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.

Literally speaking, our grid is comprised of the battery, its port, the charger, its plug, the outlet and its wall-hidden wires out to the street, the transformer and the familiar forest of urban utility poles, the low-voltage wires that run along these poles out to the substation, more transformers (bigger here), some syncrophasers, relays, switches, and fuses and the giant pylons that march away across the empty parts of America carrying high-voltage wires to the power plant, where it all begins in an electromagnetic generator spun fast by a steam-heated, or wind-blown, or water-wheeled, or gas-combusted turbine. Our grid is a peculiarly pervasive infrastructure that touches every life, pierces every wall, bifurcates every landscape, and runs every battery.

And though we call it the grid, in America we actually have three of them: one for the West that includes a tiny bit of Mexico and much of western Canada; one for all of the East; and a separate, smaller one for Texas. For the most part Mexico has its own grid, but Canada does not (except for its errant province, Quebec, which, like Texas, has...

More than 70 percent of the grid’s transmission lines and transformers are twenty-five years old; add nine years to that and you have the average age of an American power plant.

According to the industry expert Peter Asmus, we rely on twice as many power plants as we actually need because of “the massive inefficiencies built into this system.” As a result, significant power outages are climbing year by year, from 15 in 2001 to 78 in 2007 to 307 in 2011. 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,” of which there were 679 between 2003 and 2012. Compare this with Korea at 16 outage minutes a year, Italy at 51 minutes, Germany at 15, and Japan at 11. Not only do we have more outages than most other industrial countries, but ours are getting longer. The average U.S. power outage is 120 minutes and growing, while in the rest of the industrialized world it’s less than ten minutes and shrinking. 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.”

The 2003 East Coast blackout, caused by an overgrown tree and a computer bug, blacked out eight states and 50 million people for two days. So thorough and vast was this cascading blackout that it shows as a visible dip on America’s GDP for that year. Six billion dollars lost: that’s $60,000 per hour per blacked-out business of lost revenues across 93,000 square miles.

After the big East Coast blackout of 1965, caused by an incorrectly set relay, we couldn’t even get our power plants to come back online. It turns out you need electricity to make electricity, and so diesel generators had to be wheeled in and used to “black-start” our coal-burning plants and nuclear power stations.

On a lighter, if no less economically devastating, note in 1987, and again in 1994, the NASDAQ lost power because of squirrels gnawing on the electric lines that connect that stock exchange to the world.

overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.

It turns out that transitioning America away from a reliance on fossil fuels and toward more sustainable energy solutions will be possible only with a serious reimagination of our grid. The more we invest in “green” energy, the more fragile our grid becomes.

A coal-burning plant might be bad for the environment, it might be bad for the miners who struggle underground to bring that coal up and bad for the West Virginia mountains razed in its production, but it’s a remarkably good fit for the grid. And not just coal. The grid is at its best when we make electricity using what are called “stock resources.” These are fuels that when we use them, we use them up—plutonium, natural gas, oil, coal, and anything else dug up from the ground or grown upon the earth that we burn and then have no more.

These steady fires are what our twentieth-century grid was built for. During that period, the business of making and delivering power was a remarkably centralized activity, run by “natural” monopolies (the utilities) that built infras...

Renewables, especially the two most popular, solar and wind, have been creeping their way into our national energy mix since the 1970s. These are anything but obedient. The utilities can command them, but they do not listen. The utilities can attempt to control them, but their e...

At issue are the vagaries of nature. The wind can never blow with the same steadiness that factory-combusted coal provides, and the sun’s rays, while ever present, are all too often blocked from reaching the panels we’ve built to gather them by clouds. Each moment of shade, no matter its length, is translated by solar panels into a dip in the electricity they produce....

Sustainable energy sources provide something else: an inconsistent, variable power that our grid is unprepared to adapt to. Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that these alternatives to fossil fuels are where our energy future lies.

However, it is problematic not only how renewables make power but where they make it. Wind farms go up where it is windy. And places like Wyoming or Iowa or West Texas have a lot of strong wind on constant offer. What they don’t have are many people to use this power or very good long-distance power lines to carry it to more promising markets. The grid was never built to be robust in the midst of wastelands. But these empty, often uninhabitable places tend to be where wind and solar power are most effectively produced.

We all use the electricity made by panel owners in aggregate, in exactly the same way we use power generated by a natural gas combustion turbine or a hydroelectric dam. When we pay our electric bill, we are also now paying the producers of this homemade electricity for the power they contribute to the whole.

In theory this is all well and good, except that in America we have long made electricity in huge quantities in big, centralized power plants. Our grid was built with these factories at its heart. Everything about the way it is structured, from the merest wire to the biggest sub-station, was designed for the effective transit of power from a few massive producers to a wide scatter of users. All of us everywhere use electricity, but we never used to make it. Home solar installations turn this logic on its head without doing much to help reconfigure the grid, which in certain pockets of our nation now has to take power from everywhere and distribute it to everywhere else.

