The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

Perhaps they will remain stewards of the wires, but no longer will they make power (they already mostly don’t) nor will they make money from selling it.

Of all the myriad “unintended consequences” and “creative reactions” arising from ruined bits of our current system, the most important is this: inventors and corporations, every bit as much as individuals, are thinking about what can be accomplished by small actions and collective efforts.

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.

As impossible as it may seem grid-scale electricity storage hardly exists.

no nation has a strategic electricity reserve. As a result the electricity we use, day in and day out, is always fresh. So fresh, that less than a minute ago, if you live in wind farm territory, that electricity was a fast-moving gust of air. And if you live in coal country, it was a blast of pulverized coal dust being blown into a “firebox”—a huge, industrial, flash-combusting furnace. If you live in hydro country it was a waiting rush of water dammed up by a massive concrete wall.

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.

It begins to seem that in the not too distant future the companies we now call “utilities” will become stewards of the wires and little more.

For though we are accustomed to saying that our modern world relies upon electricity, it’s far more accurate to say that it relies upon constant voltage,

Or to put it another way, an electric grid’s most significant point of appeal is its ability to make and reliably transmit standardized power—not

The most diabolical outcome of a return to a system of private plants, which could easily happen in the next couple of decades in sunny places like Arizona, Hawaii, and southern California (and to some degree has already happened in Germany) is that it threatens universal access to quality electrical power.

The grid we would get, the grid that the mess of the 1880s would resolve into, reflected in many ways the decisions made at Niagara—polyphase alternating current, oscillating at 60 cycles a second, produced by large power stations, transmitted by means of point-to-point high-voltage wires, and distributed by networked and ringed lower-voltage delivery systems, standardized at 110 and 220 volts.

His first major stumbling block was the intractability of electricity itself: since it can’t be stored it can’t be stockpiled; since it is indivisible, it is difficult to count and accurately bill for; since it is lethal, it requires a highly trained workforce to manage; and since it is utterly inseparable from the infrastructure that carries it, one has to bear the cost of building and maintaining that infrastructure.

The factories were the one piece of the puzzle that could make this scheme work. They were the only customers which could be counted on to use a tremendous amount of power during daylight hours; without factories, no vision of a single on-all-the-time grid could be profitable.

permitting “the feeding of locally generated electricity into utility grids”

What is news is that in 2014, 53.3 percent of new generation installed in the United States was either wind or solar, and this percentage is predicted to only grow.

The utilities could be regulated, wisely or foolishly, but they would not be asked to learn adaptability, flexibility, or creativity themselves; instead they would be told what to do and they would be expected to do it.

Each of these replacements, while helping to protect us from the pollutants and waste produced by earlier generations of power plants, complicates life for the grid, mostly by introducing variability without storage (chapter 1) and radically distributed, privately owned generation without oversight (chapter 8).

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.

Utilities, obliged since the late 1970s to buy power from small producers at the same price it would have cost them to make it themselves, were, with the act, taken even more thoroughly out of the generation side of the electricity game.

In many states this also came with an obligation for total, or significant, divestiture in generating stations. From this point forward the main way for the utilities to make money would be by transporting, deliver...

the greatest threat to the security and reliability of our electrical infrastructure is foliage.

The vision of Boulder presented in 2008, had it been truly built, would have borne a strong and abiding resemblance to a future Phoenix (ca. 2029). Xcel would also have bankrupted itself.

The big grid would have become a backup system.

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.

All of this new activity is happening on the bit of the grid designed for distribution—the low-voltage wires slung between homes and pole tops in residential neighborhoods.

Almost all of these more recent blackouts, much like the big East Coast blackout of 2003, started and propagated on underfunded distribution networks.

Meanwhile transmission systems—those long high-voltage lines that stretch between distant power plants where electricity was once solely made and the urban centers where it is still mostly used—are much less prone to outages.

A recent special report in the Economist took it one step further. As a result of the veritable explosion in rooftop solar, “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.”

Finding a way to store electricity so that it is there to be used when we need it is at the top of every ideologue’s list.

Air-conditioning, as we well know, is the grid’s true nemesis.

When Xcel, the maligned former utility of Boulder, Colorado, offered this deal to its Minnesota customers, one friend of a friend on Facebook raved: “If you are a homeowner, there is no reason on earth not to do this … it will cost me $4/month and my energy from here on out will be 100 percent wind powered. What a great feeling! Plus, the energy that supplies Windsource will be purchased entirely from wind farms in Minnesota and will go above and beyond government mandates.” What matters here is the emotional force behind the idea for a certain kind of customer. No one connected to the grid, even if they pay the surcharge, is getting 100 percent of their electricity from “immaterial” fuels. Nor is their power, on a grid that spans half a continent, guaranteed to be more local. The same terms may be used to laud an environmentally friendly, locally produced electron as an organic, locally grown tomato, but the two entities are impossibly different. Both a customer who has checked the renewable fuels surcharge box and her neighbor get the same electricity. The principal difference is that the electric bill of the “Windsourse® for Residences” customer runs her four dollars more every month.