The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

The grid must be balanced; consumption must always match production, for there is as of yet no real means of storing that electricity for later use. If power is not being made right now, somewhere, somehow, we simply don’t have it to use.

As impossible as it may seem to people outside the industry, grid-scale electricity storage hardly exists. There are some artificial lakes pump-filled with water that folks in mountain states can call on in a pinch, but that’s about as far as it goes. For now, no household has a cookie jar full of watts secreted away for later use; no nation has a strategic electricity reserve. As a result the electricity we use, day in and day out, is always fresh. So fresh, that less than a minute ago, if you live in wind farm territory, that electricity was a fast-moving gust of air. And if you live in coal country, it was a blast of pulverized coal dust being blown into a “firebox”—a huge, industrial, flash-combusting furnace. If you live in hydro country it was a waiting rush of water dammed up by a massive concrete wall. Picture it. The electricity you are using right now was, about a second ago, a drop of water.

This is 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. And though schematas of the grid tend to make it seem like there is a line out of a power plant that ends in the toaster, the whole thing is actually a giant loop that both starts and ends at the power plant, or generating station.

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.

The rub is that, with the exception of hydroelectric dams, the output of all existing, comfortable-to-utilities, means for generating electricity take significant time to turn up or down.

When this happens a controller sitting in front of a wall of flat screen monitors in a control room somewhere sees it: bam, an 81 percent drop in output or an 81 percent increase in demand.

Coal-burning plants, at 50 percent in five minutes, are one of the fastest; natural gas (from a cold start) takes about ten minutes to get up to speed, while nuclear takes a full twenty-four hours to turn up, though it can be shut down in seconds.

In human time, five minutes might seem pretty quick, given that we are talking about moving a mechanical system as massive and complicated as a coal-burning power plant, which pulverizes and combusts, on average, 125 tons of coal every five minutes. But in electricity time, which is what matters to grid stability, five minutes might as well be infinity. In five minutes, electrical current generated by a power plant outside Muncie, Indiana, can go to Mars.

For this river valley is not only a phenomenal source of wind power, as Secretary Chu pointed out, but it has an extensive hydroelectric infrastructure left over from the heady days of big government investment in public works that helped to pull America out of the Great Depression. These New Deal dams (Grand Coulee and Bonneville most especially) and their smaller, more recent brethren were providing 98 percent of the Pacific Northwest’s electricity needs before the first industrial wind turbine went up; now there is all that hydro and all that wind power all in one place.

Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, they could live bright, warm, electric lives without the wind. The rain, snow, and meltwater are more than sufficient. In fact, of all the power produced in the Gorge, from whatever source, only about 15 percent is used locally. The rest is shipped on down the lines to whoever will buy it. This is why it is a big deal when the wind stops blowing for three weeks.

The fact that we don’t yet have a good means of storing electricity doesn’t just mean that we have little backup power on hand to deal with shortages; it also means that it is difficult to dispose of surplus power when it’s produced in excess.

Anywhere in the nation with a high concentration of wind turbines or a high concentration of photovoltaics always runs the risk of generating more electricity than can be easily consumed. This is the part of the renewable energy horror story that Secretary Chu left out.

You can’t just turn the wind down. When it blows hard, those turbines spin and spin and the output is tremendous. The young control room operator with whom I sat watching the weather as it approached and moved through widely scattered wind farms told me with a note of awe in his voice that you can actually see a gust of wind as it tops the Rockies and then hits one set of turbines after another all the way to the coast. You can see it in the power spikes—bang, bang, bang—of wind farm after wind farm shooting electricity into the system. It floods the grid; it crashes through the infrastructure much like a wave crashing against a sea wall on a stormy day. Even Los Angeles can’t absorb all the electricity made on a seriously blustery day in the Pacific Northwest.

Even the Western Doughnut, as the high-voltage DC line that carries electricity from the Gorge to the people of Southern California is called, with its 3,100 megawatts of transmission capacity (o...

When there is too much power on the wires they overload, or circuits break to protect them, and in so doing they close, rather than open, available paths for excess power to take. It’s hyperbole that your toaster will explode; the system will self-protectively black itself out long before your toaster turns into a bomb of flame on your kitchen count...

