The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

According to Massoud Amin, a power systems engineer, on “any given day in the U.S. about half a million people are without power for two or more hours.”

overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.

Methane emissions from natural gas development and leaky transport infrastructure, however, undercut some of the climate advantage gas has over coal. One 2012 study estimated that if the industry were to let leak only 3.2 percent of the gas produced, it could be worse for the climate than coal. In most places, leakages are not that bad. In some places they are worse.

There are a number of ongoing efforts, globally, to scale nuclear technology way down, making it portable and mass-producible.

It sounds like a pipe dream, until you consider that between 2009 and 2014 the amount of renewable power traveling the lines of our grid has more than doubled.

Maine is aiming for 40 percent by 2017, California for 50 percent by 2030—and these numbers don’t even include the electricity made from rooftop solar systems. Vermont, ever the tiny optimist, has a goal of 75 percent by 2032. Hawaii is aiming for 100 percent. These are not impossible objectives, but they will require us to utterly reimagine our grid.

If electricity is made, it’s shipped; if it’s shipped, it’s used.

The more solar there is in any given mix of “fuels” used to generate electricity, the harder it is to cope with the sudden arrival of a cloud, especially at five in the afternoon when things on the demand side have just shot through the roof.

Variable generation—the technical term for power plants that make electricity out of unpredictable fuel sources like the wind, sun, or waves—is a problem.

Coal-burning plants, at 50 percent in five minutes, are one of the fastest; natural gas (from a cold start) takes about ten minutes to get up to speed, while nuclear takes a full twenty-four hours to turn up, though it can be shut down in seconds.

Anywhere in the nation with a high concentration of wind turbines or a high concentration of photovoltaics always runs the risk of generating more electricity than can be easily consumed. This is the part of the renewable energy horror story that Secretary Chu left out.

“The problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century.”

We can see these seventeen years—between 1879, when the first grid was built in San Francisco, and 1896, when the Niagara Falls power plant began sending its current twenty-two miles along high-voltage lines to Buffalo—as the history of a slow but steady technological comprehension.

Though we tend to give Thomas Alva Edison the credit for having invented the lightbulb (he did not), he did devise something just as remarkable—the parallel circuit, one of his greatest if least lauded contributions to technological underpinnings of our modern world.

So if one provides two paths, it will take them both simultaneously and indiscriminately, even if the second is twenty times longer than the first; if one provides forty paths, this pattern of all-options-at-once travel is the same.

With series circuits, either everything is on or everything is off.

What Edison set out to prove at Pearl Street was not that electricity was good for making light—by 1882 that was known—but that electric lighting could be comfortably dim and electric systems greatly expanded.

One hundred ten volts can power a bulb, 220 an electric razor, 500 a streetcar, and 2,000 an electric chair; 50,000 volts is good for high-voltage transmission lines and 100,000 volts for a stun gun.

The singular advantage of alternating current is that low voltages, made at the generator, can be “stepped up” to much higher voltages by means of a transformer—a simple device made of two sets of tightly coiled copper wires that almost, but don’t quite, touch.

rotary converter—“a single armature for changing direct current first into polyphase and then the reverse.”

Therefore, Insull reasoned, a central power station providing 20 kilowatts would be more efficient and economical than a series of separate generating plants in each apartment with the aggregate capacity of 68.5 kilowatts.”

All these men, with their top hats and cigar-clenched teeth, made private empires out of electricity by following Insull’s lead until, by the closing years of the 1920s, ten holding companies controlled 75 percent of the American electricity industry.

No power plant built by man or some yet-to-be-invented machine intelligence will ever do better than just under 50 percent.

It turns out that the blades you need on a helicopter are the exact opposite of the ones that make for a successful wind turbine.

Today renewables comprise 13 percent of installed electricity generation in the United States,

In 2002, Davis-Besse became the closest thing to a nuclear disaster in America since the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979.

As a result Vermont Yankee, which produced almost 80 percent of the electricity made in Vermont, was decommissioned in 2014.

Every line has a rating, a voltage, a “quantity” of electricity that it can safely conduct from one place to another. Extra High Voltage lines, the ones threaded across open prairies and high mountain passes borne up by huge steel towers, carry from 275 kilovolts (kV) to 765 kV, while those that link the corner pole to the side of your house have a low voltage rating, usually around 50 kV.

This beckoning, called a “sink,” says to all the current on the grid: “look here, this is the easy way.” To get electricity to where we need it we make little sinks, like flipping on a light switch, and big ones like firing up a paper mill.

For example, one way, among the many, that they made money was to purchase transmission rights on essential power lines, most significantly a thousand of the 1,600 possible megawatts on California’s path 26, one of two conductors linking the northern and southern halves of the state. They could then fictitiously “clog” this route. They did this not by adding any actual electricity into the grid, but by simply saying there was no more room available on these critical paths and then getting the state to pay them to “free up” transmission capacity that had in fact been there all along.

This is what vars do: they help ensure a constant voltage in times of stress.

The radiation emitted by the meters is very similar to that emitted by cell phones and wireless Internet routers, which while not proven to be safe are both types of electromagnetic pollution people opt to use all the time.

The utility may have wanted to disconnect their capacity to do business from things like telephones and dumb, greedy air conditioners, but what they also enabled with these new meters is “net metering” by means of which homemade electricity, from rooftop solar panels, for example, can be fed back into the grid.

In a perfect world, the various component parts of the Boulder smart grid would have functioned like distributed, systemic thought. The grid would make simple decisions from the dishwasher level all the way up to that of the power plant; it could communicate both to and between people and machines while balancing its load, all while avoiding the electrocution of its linemen, pretty much all by itself.

The smart meter is the only part of the SmartGridHouseCarNanoGridComboPack that is actually necessary to the utilities, because, to borrow the words of the technology journalist Glenn Fleishman, “shedding 5 to 10 percent of their load at peak times on demand could reduce or eliminate turning to the expensive spot power market or powering up dirty old power plants. Shaving that usage can have enormously disproportionate cost and environmental savings.”

Refrigerators, for example, are always on, and use about 14 percent of domestic power. Freezers use another 4 percent.

In almost every case, the smart meter is what makes this voluntary ceding of control over household energy use to the utility possible. It is their primary weapon in softening peaks. And it’s begun to work.

For example, the army’s tents in the Middle East are now covered with a thick layer of orange spray foam, which reduces the electricity needed for air-conditioning, heating, and ventilation by 40 to 75 percent.

But “eskimoing” the tents in the desert (as this process is called) is just the tip of the conservation iceberg.

These activities, the tinkering as much as more formal constructions, are collectively known as grid edge, a term that encompasses everything from hooking up a generator to a house or adding some solar panels to the garage roof or using a 50-MW acronymically named S.P.I.D.E.R.S. microgrid for your base, to building a wind farm, a substation, and private lines into your corporate headquarters.

Nevertheless, for over half a century, fusion has been the electricity industry’s holy grail: limitless power from water.

For places with mountains, there is “pumped hydro.”

Another even more recent stab at energy storage has come in the form of concentrating solar towers.

cadmium battery uses nickel oxide hydroxide and metallic cadmium as its terminals (metals), and potassium hydroxide serves as its electrolyte.

magnetic resonance, which essentially only allows the electricity sent to power a device specially “tuned” to receive