It’s also a massive cultural system. And the stakeholders—the utilities, investment firms, power plant owners, mining firms, and “too-big-to-fail” multinational conglomerates—will not go gently into the future’s bright night. An abundance of carbon-free energy is a nice idea, but fossil fuel companies are still responsible for the vast majority (66.5 percent) of the power on our grid. Coal may be on the way out; the Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that roughly a fifth of total coal capacity will be retired between 2012 and 2020, and even the chief executive of the American Coal Council admits that the industry has abandoned any plans to replace the retiring fleet.

The recent boom in natural gas, however, seems to legitimate that industry’s claim that it is the perfect transition fuel. For the moment, it’s almost as cheap as coal; we have a lot of it, ripe for domestic exploitation; and it is more efficient for producing electricity because power plants that run on natural gas are spun first by the raw force of combustion and then run on steam, giving twice the bang for the same buck. At first glance, natural gas is also cleaner than coal. This is certainly true if one is thinking in terms of particulates and not greenhouse gases or wastewater pollution. Methane emissions from natural gas development and leaky transport infrastructure, however, undercut some of the climate advantage gas has over coal. 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. In most places, leakages are not that bad. In some places they are worse.

Even nuclear power, which is problematic on many levels, has gained a new sparkle as “green” has come to mean carbon-free rather than pollution-free. They can still melt down, and the problem of storing the radioactive w...

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.

As the first decade of the twenty-first century crested, making power from renewable sources shifted from a nice idea and a minor player on the electricity scene into the mainstream. The speed and the scale of this shift have been truly extraordinary—a momentum that is only likely to increase. It is estimated that by 2050 “nearly every single power plant in the U.S. will need to be replaced by new plants.” If, then, in 2015 we had three times as much wind power as in 2008 and twenty times as much solar, these looming plant retirements only further open the door to renewable technologies, big and small.

In Hawaii, at present, over 12 percent of the houses are equipped with solar panels—so many that on certain sunny days these home solar systems produce more electricity than the state needs.In the summer of 2015, Hawaii’s utility began refusing further connections by home solar owners to the grid. Not because they are mean-spirited, but because they can’t use it all, and 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. The same was happening in Vermont, which is saying something, because Hawaii might have a lovely climate for solar power, but Vermont is both northern and gray.

Nevertheless, its two largest utilities had, for much of 2015, also called for a hiatus on new grid connections for home solar systems as these were causing the bills of their customers without home solar to rise precipitously. Until something infrastructural, in some cases, and fiscal in others must be done to deal with all the homemade electricity being pumped into the grid during daytime hours on sunny days, both states will be sti...

This reveals another curious thing about our grid: though it may be big, it is also intensely local. For example, right now, variable generation is producing only a tiny portion of the electricity used in this country, about 7 percent overall. But in some places this number is much higher. In Texas, wind power alone accounts for 9 percent of elect...

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. In Texas, one blustery September day in 2015, the price per megawatt-hour of electricit...

By 2025 the Department of Energy wants 25 percent of America’s electricity to come from renewables. It sounds like a pipe dream, until you consider that between 2009 and 2014 the amount of renewable power traveling the lines of our grid has more than doubled. And this federal goal is actually rather lightweight when compared to certain state efforts. Maine is aiming for 40 percent by 2017, California for 50 percent by 2030—and these numbers don’t even include the electricity made from rooftop solar systems. Vermont, ever the tiny optimist, has a goal of 7...

Electricity is not like this, ever. It cannot be boxed or stored or shipped. It is always used the same instant it is made, even if the person using it is a thousand miles from the source. If electricity is made, it’s shipped; if it’s shipped, it’s used. And all of this happens in the same singular millisecond.

For our part, consumers, who know very well what a banana is and what a dollar is and how the two kinds of things stand in relationship to each other, rarely have any real sense of what a kilowatt-hour is, how much it should cost, how many we are using, and how much we might be paying for them.

Yet because the electricity we depend so heavily upon cannot be separated from its infrastructure, we cannot reform our energy system without also transforming our grid.

Almost all the big utilities are investor-owned, which means they have shareholders who have been promised at least the occasional dividend. Corners get cut in order to ensure that this flow of cash continues apace, and decisions get made with profit motives in mind that brook little concern for the particular capacities, and incapacities, of the grid. 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.

No advance could be made in one place that couldn’t accommodate weaknesses somewhere else down the line. Little by little, this build here, that reform there, developed into the grid we have: it is a jury-rigged result—highly inventive in places, totally stodgy in some, fantastically Rube Goldberg in yet others. As implausible as it must sound, 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.

Wrapped up in this is how the utilities established themselves as monopolies and saddled the industry with the long-term inertia a lack of competition too often begets. In part because of its protected status as a regulated monopoly, the grid worked reasonably well from the moment of near to universal electrification in the late 1930s through the end of the 1960s. But when it stopped being true that utility profits were assured by an ever-increasing rise in demand, and as their fundamental strategy of grow-and-build simultaneously faltered, the grid began to slip into a state of disrepair. The utilities, which for so long had thrived on being the least inventive, least flexible, most run-of-the-mill companies in America, didn’t know how to change. This indifference, even from within the industry, when coupled with legislative attempts to make the electricity business more profitable as the digital economy rose to prevalence in the final years of the twentieth century, have made the grid an ever more uneven technology. The parts that can be leveraged to make money get a lot of attention while the rest silently molder.

