The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

The reason the price per kilowatt-hour had to be set at the time of the initial contract, even if that contract stretched out for fifteen or thirty years, is that small power providers needed to know how much they were going to be paid for the electricity they would be selling, not just when they brought their projects online, but for the foreseeable life of their infrastructure. In order to win a contract they had to first demonstrate that they could produce electricity more cheaply than could the local utility. And second, they, too, like large power providers, stumbled over the costs of facility construction.

Interim Standard Offer #ns4, or ISO4—was

ISO4 was unique among California’s offerings in that for the first ten years of the contract it paid more than the avoided costs to the utility; it then paid less than this amount in the final years.

In California, any investment in renewable infrastructure (including solar and wind power, but also solar hot water heaters and other non-electricity producing uses of renewables) was rewarded with a tax break of nearly 50 percent.

America’s first turbine engineers were aeronautical engineers who had opted out of working for Vietnam-era helicopter companies. As a result they designed their turbines with floppy flexible blades based on the aerodynamics of helicopters. 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. “On a helicopter,” Cashman explains, “you need lightness because you have to get off the ground, but you don’t want lightness in a wind turbine. Heavy is what you want, brute force,

As bidding auctions between small power providers gradually became the most effective way to integrate new forms of generation, and the companies making it, PURPA helped to prove that bigger wasn’t better and that monopoly-governed, vertically integrated, government-regulated megacompanies were far and away not the best way to make and manage American power.

Even our “young” nuclear power plants are pretty old. And old things break down. They rust through, they develop inexplicable leaks, they function at a fraction of their capacity, and they become increasingly expensive to maintain. A nuclear power plant in this regard is not unlike an aging car. There comes a moment where one has to decide to scuttle the thing rather than continuing to sink money into its repair.

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.

FirstEnergy was hardly the only utility to have cut back on foliage maintenance; tree-trimming budgets, while not gigantic, do form an easy source of revenue for utilities tightening their belts or, as was the case of PG&E in California in 1994, expanding executive pay.

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.

This offending tree was one of 767 violations in that county alone, all of which PG&E knew about and ignored, while simultaneously reducing tree-trimming crews from three to two men, shifting their cutting schedule from three to five years, and lobbying the California legislature to change the recommended clearance between the treetops and power lines from four feet to just six inches. The Trauner fire of 2004, much like the East Coast blackout of 2003, was caused by a tree that was at least a decade behind on its trimming schedule.

the greatest threat to the security and reliability of our electrical infrastructure is foliage. Trees most especially, though kudzu and its ilk are troublesome creepers in their own right.

This kind of death of a wire happens all the time in the United States. A tree, a wire, a bang, a short, followed by the automatic shift of the dead wire’s “load”—this is the technical term for the electricity it is asked to carry—to another, duplicate wire, heading in the same direction.

This wire, like the first, was warm and sagging low with the heat of the day; it was, like all conductors, apt to stretch longer in hot weather. This expansion is a molecular property of metals that is exacerbated, but not caused, by the presence of an electric current.

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.

a fourth 345-kV line was lost—this one because it was being asked to carry more current than it could safely transport—followed almost immediately by fifteen 138-kV lines shutting themselves off automatically. This is a self-preservation technique designed into electrical conductors (“conductor” is the technical term for an electric transmission line) when giant waves of unstable voltage threaten to fry, melt, or otherwise disable them. At this point, 3:41 P.M., about thirty minutes before the actual blackout started, trees ceased being the problem. Line failures were fast becoming commonplace because circuit breakers had begun to trip.

Much like the fuse box in your home, transmission and distribution lines are armed with a delicate, and fairly simple, analog system (that means no computers are involved) for keeping lines in good working order. If, for example, the electrical current a line is asked to carry exceeds its rating, its circuit breaker trips, the line is taken “offline,” and its load is transferred to a duplicate line.

It seems that there was way too much current on what little transmission capacity remained to carry it—a condition called overcurrent that causes any low-voltage area, in this case almost all of Ohio, to work like a giant suck on any and all the electricity elsewhere in the network.

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 routes we’d prefer electricity to travel are built from highly conductive materials and those we’d rather it avoided are made of materials with low conductivity.

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. The reason a bulb illuminates when you flip on a light switch is that you have just lowered the resistance on the circuit, from total (when the switch is off) to near zero (when the switch and lamp are on).

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.

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.

one line was carrying 332 megavolt-amperes (MVA) despite being rated for only 197 MVA.

The so-called Swiss Cheese Model of Industrial Accidents assumes glitches all over the place, tiny little failures or unpredicted oddities as a normal side effect of complexity. Rather than trying to “know and control” systems designers attempt to build, manage, and regulate complexity in such a way that small things are significantly impeded on their path to becoming catastrophically massive things.

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 thing like any other. While the grid, electricity’s infrastructure, was reconceptualized in law to something rather like a box or shipping container. Conceptually if not actually, electricity now is made and sold in units to whoever pays the best price and then shipped to them by means of the grid.

