The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

The grid is not just something we built, but something that grew with America, changed as our values changed, and gained its form as we developed as a nation. It is a machine, an infrastructure, a cultural artifact, a set of business practices, and an ecology. Its tendrils touch us all.

America has the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation—coming in at about six hours per year, not including blackouts caused by extreme weather or other “acts of God,”

According to Massoud Amin, a power systems engineer, on “any given day in the U.S. about half a million people are without power for two or more hours.” For every minute of every one of these blackouts, money is lost and national security is at risk.

Not every blackout is caused by a world-class storm. Many are made by wildlife, squirrels most especially, and even more originate with trees—so many that overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.

The lines are not hollow with electricity inside them, they are solid through and through. Nor does electricity flow, trickle, or drip. It is not a liquid or a gas subject to the laws of fluid dynamics; it’s a force. We make it—which is already pretty awesome—by breaking electrons free from their atoms (at the power plant) and then allowing these to bump into their next nearest atomic neighbor, dislodging their electrons, and allowing these to bump along to the next. Some metals, at the atomic level, make this process of dislodging electrons from atoms easy, and these are the metals we use to build conductors (power lines). The lines, in turn, play material host to this atomic domino effect that moves at roughly the speed of light.

Toasters don’t explode, wires function well, lightbulbs go on when the wall switch is flipped, all because the grid is kept in balance: there is enough electricity available to run our machines, but there is not so much that it rips through and destroys them.

It can be us, using too much power all of a sudden (like when we all come home after a long day’s work and simultaneously turn up our air-conditioning just as the wind slackens), or it can be cloud cover, stripping the generative capacity from solar panels. Regardless, the utilities and other balancing authorities have to act very quickly to set things right again. Otherwise there just isn’t enough power in the lines to keep the lights on. Lots of blackouts start this way.