The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

as Amory Lovins (who coined the term “negawatt” way back in 1990) said, “Customers don’t want kilowatt-hours; they want services such as hot showers, cold beer, lit rooms,” and this can “come more cheaply from using less electricity more efficiently.”

Efficiency, not just for the sake of it, but as a structured means of generating less power to begin with. We don’t use what isn’t made, and (this is the new bit) this non-use will get factored into our financial thinking about the grid, and its reform. If it can be given a stable price, a negawatt will matter as much to how actors big and small choose to reform our grid as a tax cut, a subsidy, or a guaranteed low-interest loan does now.

The problem is getting all the necessary components into the mainstream (the cars most notably are still lacking, but smart appliances would make a big difference too), getting them all to speak the same language, and figuring out how to move through regulatory regimes and ownership blockades still in place from the twentieth century’s far more proprietary and centralized grid.

At issue was precisely the question of whether a watt saved would be compensated at the same rate as a watt made.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the only regulatory body with a mandate to govern our electrical system, felt that a “commitment to reduce demand” should “be compensated the same amount as an equivalent commitment by generators to increase supply.” This was not just about fairness, but also a means of making the grid a more integrative machine. Or, in their words, “paying demand response providers the full value of their contribution to the market would help overcome preexisting barriers to demand-response participation and increase the reliability and competitiveness of wholesale markets.”

The utilities, who are once again the ones struggling to maintain something like a viable revenue stream, begged to differ and sued FERC for jurisdictional imprudence. They argue “that real energy generated by real power plants should attract a higher price, in order to stimulate much-needed investment.” Here again the battle’s lines take a familiar form. Some people value stuff, real existing stuff, more than non-stuff, nothings, and zeros that can be added, counted, and made manifest.

If we want to keep America woven into one nation of equal opportunity then the grid, its technologies, and its wardens will need to pay more attention to what individuals expect of their infrastructure.

The odds rather predict the inverse. More wireless, more renewable, more portable, more integrated, and thus more invisible technologies that we move, rather than that move (or worse, root) us.

friedmn fast free invisible easy for you and invisible

Repair is not a cultural value. Replacement is.

lets make it one

The future we want is one in which difficult things are integrated, even when this is a more troublesome route than excluding them.