They would buy the cheapest electricity they could find and “wheel” (transport) it to be sold in the most lucrative market.

was to make a unit of electricity into a tradable commodity with a price set by relations between supply and demand rather than by a utility’s regulatory body or by convention. This is literally what deregulation means when applied to the electric industry.

The Energy Policy Act did nothing to upgrade the lines. The result was a simple one. The free trade of electricity meant that there was too much electricity traveling too far. Lines were getting overburdened, heating up, sagging, shorting out, arcing, and filling with harmonic resonances.

the number of Transmission Loading Relief Procedures on the East Coast’s grid was six times what it had been a year earlier. These requests for help managing the load of particular lines are one very good way of measuring stress on the grid.

Historically, utilities made money when people used electricity; the more we used the more money they made. Now they don’t. Today’s utilities make money by transporting power and by trading it as a commodity.

money doesn’t flow toward a critical part of the grid system—vars. Vars, or reactive power, help to stabilize voltage levels on the grid. Even alternating current, with its remarkable capacity to be transmitted so far without diminished force, needs occasionally to be buoyed up and smoothed out. The increase in long-distance wheeling after the Energy Policy Act has made maintaining power quality an even more critical element of basic grid functionality. This is what vars do: they help ensure a constant voltage in times of stress.

vars are what keep voltage and current in sync.

Problems like power surges (when voltage leads current) or brownouts (when current leads voltage) normally happen in the transmission of electricity, not its production.

Previous to the mass installation of smart meters utilities had to guess the parameters of an outage based upon triangulations of customer telephone calls. Before ten calls came in they couldn’t even dispatch repair crews, since they didn’t know the precise area affected. Now, with the new meters, they know if your power is out without you ever having to pick up the phone. Better still, they also know who among your neighbors has lost power, and who has not. This means that repair trucks of the right kind go to the right place right away. Since the introduction of digital smart meters, outage times have shrunk over all the United States.

In electricity speak, the “demand side” of the grid is the Taorminas. It’s you and me. It’s the people of Boulder, Colorado, and Bakersfield, California,

Smart meters, for example, allow utilities to take steps to limit electricity usage at moments of peak demand—when we all ramp up our electricity use at the same time.

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. The utility has to pay you for this power and the smart meter helps them keep track of how much they owe you at the end of each billing cycle.

Since the lines necessary to carry radically distributed, uncoordinated, and small-scale generation to market also needed to be smart (which is to say to have some basic digital computing capacities), it made sense to build the two functionalities into the same set of wires. Information and electricity finally, in Boulder, becoming one.

smart meters don’t benefit us, the customers. At least they don’t directly. Smart meters, and to a lesser extent other grid-smartening investments, benefit them, the utility companies.

as a “microgrid,” these institutions could make mutually beneficial deals with their utility to, for example, stop drawing power from the big grid during heat waves in exchange for substantial cash payments.

smart grid makes it possible to shift consumption around the clock. It doesn’t reduce consumption; in fact, quite the opposite: the utilities would be pleased if everyone used more electricity than they currently do. Rather, what the smart grid does is change the time at which consumption takes place. Instead of most of the nation vacuuming, washing and drying laundry, cooking dinner, watching TV, charging their car, and turning up their air-conditioning (or heat, depending upon the season) at the same time of day, some people, like Val, will let the house decide. And its decisions will be based upon time-of-day tariffs that cause electricity to be cheapest at night—when there is the least demand—and most expensive between five and ten P.M., when demand is highest.

This, then, is exactly the problem. The utilities don’t know how to upgrade existing technology without putting themselves out of business. Nor do they know how to continue with the existing infrastructure without going out of business.

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.”

Most of the time customer usage is fairly predictable. Refrigerators, for example, are always on, and use about 14 percent of domestic power. Freezers use another 4 percent.

Other things, such as lights—11 percent of domestic power, but 26 percent of commercial electrical consumption—go on at a predictable point in time.

As American homes get bigger, as population shifts toward the southern states, and as air-conditioning becomes ubiquitous in all new construction, the summer peaks have grown steadily graver than those in winter. Some blame can also be apportioned to global warming:

“Anywhere there’s air-conditioning, smart grids will likely prosper.” This is not just because these devices use a lot of electricity (they do), but because everybody uses them at the same time and because when it’s very hot outside the utilities are already having a difficult time for a variety of reasons: long-distance wheeling goes up, spot markets get expensive, and lines sag and grow less efficient.

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.

The collapse of the Energy Futures Holding Corporation in 2014, a less well-known industry bomb than Enron, continues this trend. The eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, with $40.9 billion in assets, Energy Futures was only two-thirds the size of Enron, but all of its holdings were in a single state—Texas. Energy Futures Holding was the parent company of North Texas’s retail electric service provider TXU Energy, which has more customers than any other electricity retailer in that state. Energy Futures also owned the state’s largest power company, Luminant Generation Co., with twenty power plants across Texas (including a nuclear plant) and a generating capacity of 18,300 MW. And Energy Futures controlled Texas’s largest transmission and distribution company, Oncor, with 7.5 million customers in more than four hundred Texas cities and towns, including Dallas–Fort Worth.