The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

2003 East Coast blackout, caused by an overgrown tree and a computer bug, blacked out eight states and 50 million people for two days.

Six billion dollars lost: that’s $60,000 per hour per blacked-out business of lost revenues across 93,000 square miles.

Sustainable energy sources provide something else: an inconsistent, variable power that our grid is unprepared to adapt to.

excess power on the grid causes bits of it to shut down self-protectively—a measure that spares the infrastructure but blacks out its users.

There is so much wind in some places in the United States right now that on particularly blustery days, the local balancing authority—charged with making sure the amount of electricity going into the grid and the amount being drawn from it are exactly the same—has to pay some of the wind farms to shut down their turbines

and also pay large industrial concerns to take and use more power than they actually need.

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.

Charles Brush’s—the

In Appleton we got America’s first true, small municipal grid,

More than any fact of physics or markets or culture, regulation in the form of long-term loan guarantees coupled with assured profit on investment had enabled electric companies to weather the intense infrastructural costs of building ever bigger, more powerful electricity factories and ever more expansive power networks.

ISO4 was unique among California’s offerings in that for the first ten years of the contract it paid more than the avoided costs of the utility; it then paid less than this amount in the final years.

appealing to entrepreneurs because of how expensive it was to build new energy infrastructure.

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

Renewable energy resources don’t need risky supply chains—like the chance arrival of a fuel truck in the middle of a hurricane—in order to function.

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.

At present, our capacity to integrate renewable generation gets complicated as we approach 15 percent of peak power—or 25 percent of daily electricity use. This does not change with the size of a grid.

Rather than storing excess power we use generation to “balance” generation.

The utilities have been quick to recognize that people who are normally quite stingy with their electric company, including those actively opposed to new high-voltage wires, will voluntarily pay a surcharge on their bill for renewable power.