The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

One 2012 study estimated that if the industry were to let leak only 3.2 percent of the gas produced, it could be worse for the climate than coal.

The grid, then, is built as much from law as from steel, it runs as much on investment strategies as on coal, it produces profits as much as free electrons.

For-profit power companies, deeply subsidized oil and natural gas interests, the mining industry, and even the railroads all have vested interests in keeping America dependent upon fossil fuels. These are big, unwieldy corporate machines. They do change with time, but it is a glacial kind of change characterized by recalcitrance and torpor. Nor should we be surprised that these behemoths of old power are unwilling to embrace a transformation that will quite likely put them out of business.

We may imagine the grid as primarily a machine to make and move electricity, but integral from the very start was that it also make and move vast quantities of money. A lot of people are still happy with this way of doing things.

in its earliest days America’s electric grid grew haphazardly, not radiating out from one imaginary center point but spreading instead like a pox, appearing only in spots with dense enough populations to ensure a profit. 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.

The Executive Branch, in 2013, finally admitted that “grid resilience is increasingly important as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of severe weather,” promising that Americans can expect “more severe hurricanes, winter storms, heat waves, floods and other extreme weather events being among the changes in climate induced by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gasses.”

Big storms, and other weather weirdnesses, have ironically become one of the main drivers of contemporary grid reform, but in the least efficient way imaginable. We use fossil fuels, including natural gas, to make electricity, the chemical pollution from these contributes massively to global warming, global warming makes for more ferocious storms, and these storms swoop in and decimate the grid. This destruction prompts people to think about ways that the grid might be made harder to destroy.

60 percent of men who run our electricity system are within five years of retirement.

Over and over, investments in renewable sources of power generation are failing or falling very short because America’s electric grid just isn’t robust enough or managed well enough to deal with the electricity these machines make.

the Los Angeles Times: “The problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century.”

We think of it as a public good only because it became one with time, not because it worked that way from the beginning.

Though we tend to think of electricity as an elite product during this epoch because only rich people could afford to have it in their homes, it might be more apt to say that it was a corporate and industrial power source first and a means of artificially illuminating the homes of the rich second.

Today, the tension between individual power production (private plants) and utility-supplied electricity (central stations) is once again becoming the battleground upon which the future of our grid—the form and scope of its infrastructure—is being waged.

One of the reasons that electric cars have received such public praise is that they can be programmed to charge almost exclusively at night and thus provide that rarest of beasts—substantial midnight load.

Politicians may talk a lot, and utility managers may worry a lot, about how terrorists might hack into, shoot up, or bomb various bits of our grid in order to bring the United States to her knees. And yet the trees constitute a far more significant threat to the security and reliability of our national electric infrastructure. It

If some people want to get rich while others want to put an end to global warming, well, let them duke it out in the marketplace. That’s effectively what the Energy Policy Act has made possible. It’s not a pretty fight. Nor is it a clean one. But where there was stagnation there is now innovation. And where there was a stable, if aging system—our grid—there is now a fantastically unstable, old one with new bits and more modern logics soldered into the joints and around the edges.

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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.

Despite all the chatter to the contrary, when it comes to being too hot or too cold, people tend not to act in economically rational ways. They follow a physiological rationality instead.

Sandy did for East Coast businesses and East Coast utilities what deregulation never managed: it made them realize that resiliency in a crisis needs to be built into the system, from the ground up.

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 utilities don’t own the storage. Because you bought the car, you do. Electric cars thus also help solve the problem of who will pay for stabilizing our grid. People who own cars will.

Sharing, when it comes to electricity, is simpler and more cost effective, than doing it for oneself. The pragmatics of this simple truth are the elementary bond that keeps us together, but it’s a weak bond rather than a strong one.