The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

This is why for its first half century, electricity was largely an urban phenomenon. That finally changed during the Great Depression, when the government intervened and brought the grid and electricity to the rural folks whom capitalism would have happily left behind.

New York alone is in the process of constructing eighty-three new microgrids.

Others, including CitiBank, Businessweek, and the Edison Electric Institute, are predicting the end of the electrical utility company as we know it.

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.

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.

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.

it does the reader well to remember that the vulnerability of the grid as a technological system is intimately linked to the fragility of biological systems (like salmon runs), the intractability of legal and bureaucratic systems (like the endangered species act), and the unpredictably of meteorological systems (like wind storms).

Our grid delivers electricity as easily to the poor as it does to the rich, and it blacks out privilege almost as often as poverty.

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.

By the early 1890s regular people, industrialists, white-collar workers, small business owners, corporate managers, manufacturers, traction companies, investors, and inventors had all grown fond of electricity and what it could do. Nevertheless, most also found the wild way of building an infrastructure deeply unsatisfactory, with four different kinds of current (DC, single-phase AC, dual-phase AC, and polyphase AC), two different intensities of lighting system (arc and incandescent) that relied on different wiring logics (series and parallel), seven different possible voltages, nine different rates of oscillation, and up to forty competing electric companies (depending on the size of the market), plus all the folks who’d opted out of public power and installed private plants. The result was predictable: not only were there too many wires, but the lack of standardization made it difficult for anyone to make any money, whether selling current or selling the various components and machines that used it.

Lord Kelvin, a physicist of some note, sent a cable late in 1893, just as the International Niagara Commission was completing its decision-making process, saying TRUST YOU AVOID GIGANTIC MISTAKE OF ADOPTION OF ALTERNATING CURRENT.

The grid we would get, the grid that the mess of the 1880s would resolve into, reflected in many ways the decisions made at Niagra—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. As more new electrical installations were built to follow this model, rotary convertors, and slightly later, phase converters (which made single-phase AC systems interoperable with multiphase systems) made diverse, existing electrical infrastructures interoperable, such that companies did not have to abandon large, unamortized investments in order to work together.

Rural people had virtually no access to electricity until the passage of the Rural Electrification Act in 1936 during the darkest days of the Great Depression. And even before that, during the first decade of the twentieth century, urbanites, suburbanites, and factory owners rarely chose to use electric current over more constant and familiar technologies such as gas lamps and steam engines.

In 1900 only one factory in thirteen used electric motors, and only one domestic light in twenty was electrified—the rest were still gas lamps, kerosene lamps, and candles. At home, people often preferred the wink and flicker of fire to the more even, unwavering, if equally warm, light of incandescent bulbs.

By the mid-1960s it had become clear to utility men that a plant run at just over 30 percent efficiency was both the most reliable and the most cost-effective way to make electricity.

It only took a generation after the end of the Depression for Americans to become consummately modern individuals, until as a nation we had lost working knowledge of a coal brazier, a kerosene lamp, a latrine, an ice box, a well, a mangler, or anything else more complicated than a switch, a button, an outlet, a socket, a tap, or a flusher.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s current goal is that 20 percent of America’s electricity come from cogeneration plants by 2030.

What nobody involved with crafting ISO4 or the tax credits that accompanied it had expected was how well it all might go. Doing anything new in relationship to the bulk energy game had for so long been impossible that the best these new energy entrepreneurs and ideologues had hoped for was to make a tiny dent in the existing edifice. What they got instead was a party that everybody (even people they hadn’t exactly invited) came to. Taken together, ISO4 and the state’s overly generous tax credits created a glut in the renewables market. And as oil and natural gas prices plummeted in the mid-1980s, California’s two big utilities were quite suddenly being required to purchase more power than they needed for far more money than they could recoup through their rates. Meanwhile, the Reagan-era deregulation of the savings and loans in 1986 took Cashman, and most everyone else, totally by surprise. Suddenly everyone, not just the superrich—“the baseball players, football players, plastic surgeons and Southern California actors” that Cashman’s turbine investment plan had been meant to attract—could secure the financing necessary to buy their very own personal wind turbine. Far too many people, in his opinion, did just that.

