The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

the fact that for the most part, America does not run on gas, oil, or coal any more than we may one day run on wind, solar, or tidal power. America runs on electricity.

the grid—a complex and expansive electrical delivery system

an electromagnetic generator spun fast by a steam-heated, or wind-blown, or water-wheeled, or gas-combusted turbine.

though we call it the grid, in America we actually have three of them: one for the West that includes a tiny bit of Mexico and much of western Canada; one for all of the East; and a separate, smaller one for Texas.

More than 70 percent of the grid’s transmission lines and transformers are twenty-five years old; add nine years to that and you have the average age of an American power plant.

America has the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation—coming in at about six hours per year, not including blackouts caused by extreme weather or other “acts of God,” of which there were 679 between 2003 and 2012. Compare this with Korea at 16 outage minutes a year, Italy at 51 minutes, Germany at 15, and Japan at 11.

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.

when the voltage on our wires sags (brownouts),

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

The grid is at its best when we make electricity using what are called “stock resources.” These are fuels that when we use them, we use them up—plutonium, natural gas, oil, coal, and anything else dug up from the ground or grown upon the earth that we burn and then have no more.

Sustainable energy sources provide something else: an inconsistent, variable power that our grid is unprepared to adapt to.

Wind farms go up where it is windy. And places like Wyoming or Iowa or West Texas have a lot of strong wind on constant offer. What they don’t have are many people to use this power or very good long-distance power lines to carry it to more promising markets. The grid was never built to be robust in the midst of wastelands.

and it is more efficient for producing electricity because power plants that run on natural gas are spun first by the raw force of combustion and then run on steam, giving twice the bang for the same buck. At first glance, natural gas is also cleaner than coal.

The grid, then, is built as much from law as from steel, it runs as much on investment strategies as on coal, it produces profits as much as free electrons.

There is so much wind in some places in the United States right now that on particularly blustery days, the local balancing authority—charged with making sure the amount of electricity going into the grid and the amount being drawn from it are exactly the same—has to pay some of the wind farms to shut down their turbines and also pay large industrial concerns to take and use more power than they actually need.

Nor does electricity flow, trickle, or drip. It is not a liquid or a gas subject to the laws of fluid dynamics; it’s a force. We make it—which is already pretty awesome—by breaking electrons free from their atoms (at the power plant) and then allowing these to bump into their next nearest atomic neighbor, dislodging their electrons, and allowing these to bump along to the next. Some metals, at the atomic level, make this process of dislodging electrons from atoms easy, and these are the metals we use to build conductors (power lines). The lines, in turn, play material host to this atomic domino effect that moves at roughly the speed of light. Though this tumble of electrons is the fastest thing in our known world, actual atomic drift is only about .05 inches per second, or roughly the speed of cold honey.

In the early years of the new millennium, the grid finally began to break; its business model cracked open as much as its copper and cement were worn down. California suffered blackouts so severe the governor declared a state of emergency and one of its major utilities filed for bankruptcy (the first for a large utility since the Depression). Then a nuclear power plant in Vermont toppled over. It literally fell down; its support structure had rotted right through. Not because it hadn’t been subject to regular maintenance and inspection, but because all the cameras set to watch the infrastructure age were pointed elsewhere and the maintenance checklists didn’t include the beams that held the cooling tower up.

We use fossil fuels, including natural gas, to make electricity, the chemical pollution from these contributes massively to global warming, global warming makes for more ferocious storms, and these storms swoop in and decimate the grid. This destruction prompts people to think about ways that the grid might be made harder to destroy. Occasionally they take action on these thoughts and some small element of our infrastructure gets changed. If our aim is to prompt infrastructural reform that will work for us over the long term, then this absurdist loop is clearly the least efficient and most destructive route possible. And yet it is the one we take.

America’s infrastructure is being colonized by a new logic: little, flexible, fast, adaptive, local—the polar opposite of the way things have been up until now.

60 percent of men who run our electricity system are within five years of retirement.

Power lines are there to channel or direct broad halos of electromagnetism in a direction determined by something as simple as someone depressing the lever on their toaster. Suddenly a pathway opens up, one that wasn’t there an instant before, and electricity follows it, moving into and through the toaster, where it is slowed down as it passes. This slowing down, or resistance, produced by the device causes electrons to release heat, which toasts the bread. After a certain number of seconds the lever pops back up, ejecting the toast and closing off the toaster channel, and electricity must find another way.

As long as there is a “sink” (of the kind caused by a toaster toasting), all the electricity on the grid will move toward it by whatever means possible.

This is our grid in a nutshell: it is a complex just-in-time system for making, and almost instantaneously delivering, a standardized electrical current everywhere at once.

peak load—when customers suddenly use a lot more electricity than they were using just five minutes before—is a startling kind of problem for utilities.

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

And though they are getting faster, they are just not very adjustable. 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.

When there is too much power on the wires they overload, or circuits break to protect them, and in so doing they close, rather than open, available paths for excess power to take. It’s hyperbole that your toaster will explode; the system will self-protectively black itself out long before your toaster turns into a bomb of flame on your kitchen counter. In this way, blackouts should be seen as source of grace as much as a bane and a burden.