“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...

So, spilling the water isn’t an option, at least not in May. The only option is to let the dams operate at close to maximum capacity. And if the dams are going to make all the power they can, they are going to need all available transmission lines to move that power out of Oregon to anyone and everyone who looks like a market. It can’t be stored, it must be transported and used immediately, or the land will flood, or the grid will crash. This is every day in May. There is water, there are fish, there are laws, there are power lines with a finite capacity to transport electricity, and there is a market that just might not be big enough to use all the power they are being fed.

In this they are right. Every man at Grid Week knows it. That is part of why they have come. Over and over, investments in renewable sources of power generation are failing or falling very short because America’s electric grid just isn’t robust enough or managed well enough to deal with the electricity these machines make. And not just in the Columbia River Gorge.

In West Texas, the largest wind farm ever planned on American soil was abandoned in 2008 because the utility refused to build a high-voltage line out to the site. And the developer, the local oilman T. Boone Pickens, thought it was a travesty given how much he was investing to build the farm itself that he would be expected to also build the transmission infrastructure. He shelved the project after having installed just a thousand turbines, a fraction of the total.

Add to this a second outrage. Pickens had already been obliged to use turbines that were small by international standards, just as was every other wind farm developer in America at the time. The grid’s fragility demanded it. If a wind storm can turn a field of “small” wind machines into the equivalent of a nuclear power plant in a peri...

Germany’s Enercon makes a 7.5 MW model (only slightly smaller than the largest offshore turbines, which come in at 8 MW), whereas in the United States the most common turbines remain the 1...

the balancing authority had once again just paid the wind farms in the Gorge to shut down. This time not because of a storm, but because of an exceptionally robust runoff. The dams needed all the space on the wires.

And then, after all of this, Secretary Chu smiles. He looks down upon them from his podium and drops the bomb they all knew would come. “The Obama administration,” he said, “has set a goal of 25 percent renewable energy use by power producers by 2025; ten percent by 2012.”

Secretary Chu continued unperturbed through the rest of his PowerPoint presentation, which amounted to a tidy list of solutions to the grid’s known woes: use smart grid technologies, curb customer demand, end peak demand, develop grid-scale storage, add a nationwide extra-high-voltage DC/AC transmission network, reduce line congestion, encourage interregional cooperation, develop interoperability standards, increase government investment, train a new generation of grid operators, and integrate large numbers of electric vehicles. This is the “solutions” laundry list, and a pretty thorough one, especially if we add deployable energy efficiency to the mix.

According to NREL (the National Renewable Energy Laboratory—a thirty-five-year-old federal institution that is something like the NASA of renewable energy), 12.4 percent of America’s electricity was made from renewable resources in 2012. Read the small print, however, and it immediately becomes clear that slightly more than half (55 percent) of the total still comes from hydroelectric power.

Drought years to the side, the dams are steady. In 2000 they were generating about 78,000 megawatts, and in 2012 they were generating about 78,000 megawatts, though this should rise somewhat in the near future as the big old dams are “returbined”—their efficiency raised by the integration of newer technology.

In certain expensive markets, like Hawaii and Southern California and in certain sunny ones, like Arizona and, recently, New Mexico, homemade solar power now costs about the same or even slightly less than grid-made power. Why, then, pay a utility company for something you can make for yourself? No good reason at all. Quite suddenly, the utilities aren’t earning enough money to perform basic upkeep on the grid, though all of their customers are still using it. Solar-panel owners feed power into the grid during the day, but they draw electricity exclusively from the grid in the evening and at night. To cover basic infrastructural costs utilities in regions with a lot of rooftop solar are charging those customers without solar panels, the ones still getting all their power from the grid, higher rates. This of course leads these folks to switch to solar as well. The situation has gotten so bad in Hawaii that in 2015 the state’s utility refused to enroll any more customers’ net-metering programs. People can still put solar up on their garage roofs in Hawaii, but the utility won’t connect to them, won’t pay for the electricity they generate, and won’t offer any kind of deal to homeowners on power consumed after dark.

