The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

For though we are accustomed to saying that our modern world relies upon electricity, it’s far more accurate to say that it relies upon constant voltage, which electricity, when properly managed, provid...

Or to put it another way, an electric grid’s most significant point of appeal is its ability to make and reliably transmit standardized power—not for us, we are fine to get the candles out of the closet if the lights grow too dim. Our machines, the true customers of the electric age, are not so forgiving. Sagging voltage will tear a power plant to bits in minutes as all the tiny ball bearings that make that plant work quickly build up enough heat to destroy every motor and pulley system ...

Direct current, which is what all grids ran until about 1886 and most grids ran well into the early years of the twentieth century, uses an inflexible voltage set at the dynamo. If a grid is using direct current, then a streetcar simply cannot be run using the same generator or set of wires as a string of lightbulbs. Either all the bulbs explode (overvoltage) or the streetcar doesn’t budge (undervoltage); there is no happy medium.

To make matters worse, all these different electric systems were made up of components patented by a host of competing inventor-entrepreneurs. In the 1870s and 1880s, literally hundreds of patents were issued in the United States for dynamos of different builds and characteristics.

And once Pearl Street was working and the Edison General Electric Company had been established for the making and marketing of small municipal grids to cities across the Midwest, another 134 isolated plants had, much to Edison’s chagrin, been ordered and installed, most into factories.

Part of the reason for this is that as remarkable as Edison’s direct current grid was in densely populated lower Manhattan or tiny Appleton, Wisconsin, it was better suited to small installations than large ones. The Pearl Street Station only confirmed this, as even with the six jumbo dynamos he’d installed it still didn’t have the capacity to transmit electricity farther than about a mile. He could put a lot of bulbs in that mile, and by adding additional generation, he could power them well, but after that the laws of physics took over. Direct current at so low a voltage (100 volts) just can’t be transmitted farther before becoming so diminished that one couldn’t singe a mustache hair with the stuff. There just isn’t enough oomph in the electron stream to push it beyond a mile.

Even a big factory, or an office tower, or a rich man’s mansion were, in the late 1800s, smaller than a square mile. It was a manageable task to determine the light or power needs of each individual customer and build that customer a basement power plant, install the necessary lighting, drill holes in the walls for the electric sconces, add the bulbs and switches, and call it a success.

Today, the tension between individual power production (private plants) and utility-supplied electricity (central stations) is once again becoming the battleground upon which the future of our grid—the form and scope of its infrastructure—is being waged.

The most diabolical outcome of a return to a system of private plants, which could easily happen in the next couple of decades in sunny places like Arizona, Hawaii, and southern California (and to some degree has already happened in Germany) is that it threatens universal access to quality electrical power.

If our nation is grounded in the notion of equal opportunity for all, then there cannot be partial, or unevenly distributed, electricity. We cannot continue to be the nation we have become and also endorse or produce haves and have-nots in the world electric.

In the early days of electrification, however, this sense of power as a common good was not how electricity was made or marketed. It was by definition an elite product, not for everybody but for those who could afford it. This was not simply because electricity hadn’t yet spread to the masses, but because the masses were not considered a market worth reaching until later in our nation’s history.

GE (originally Edison General Electric) started out as a power company; it was only with time that it became an appliance company renting, and then later selling, people stuff that needed to be plugged in to work. Money was made twice over, first with the sale of the refrigerator and second with the ongoing sale of electric power necessary to make it run. This shift in vision involved both imagining a whole new set of demands, beyond lighting for elites, for which electricity might be used and seeing a whole new population—everyone—as a potential market. Not elite light but popular light, popular heat, and popular power.

The first step toward a big grid, one that would make it possible to universalize access to electric power, was the invention and successful manufacture of alternating current (AC) electrical systems in 1887.

The singular advantage of alternating current is that low voltages, made at the generator, can be “stepped up” to much higher voltages by means of a transformer—a simple device made of two sets of tightly coiled copper wires that almost, but don’t quite, touch. Higher voltages can go farther than lower voltages. It has, if you will, a higher quotient of desire, it “wants” harder, and thus is propelled farther. The transformer is a simple if genius means by which this “stepping up” and “stepping down” of voltage is accomplished without any loss in efficiency. It only works, however, if the current traveling through it “alternates,” which is to say, moves in a series of rapidly reversing waves.

