The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

“On the afternoon of May nineteenth, 2010,” he might have said, “in a single chaotic hour, more than a thousand wind turbines in the Columbia River Gorge went from spinning lazily in the breeze to full throttle as a storm rolled out of the East.” Here he would pause, to see if his audience understood what was about to happen, what all of this wind was about to do to all those turbines. “Suddenly, almost two nuclear plants’ worth of extra power was sizzling down the line—the largest hourly spike in wind power the Northwest has ever experienced.” A massive uncontrollable, unmanageable, unstorable, undumpable electricity surplus. Chaos on the lines. And what is worse: it’s May. In Oregon in May it’s still raining. It’s been raining since November, and it will continue to rain for another month or so before things begin to lighten up. In the Cascades, the mountain range that bifurcates the state, all that rain is snow, and in May all that snow is meltwater—pure, chill runoff. The rivers are very full, and they are sloshing their way down the sides of mountains and hills into the man-made lakes that sit behind, and feed, each and every dam on the mighty Columbia. In May these reservoirs can’t hold another drop. They are full up. And the turbines on every dam up and down that mighty river chug along at a fearsome rate, because if they don’t there are only two options. Either the reservoirs flood up over the homesteads, highways, and towns that dot the river’s edge, or the dam op...