What we are bearing witness to are the early days of a variable and distributed generation revolution. Electricity is being made everywhere, by power producers of all sorts and sizes, and increasingly from uncontrollable and largely unpredictable means. And because of an awkward piece of legislation called the Energy Policy Act (1992), which laid the foundation for the deregulation of the electricity industry, in many places not only have the utilities lost control of who makes power and how and where they make it, but they have also lost the right to own power plants themselves.

The Energy Policy Act separated electricity generation by law from electricity transmission and distribution (a divorce formalized by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order 888 issued in 1996). In effect this means that private companies can build condensed solar power plants wherever the sun shines hottest, individual home owners can mount solar panels on anything that doesn’t move, and multinational conglomerates, or farmers, can install wind farms wherever the wind blows most ferociously—as well they should, for these are the sites that are most efficient when it come to the generation of electricity.

What is new with the Energy Policy Act is that these investors in electrical generation, large and small, don’t need to give much thought as to how the grid, in often very out-of-the-way places...

They just bring to light a problem that has been characteristic of our grid for more than half a century: it was made to be managed according to a command and control structure. There was to be total monopolistic control on the supply side of great electric loop—which included generation, transmission, and distribution networks—and ever-increasing yet always-predictable consumption on the customer side of things. Electricity would move from one to the other, while cash would move in equal measure in the opposite direction.

Electricity is not like anything else. It’s not a solid, or a liquid, or a gas. It isn’t quite like light or heat. It doesn’t move like the wind or the tides. It doesn’t combust like oil or burn like wood. If it resembles anything at all from the world we know, it is in some way like gravity. Which is to say, it is a force to be reckoned with.

Electricity was harnessed, made, transported (all wired up), and caused to light and power any number of early devices while continuing to secret within its ineffable physics the cause of its capacity to “communicate life” to inanimate beings and, equally, its ability to steal this life force from animate ones.

Electricity’s peculiar capacity to divorce space from time was in keeping with other nineteenth century inventions: the telegraph (1830s) sent “messages” across town and later around the world in something like an instant; the telephone (1876) did the same with the voice itself; so, too, the radio (1896) with its wireless communication of sounds and songs everywhere all at once; and the phonograph (1877) with its reproducible, if slower and more material wax and later shellac discs that allowed recordings made in one spot to be heard in quite another.

This capacity to translate power from one point to another took about seventeen years to become the cause célèbre of electricity. We can see these seventeen years—between 1879, when the first grid was built in San Francisco, and 1896, when the Niagara Falls power plant began sending its current twenty-two miles along high-voltage lines to Buffalo—as the history of a slow but steady technological comprehension.

For this reason it is worth charting a path to the grid we did get, first realized at Niagara but which would later grow to include the big federal dams (Bonneville (1937), Grand Coulee (1942), and the Tennessee Valley Authority project (1933)) as well as big, investor-owned, utility-run, government-regulated coal-burning, oil-burning, and later nuclear power plants.

Even more recently, with the meteoric rise of solar power installations, the preferred form of electrical current in the 1880s, so-called DC has also made a curious comeback despite having been outperformed by its most immediate competitor, AC, or alternating current, for 130 years. Although almost everything about our world has changed since the 1880s, it nevertheless remains the case that there is a certain appeal to private ownership, especially when explicitly linked to a sense of control over a limited domain. It just so happens that small, privately owned power systems are what DC is best suited to.

We’ve been able to produce electricity using electromagnetic forces since Michael Faraday’s experiments in the 1830s and to produce it chemically, using something like a battery, since Alessandro Volta invented the electrochemical pile in 1800. Despite an intense interest in electricity and the machines one might devise to make it, it remained unclear well into the 1860s what electricity might be good for. Such that by 1870 though we could produce electricity and control it, we had nothing to do with it.

It was big news, then, when Father Joseph Neri, a professor at San Francisco’s Saint Ignatius College, installed a small battery-powered electric light in his window in 1871; slightly less than a decade later, in 1879, San Francisco already had the nation’s first-ever central arc lighting station. This system consisted of two dynamos (an early kind of electric generator) powered by a coal-fired steam engine at Fourth and Market Streets. It may have been tiny, lighting only twenty shockingly bright lamps, but it was a grid.

