversity over homogeneity.”

The main difference between their vision for resiliency and contemporary constructions is computing power—a difference that makes microgrids an even more compelling solution to grid calcification than they were before.

Microgrids are their own special kind of thing—a new niche carved out between a system that relies solely upon “machines rotating in exact synchrony across half a continent” and an individual home that makes power only for itself. Microgrids are sharing machines that are not debilitated by that capacity when sharing means being sucked dry. They are not mechanical martyrs but self-interested, social, individuated electrical systems.

“at three hundred thousand barrels a day the Department of Defense is one of the biggest users of oil. Getting that fuel to the front lines is incredibly expensive—in dollars but more importantly in blood.”

Savannah River National Laboratory, more than 80 percent of the energy needed to power devices like computer displays, infrared sights, global positioning systems, night vision, and other sensor technologies each soldier carries comes from disposable batteries. A brigade “will consume as much as seven tons of batteries in a 72-hour mission at a cost of $700,000.”

95 percent of the base’s electricity went to “air condition, inefficiently, tents sitting in a hot sandy place.” All of this electricity was produced by a diesel generator. He continues: “We are getting people blown up in fuel convoys to deliver the fuel to be wasted in that way. Just connect the dots and obviously there is something wrong with this picture.”

A secure, ample energy system also includes good employment policies that lead to peaceful labor relations and good county, state, and federal regulations that ensure both the affordability and the long-term stability of extractive technologies. And it includes making sure that disasters like Love Canal or Deepwater Horizon are a thing of the past.

physical infrastructure is not just exposed to weird weather, it’s also shockingly vulnerable to weird people.

The Great Gale of 2007 did not bring about the awaited Left Coast, ecotopic, green revolution, nor did it help to affirm a Libertarian do-it-yourself-and-bugger-the-government’s-meddling agenda. It was rather that mild-mannered townsfolk, people with no alternative stance, people who would rather the government and the utilities did their job, had simply had enough. They began to take the project of heating and lighting their homes into their own hands.

When I say the world changed in December 2007, I mean that nonradicals began to take what would have been, even a year earlier, considered radical action. Townsfolk

At present, our capacity to integrate renewable generation gets complicated as we approach 15 percent of peak power—or 25 percent of daily electricity use.

Most of us, when we think about storage, think first of batteries, but though batteries may be good for bringing electricity with you, they have not, until recently, been very good for storing power at grid scale. 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.

this has already changed. as of jan 2017 there were three installations each being worlss largest at install. one was 20MW/80MWH

“the power grid is becoming far more complicated. It increasingly involves sending power at low voltages over short distances, using flexible arrangements: the opposite of the traditional model.”

Much like all those unfinished nuclear cooling towers that dotted the American landscape in the early 1980s, big fossil fuel power plants, in Germany as in Hawaii or Arizona, stand as a testament to massive investment in the wrong path. The

The feasibility of these kinds of big, better-than-a-battery projects is not dependent upon scientific ingenuity so much as the difficult process of translating ideas through real-world bureaucratic and cultural systems, gathering both money and support along the way.

This invisibility, or capacity to disappear into the given, is also a part of what storage needs to accomplish in order to succeed, not physically so much as culturally. And mimicking familiar urban “skins” seems to hold a great deal of promise for the adoption of new electricity-storage technologies, both large and small. Three familiar forms are getting most of the attention from consumers and the press; these are the air conditioner, the office tower, and the car.

Many people who care about grid reform don’t see electric cars as cars so much as great big batteries on wheels.

Customers, when contemplating the purchase of an electric vehicle, tend to care about its capacity to move them speedily and reliably from one place to another. The grid guys, on the other hand, see an ingenious form of storage that doesn’t rely upon the quirks of geology or climate, that blends seamlessly into its environment, and that can be made to work for tiny grid imbalances as well as big ones.

With car batteries backing up the grid, we could have more green power, fewer polluting backup power plants, and no robocalls asking us to switch off the AC on the summer’s hottest days.

