The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

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.