The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

the machine that holds the whole of our modern life in place “works in practice, but not in theory.” No one can see, grasp, or plan for the whole of it.

Though there are many ways to describe voltage, none make it a particularly easy concept to grasp. Often, again, what the process of trying to get down to the physical nuts and bolts of electric power makes most plain is how much electricity really isn’t like anything else we know or manage.

So difficult is it to “think” about electricity that descriptive metaphors quickly enter into any explanatory matrix. Odd as it may seem, the most accurate of these for explaining voltage is the highly anthropomorphic notion of “desire”: electrons that have been artificially split from atoms (which is what an electromagnetic generator does) “want” to resolve themselves back into whole atoms again. This may make electricity sound rather more like a singles bar than a problem of physics, but the notion of “desiring to complete oneself by coupling” does give a pretty good sense of the ferocity with which electrons without atoms move toward atoms that lack electrons. 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.

“any change in generation or transmission at any point in the system will change loads on generators and transmission lines at every other point—often in ways that are not anticipated or controlled.”