Less known, but no less remarkable, was the adoption of hydropowered electric lighting in the gold mines of the Sierra Nevada. The first electric grid built to light a mine also became operational in 1879. Using water-driven dynamos designed by Charles Brush, the mine owners were able to light three 3,000-candlepower arc lamps. These allowed the miners to work through the night, effectively doubling the time they could spend searching for bright mountain gold. Electric lighting was so intimately linked to profit, in this case, that it quickly became an essential tool for mining companies. Slowly these companies also began to electrify pumps and hoists, building longer and longer lines to carry electric current from where the water fell to extraction sites. As electricity grew into an increasingly necessary form of industrial power, the grid’s lines also grew and stretched to accommodate the circumstances into which it was built and within which it would need to function.

Three years later, in 1882, the New York Times had its offices wired for light, in this case fifty-two incandescent bulbs strung in parallel.

This subtle-seeming transition in the structure of circuitry, from serial to parallel, was the grid’s first revolution. Though we tend to give Thomas Alva Edison the credit for having invented the lightbulb (he did not), he did devise something just as remarkable—the parallel circuit, one of his greatest if least lauded contributions to technological underpinnings of our modern world. The very existence of a relatively dim bulb, which we take for granted today, was made possible only by the prior invention of the parallel circuit.

At issue was that unlike water an electrical current doesn’t seek the easiest or shortest route from one point to another; to electricity all pathways are equal. So if one provides two paths, it will take them both simultaneously and indiscriminately, even if the second is twenty times longer than the first;

When Edison’s first public grid flickered to light in 1882 it was little more than a sixth of a square mile. By 1884, it had expanded to a full mile and held more than eight thousand bulbs, each a little circle of golden dimness with a lumen count equivalent to a contemporary 15-watt bulb.

Even though thousands of arc light systems were burning in American cities, manufactories, and mines before Edison turned the lights on for the staff of the Times and other residents of Wall Street, the Pearl Street Station is where, in the American popular imagination, the electric age began. This is due not so much to the fact that our current grid looks or works like Edison’s first attempt—in many ways it does not—but because parallel circuits changed both the intensity of lighting and the proliferation of bulbs, and both of these have become ordinary to us in the present.

Like the Pearl Street Station, Appleton’s grid produced and distributed direct current at 100 volts, give or take, and was used exclusively for powering incandescent lightbulbs—also of Edison’s manufacture and included in the kit. What quickly became clear to the town’s people and nascent utility men of Appleton is that maintaining a constant voltage is much easier with coal-powered dynamos, like the ones Edison was using in Manhattan, than with water-powered ones.

So difficult is it to “think” about electricity that descriptive metaphors quickly enter into any explanatory matrix. Odd as it may seem, the most accurate of these for explaining voltage is the highly anthropomorphic notion of “desire”: electrons that have been artificially split from atoms (which is what an electromagnetic generator does) “want” to resolve themselves back into whole atoms again. This may make electricity sound rather more like a singles bar than a problem of physics, but the notion of “desiring to complete oneself by coupling” does give a pretty good sense of the ferocity with which electrons without atoms move toward atoms that lack electrons.

Regardless of whether one is siphoning off the “desire that moves them” in an electric flow for heat, light, or power (all of which are subsumed, technically, by the term “work”), two things are important: first, that the electrons are moving through, not stopping in, the device; and second, that they are not overly diminished in their desire (or potential for work) in the process. The name for the drive, also called a potentiality, is voltage. The measure of this drive is a volt—or a unit of electrical tension.

One hundred ten volts can power a bulb, 220 an electric razor, 500 a streetcar, and 2,000 an electric chair; 50,000 volts is good for high-voltage transmission lines and 100,000 volts for a stun gun. Lightning, earth’s wild electric force, is several hundred million volts, and best avoided.

As abstract as this all might sound, maintaining constant voltage on a grid is not merely a theoretical problem, nor even principally a financial one (Appleton’s crippling bulb budget to the side). At root it is a practical one. If we want the grid to work for us, the relative vehemence of the electric flow must be controlled.