This solution to peak demand sounds a little like Marxism. Each car, never exploited, gives to the grid according to its ability while remaining available to the grid to take from according to its need. Together, all our cars keep our common electrical system strong. And the grid, with their help, can at long last balance itself.

Notice that though electricity in this scenario is still public, storage has been thoroughly privatized. The utilities don’t own the storage. Because you bought the car, you do.

Add to this that if the vehicle-to-grid system is going to work as promised, all electric cars would have to be plugged in whenever parked. This makes for a massive investment in infrastructural rebuilding.

The easiest way to begin operationalizing “V2G” technologies is to do it with fleets, all of which park together in the evenings, lessoning infrastructure costs for the installation of two-directional smart charging and also vastly simplifying the economics of figuring out how to pay a utility customer residing in one service area for the power she supplies to the grid, or takes from it, while parked in a different utility’s service area. Fleets should be the first adopters and yet, they aren’t.

This holy grail retains its mass only in the minds of those struggling to build the better future in which we hope one day to reside.

the DoD, which operates a fleet of 200,000 nontactical vehicles, is working to convert them all to electricity with vehicle-to-grid technologies designed in from the start.

lets hope this continues with trump

It is right, then, that we now live in the era of infrastructural dreaming and that these dreams would be centered around finding ways to unplug electricity from the system of wires and power plants leftover to us from the past.

In this, the last chapter, I’d like to turn toward our more intimate and personal interactions with the grid and our desires for these.

What we would like ultimately is that our infrastructure move us less and have a less obvious presence in our world—not just visually, not just when it breaks down and emerges forcefully into consciousness, but all the time, and in both little and big ways. No more outlets, cords, or plugs would be nice. No more blackouts, short or long, would be great. So would a return to an earth with a stable climate, a planet that grows neither warmer nor colder because of our attachment to fossil fuels for making power.

Plus we will need to find a way to pay for the most basic elements of the infrastructure, the wires and poles, that few people care about and yet must stay standing and in good condition for all the rest of the grid to work at all. Investors’ money may flow toward newfangled forms of generation these days, and toward private companies, whether inventing microscopic components or repurposing salt caverns, but basic maintenance is still on the back of the utility. We, the users of electricity, pay those bills, until we don’t.

Conservation and efficiency, ascendant in the 1960s and ’70s, were the precursors of a valuation of what wasn’t used and not needed. And the debate that rages today over how one might accurately count a watt saved, or value and remunerate a power plant not built, also began back in the days of President Carter and his Cardigan Path. In the age of wireless communication systems, we can add another vision: How might we make a grid less material rather than more so? Across domains one begins to see an abiding concern for ways of reducing the material impacts of infrastructure and counting every zero we make as if it were something substantive. Even when not conscious of this trend, a good many people, companies, and interest groups are leaving to value what is not there as much as what is.

Doing away with heat engines, with their inevitable thermodynamic limitations, is for them a big step in the right direction.

Even forward-thinking California has proved boneheaded on this point.

A sentiment difficult to fault, and yet, in failing to require the utilities to take full advantage of all the renewable power resources available to them, California’s legislature has virtually assured that grid reform in that state will fall far short of its potential.

If Tesla Motors or some other smart start-up can create a battery pack that is sufficiently cheap and sufficiently reliable, people with the means to make their own electricity will start dropping off the grid. This might seem to solve a short-term problem for the utility, but it would significantly undermine a larger, national project of providing the same quality of electric power, at a fair price, to all America’s people.

this is going.to.be.the challenge ahead . how to.provide electricity to all not just rich

The problem becomes, given that all these various customers are still on the grid, how the electricity they don’t use—their so-called “negawatts”—might be counted, paid for, and deployed.

This is the real story behind contemporary grid reform: not just valuing electrons made by unusual producers, but valuing electrons that we never needed to make at all—the saved power that we shouldn’t even notice has gone missing.