The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

A century of ignoring customers has translated into all kinds of flat-footed and tone-deaf interactions in the present. In Bakersfield, these were everywhere in evidence. From the customer surprised to discover that his electricity usage actually increased during a six-hour blackout to apartment dwellers who found themselves quite suddenly in the position of paying more for their electric bill than for their rent, smart meters looked like and felt like a cash grab. And though there has been a lot of quibbling as to why, nobody argues with the fact that with the new technology’s arrival, monthly electric bills doubled, at times trebled. This happened in 2010, when Bakersfield had an unemployment rate of 16 percent and an underemployment rate double that. Nobody had $1,000 to pay a July electric bill that had cost $300 in June (not to mention $300 the previous July) with no appreciable change in consumer behavior. If both the old meters and the new meters were accurate, as the utility claimed, then the only viable explanation for the people of Bakersfield was highway robbery. PG&E offered different interpretations: July 2010 had been much hotter, they claimed, than July 2009, resulting in more intensive air conditioner use; time-of-day rates meant that customers, not yet used to the idea that a kilowatt-hour of electricity might cost more at four in the afternoon than at six in the morning, were continuing to use power, and lots of it, at the most expensive times of day; and...