the main reason given by voters for their vote against the utility was a lack of choice regarding generation. Whatever they thought about the SmartGridCity, what made them really angry was the utility’s unwillingness to integrate more wind power. Val, however, has different concerns. She wants her house to manage itself. She wants it to make electricity, store it, and use it without her having to do much more than punch into her smart phone, DISHES WASHED BY 5 P.M. and MAKE SURE THE CAR IS CHARGED BY 7. The coming “Internet of Things,” of which smart phones, smart appliances, smart meters, and electric cars are all integral parts (it is coming, by the way, it just hasn’t quite arrived yet), is in many ways the continuation of an emancipation project that began in the 1930s to free women from the drudgery of household work by electrifying common appliances. The laundry line became the electric clothes dryer, the washboard became the electric washing machine, the icebox became the refrigerator, the kettle on the stove for the weekly bath became the electric hot water heater, the mangle became the electric iron, and so on and so forth.

The machines will manage themselves. No longer does a woman need to be physically present to press a button or turn a dial. The solar panels will make electricity when then can, they will store that electricity for use as needed, and the storage device, usually banks of dedicated batteries or, even better, the battery in the car, will communicate with the smart meter to determine when the autonomous vacuum should slide out of its docking port, when the washer should click on, or when ice should be made in the rooftop freezer (later melted to cool the home, thus doing away with air-conditioning altogether). Money will be saved, since grid-provided power will be accessed only when it is cheapest, and time will be saved, since Val Peterson will no longer need to be home to push the buttons.

Smart meters, as the devices that at least in theory make real-time electricity use calculable, make the considered use of electricity possible for the first time ever. It doesn’t quite work yet, pieces are missing, and the software is troglodytic, but with luck and creative diligence it will all come together in the very near future.

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. As a compromise, most utilities in the country are opting to install the smart meters but not to provide consumers with the rest of what the Petersons got. At least not on their dime. A smart meter allows for smart appliances, such as an air conditioner or thermostat, that can be set in conjunction with a utility’s promotional-rate structure to encourage time-of-day use that smooths out peak demand. It also turns out, to almost nobody’s surprise, that smart meters allow the utility to remotely control electricity use.

Some blame can also be apportioned to global warming: thirteen of the fifteen hottest years on record (since the start of record-keeping in 1880) have been since 2000, with 2015 being the hottest year ever recorded. Even though summers are getting hotter, driving up air-conditioner usage nationwide, there have also been some spectacular cold snaps as well, the polar vortex in 2014 being among the most memorable in recent times.

Resiliency means the ability to take a blow and not be bowled over by it; it means designing ones and structures that can bend but not break; it means blackouts that bounce back into brightness rather than cascade across the continent; it means backup systems so seamlessly integrated into primary systems that one doesn’t even notice the switch between them. Resiliency means accepting that sometimes things do break and then imagining and engineering ways not so much to make them unbreakable, as to consider how they might be less thoroughly broken in the first place and thus also easier to fix.

The hard path is a way of building security into systems that is premised upon both rigidity and mass—whether masses of concrete or masses of information.

An otherwise undamaged refinery or pipeline will not operate without access to electric power. Gas stations dispense fuel by means of electric pumps, making supplies of liquid fuel for cars and airplanes also at risk when the grid breaks. Even money these days is more electric than it is material; there are no cash machines in a storm, no banking or investment systems, no ways to monitor, use, or control currency not made of paper or metal. No communications networks also means inoperative military and police forces.

If energy security is our goal, rather than simply electrification, such intricacy is a poor route to the system’s reliability.