Before the blackouts began in earnest, apart from a few concerned engineers and environmentalists, among them Amory and Hunter Lovins, not many people cared much about the consequences of this protracted inattention. In 1979, in the wake of America’s second energy crisis that decade, the Lovinses prepared a report for the Pentagon on the state of America’s domestic energy infrastructure. Their conclusion was surprising: national security was threatened more by the “brittleness” of America’s electrical grid than by possible future disruptions in the flow of imported oil. As prophetic as that report would turn out to be, few were really listening, apart from Jimmy Carter, who would lose his presidential power ...

And then the inevitable happened. In the early years of the new millennium, the grid finally began to break; its business model cracked open as much as its copper and cement were worn down. California suffered blackouts so severe the governor declared a state of emergency and one of its major utilities filed for bankruptcy (the first for a large utility since the Depression). Then a nuclear power plant in Vermont toppled over. It literally fell down; its support structure had rotted right through. Not because it hadn’t been subject to regular maintenance and inspection, but because all the ...

The White House even lost power, not once but twice during the Bush years (and twice since!).

The U.S. military, for one, is unable to tolerate even the tiniest of voltage fluctuations (these make computers behave as if they have been possessed by demons, and they are common on America’s grid) or risk physical attacks on unsecured public infrastructure.

Of all the myriad “unintended consequences” and “creative reactions” arising from ruined bits of our current system, the most important is this: inventors and corporations, every bit as much as individuals, are thinking about what can be accomplished by small actions and collective efforts. They are doing so en masse for the first time since the domestication of electricity in the 1880s. The cumulative effect of this new emphasis on “small” is to wrest control away from big men accustomed to fighting their battles on a grand scale. America’s infrastructure is being colonized by a new logic: little, flexible, fast, adaptive, local—the polar opposite of the way things have been up until now.

The ways in which they managed American power since the end of the nineteenth century are slowly but surely being relegated to the trash heap of history. Sometimes the people leading this assault look like Silicon Valley smart-guys, sometimes they look like aging hippies finally getting their way, sometimes they look like multinational corporations, and sometimes, every so often, they look like a retired schoolteacher in seasonally decorated knitwear.

What Dr. Chu is going to tell them, the men who keep our grid up and running, is to integrate more renewable power generation—more wind, more sun, more waves and tides, more geothermal, more of everything that is hot without being heated and that moves without being pushed—but first he is going to tell them some horror stories. Sure enough, by about slide 5 (after we have learned many great things about our energy future and how America will soon be rocketing back to unprecedented international success), things start to look really bad.

“Five minutes later,” he continues, “there was a jagged but rapid eighty-one-percent drop in the electricity output from the solar farm that served the community.” Eighty-one percent. Five o’clock P.M. A nicely drawn downward-plunging line.

Everyone in the room knows exactly what is going on; what they don’t know is how to deal with it. An all but instantaneous 81 percent drop in generation at five in the evening when everyone is coming home from work, switching on their air-conditioning, TV sets, and computers is the kind of story that sets the hearts of electrical engineers palpitating. Electricity consumption on this, the world’s largest machine, must at every moment be balanced with electricity production. The more solar there is in any given mix of “fuels” used to generate electricity, the harder it is to cope with the sudden arrival of a cloud, especially at five in the afternoon when things on the demand side have just shot through the roof.

“Four months later,” says Secretary Chu, continuing blithely on to the next slide, “on January fifth, 2009, in the Columbia River Gorge, the wind stopped blowing quite suddenly and didn’t start again for three weeks.” He pauses again.

Even the greenest of consumers aren’t going to just wait for the wind to pick up again before checking their e-mail or making some toast.

Even if just a portion of their electricity comes from wind power, someone somewhere is having to make up for this calm, an adjustment that still, in most cases, involves firing up some other massive power-making machine. It’s not impossible, but it’s a struggle: it’s hard to do well, harder to do fast, and almost impossible to do cleanly. America’s backup power plants are the oldest and dirtiest in the fleet. They should have been decommissioned and torn down decades ago. Instead we use them as a last-ditch resource when power supplies fall short. We use them a lot.

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

Before grid-scale wind and solar power came online, slow and steady always won the race. There was no competition in electricity, a protection enshrined in law that made each utility the unique master of its realm. They made our power and they always knew how much of it there would be, where it would come from, and where it would be used. Plans were made seasonally, collegially, as every four months utility men would sit down in a room and talk about how the winter might go, or the spring, or the summer; these men made sure there were enough power plants chugging along to provide what they estimated to be the right amount of electricity. Except for the occasional panic of a too-hot day or too-cold one—when demand for electricity jumps precipitously—their plans pretty much worked.

Nothing in the system they grew up in, and now run, prepared them for a means of power generation that not only varies from minute to minute, but which they do not own, cannot control, and have no plan for.

All that power, currently estimated at 6,000 megawatts (or enough electricity to power 4.5 million households) depends solely on the way the wind blows.