Over and over, investments in renewable sources of power generation are failing or falling very short because America’s electric grid just isn’t robust enough or managed well enough to deal with the electricity these machines make.

In West Texas, the largest wind farm ever planned on American soil was abandoned in 2008 because the utility refused to build a high-voltage line out to the site. And the developer, the local oilman T. Boone Pickens, thought it was a travesty given how much he was investing to build the farm itself that he would be expected to also build the transmission infrastructure. He shelved the project after having installed just a thousand turbines, a fraction of the total. Add to this a second outrage. Pickens had already been obliged to use turbines that were small by international standards, just as was every other wind farm developer in America at the time. The grid’s fragility demanded it.

Germany’s Enercon makes a 7.5 MW model (only slightly smaller than the largest offshore turbines, which come in at 8 MW), whereas in the United States the most common turbines remain the 1.5 MW GE model and the slightly bigger 2 MW Gamesa. This has nothing to do with how fast the wind blows across American plains versus German ones; it has everything to do with the wires these massive machines feed into. It is the system that stands between the point of generation and point of consumption that delimits productivity. The grid is the weakest link. It isn’t made for modern power.

“net-metering”—when electric companies pay homeowners for the power their solar panels feed back into the common system—this

because of an awkward piece of legislation called the Energy Policy Act (1992), which laid the foundation for the deregulation of the electricity industry, in many places not only have the utilities lost control of who makes power and how and where they make it, but they have also lost the right to own power plants themselves. The Energy Policy Act separated electricity generation by law from electricity transmission and distribution

In effect this means that private companies can build condensed solar power plants wherever the sun shines hottest, individual home owners can mount solar panels on anything that doesn’t move, and multinational conglomerates, or farmers, can install wind farms wherever the wind blows most ferociously—as

What is new with the Energy Policy Act is that these investors in electrical generation, large and small, don’t need to give much thought as to how the grid, in often very out-of-the-way places, might deal with the influx of unpredictable power.

interventionist rate making by regulatory agencies that control how much customers will be charged for their electricity.

the wires, of course, are the only piece of the whole system that generates no revenue save a small rental fee to those who use them to pass electricity from one cash cow power plant to a thousand or a million paying customers.

the West, on the part of the grid known as the Western Interconnection,

This capacity to translate power from one point to another took about seventeen years to become the cause célèbre of electricity. 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.

to produce it chemically, using something like a battery, since Alessandro Volta invented the electrochemical pile in 1800.

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. The very existence of a relatively dim bulb, which we take for granted today, was made possible only by the prior invention of the parallel circuit.

unlike water an electrical current doesn’t seek the easiest or shortest route from one point to another; to electricity all pathways are equal. 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. The simplest explanation of the difference between the two kinds of circuits is that parallel circuits allow for this sort of both/and flow pattern, whereas series circuits give electricity only a single path to follow.

Older chains of Christmas tree lights work in this single-path way. If you have ever spent an evening trying to find the burned-out bulb in such a chain, you’ll know that the downside of series circuits is that everything wired into the circuit needs to be able to allow the electric current to pass.

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. As the electrons travel along these wires they pass through all the things we put in their way—things like incandescent lightbulbs. And as they pass they encounter resistance. A filament in a bulb is less conductive than the lines into and out of the device. Some of the electrons’ potential—the push it has to reunite—is thus expended in getting through this resistive material.

In an electric motor, like those in refrigerators or washing machines, this electrical stream is used to produce a rotation within a magnetic field, which in turn produces a mechanical force. This nicely boxed-up conversion of electrical energy to mechanical energy runs much of our modern world, from nose hair clippers to electric cars.

Regardless of whether one is siphoning off the “desire that moves them” in an electric flow for heat, light, or power (all of which are subsumed, technically, by the term “work”), two things are important: first, that the electrons are moving through, not stopping in, the device; and second, that they are not overly diminished in their desire (or potential for work) in the process. The name for the drive, also called a potentiality, is voltage. The measure of this drive is a volt—or a unit of electrical tension.

Voltage is measured by means of a potentiometer (it does, one must admit, sound like a poorly accomplished sex joke from start to finish). The strength of voltage gives us a good sense of the work that electrons can reliably be asked to do as they bump their way through the system and pass through our stuff. One hundred ten volts can power a bulb, 220 an electric razor, 500 a streetcar, and 2,000 an e...

The occasional sluggishness of Appleton’s local waterwheel didn’t cause electricity to cease to flow through the grid (a blackout), it simply didn’t provide quite enough power to actually run everything wired into that grid at its full potential (a brownout)—a

The problem for places like New York or Cleveland or Chicago (but not necessarily for Appleton) was that there were many potential uses for electricity, each with a specific voltage need. Direct current, which is what all grids ran until about 1886 and most grids ran well into the early years of the twentieth century, uses an inflexible voltage set at the dynamo. If a grid is using direct current, then a streetcar simply cannot be run using the same generator or set of wires as a string of lightbulbs.

largely written to give the backstory for the central station, polyphase AC system we use today (and have been using pretty much exclusively since about 1915).

Direct current at so low a voltage (100 volts) just can’t be transmitted farther before becoming so diminished that one couldn’t singe a mustache hair with the stuff. There just isn’t enough oomph in the electron stream to push it beyond a mile.