For the Lovinses, reconceptualizing and then rebuilding our systems-in-common as smaller, more flexible, more self-contained, less polluting, and closer to home was the wisest way to proceed. Soft energy technologies, the adoption of which they considered to be the first necessary step toward ensuring energy security in the United States, have five defining characteristics. First, they rely on renewable energy resources, like wind and solar, but also biomass, geothermal, wave, and tidal power. Second, they are diverse and designed to function with maximum effectiveness within specific circumstances. Third, they are flexible and relatively simple to understand. Fourth, they should be matched to end-use needs in terms of scale, and fifth, they should also be matched to end use in terms of quality. All of this is nested within a larger cultural commitment to energy efficiency that is built in to our structures and our life-ways from the ground up. For the Lovinses, the soft energy path is not about privation but thoughtful, thorough integration of energy use into social life.

To say that an energy system should be diverse and designed for maximum effectiveness in particular circumstances is, essentially, the “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” maxim of maintaining constant access to electricity. For the Lovinses, every power-supply system regardless of its size should integrate a number of technologically different sources of generation, with different weaknesses and different supply chain problems.

From a study of biological systems rather than technological ones, the Lovinses argued that an organism’s longevity consistently relies upon “local back-up, local autonomy, and a preference for small over large scale and for diversity over homogeneity.”

Between the 1950s and 1980s, outages increased modestly, from two to five significant outages each year, compared with 76 in 2007 and a whopping 307 in 2011.

In all of this, it is only important to keep one’s eye on the grail. What are its parameters? What do we dream of ? What do we seek? And how will this thing, should we invent our way to it, change everything about the circumstances that gave rise to the dream to begin with? “The challenge right now,” architect John Keates enjoins us to consider, is that given that we don’t know the answer to what comes next, to also ask: “what are the ethics that we set for ourselves? And to be aware that when we venture out into untrodden territory, that we are able to ask that question and dare to act when there is no clear answer.” The dreamers and builders and kickstarters of electrical storage campaigns and components are doing an admirable job of this.

Infrastructure should, according to the design guru Donald Norman, fade into invisibility. It should be made to disappear from sight and equally to disappear from consciousness. It should be quiet, task-specific, and unobtrusive. We shouldn’t notice it, we shouldn’t think about it, and we shouldn’t seek it.

In all of the talk about what will make our current electric grid into a better system, usability rarely enters the discussion.

Most of us still don’t have solar panels or an intimate relationship with batteries any larger than those that power our phones. Our grid, the part of it we know and interact with, looks like the cords, plugs, outlets, and switches that link our portable electronics to the wall. This, too, might be thought of as the grid edge, since the moment that we unplug electric power from the big grid and carry it around in our pockets is literally where the grid disaggregates, becoming something different and new. The charger is the final cord, the one we know best, and the smallest dendrite in a world of complexity.

In short, we’d like our grid to whisper away, to be less devastating in its effects, and to work without deputizing us to the process. We’ll keep electricity, thank you. In fact, the further we proceed into the age of information the more electricity becomes the base for all that we do, from banking, to reading, to collaborative thinking. The future promises an even more thorough integration of electricity into our lives, more data (which is after all, just electricity), more “smart” things (coming to populate the Internet of Things), and the elimination of fuel from cars, necessary if we’d like to stop global warming before it exceeds the 2-degrees-Celsius disaster line. Most important, we’d like this means of “being electric” to come from nothing, to be transmitted by nothing, to cause no damage, and to work always and wherever.

Figuring out how to design a system for maximum inclusivity is harder than it sounds, in part because it’s difficult for any one player in the giant tangle of our grid to have much comprehension about what motivates the others.

The greens, to take the obvious example, root sustainability in getting power from nothing and producing no waste in the process.

Even forward-thinking California has proved boneheaded on this point. Late in 2015 the legislature in that state passed an extraordinary new renewable energy standard into law, which (among other things) obliges California to make 50 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030. As remarkable as it sounds, at the core of this piece of legislation lurks an unexpectedly retrograde logic. The only renewable electricity that will count toward the 50 percent is that produced by central stations. Rooftop solar will not be counted.

The grid, as should be clear by now, is not a technological system. It is also a legal one, a business one, a political one, a cultural one, and a weather-driven one, and the ebbs and flows in each domain affect the very possibility of success of any plan for its improvement. If the integration of systems across domains, especially the irritating bits, cannot be made to flourish, the problem will be not with the machinery we use or the technology we govern, but with us.