With alternating current, in contrast, a rotating polarity at the generator causes the “direction” of the positive charge to switch. The free electrons, still passionate in their struggle to regain atoms of their own, thus also shift: surging first forward, then stopping, then surging backward. And stop. And forward. Stop. Backward. Stop. And so on and on and on. This flow of electrons is still doing work every time it passes through a machine. With AC, however, sometimes the electrons are moving in one direction through the machine and sometimes in the other direction. These stop/go, stop/go, stop/go reversals and interruptions in the direction and flow of power are so quick (in the United States, about sixty per second), that nothing much of what is plugged in even notices these directional shifts, though the buzzing of early fluorescent lights was a symptom of it. In the early days of the grid there were several types of alternating current—single phase, dual phase, and polyphase; the differences between these, while important, can be simplified for our purposes to the fact that dual phase and polyphase send multiple waves though the wires and single phase sends just one.

If Edison’s Manhattan grid, in 1884, made and transmitted direct current at 110 volts over about a mile before its usefulness diminished to zero, Westinghouse and Tesla’s early alternating current system, in 1886, made electricity at 500 volts but transmitted it at 3,000 volts. By 1891, AC had been transmitted 16 miles between Tivoli and Rome, 14 miles in Portland, Oregon, 2.6 miles in Telluride, and an extraordinary 108 miles at 40,000 volts in Germany. Every experimental installation from the late 1880s to the early 1890s proved more and more successful on this account, until by 1894, 80 percent of the grids being ordered and installed in the United States were using alternating current.

Downtown Manhattan alone would have 1,500 arc lights by 1893, as well as twenty light and telegraph companies, each running independent sets of wires carrying varying voltages (if direct current systems) or operating at distinct rates of oscillation (if alternating current systems). Chicago, at roughly the same time, was home to forty different electric companies, most of which were associated with competing streetcar lines. Direct current operations offered power at 100, 110, 220, 500, 600, 1,200, and 2,000 volts, with one or more dedicated systems of wires for each.

in the early days there was little agreement about the optimal frequency at which this current would “alternate.” As a result even this more flexible voltage system had dedicated wires for 25, 30, 33⅓, 40, 50, 60, 66⅔, 83⅓, and 125 cycles per second. Making it all even worse, when electric companies went out of business, they simply left their wires to molder and fray in the sky.

This dissatisfaction, without necessarily prompting much agreement or kindly feelings between competitors, produced a willing market for one kind of machine in particular: the rotary converter—“a single armature for changing direct current first into polyphase and then the reverse.”

Indeed, so little confidence was accorded the capacities of AC power at this scale that Lord Kelvin, a physicist of some note, sent a cable late in 1893, just as the International Niagara Commission was completing its decision-making process, saying TRUST YOU AVOID GIGANTIC MISTAKE OF ADOPTION OF ALTERNATING CURRENT.

The hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls was thus the closing bell on the effervescent, chaotic, immensely creative and inventive activity of the previous seventeen years: 1879, the first arc light grid in San Francisco; 1882, the first low-voltage direct current grid in New York; 1887, the first alternating current grid; 1891, proven long-distance high-voltage transmission. And in 1896, the completion of the first large-scale generating station at Niagara Falls, together with the first long-distance transmission wires in constant use, the total adoption of parallel circuits, incandescent lighting, and the equally near total adoption of alternating current. America had her grid.

In 1900 only one factory in thirteen used electric motors, and only one domestic light in twenty was electrified—the rest were still gas lamps, kerosene lamps, and candles.

In 1901 there were only eighteen refrigerators in all of Manhattan, and a decade later, in 1910, though there were close to 45,000 electrical appliances in Southern California, 80 percent of these were irons, all of which screwed into light sockets.

In 1956 the Niagara Falls generating station fell off the side of the cliff at the falls’ edge, where it had been perched. A total loss, it was one of the largest industrial accidents in America to that date. John Haney, a janitor at the plant that day, remembers that “there was water seeping in and we were trying to keep it away from the generators.

1882. This was also the year that saw the creation of the Standard Oil Trust, a business entity that brought 90 percent of the world’s oil production and refining under the control of a nine-person board, headed by John D. Rockefeller.

According to the historian Richard Hirsh, in the years immediately following the creation of the Standard Oil Trust, more than 4,000 businesses in the United States were combined into 257 corporations, and “by 1904, one percent of American companies controlled 45 percent of manufactured products.”

The thrust of the 1935 Public Utility Holding Company Act was, as its title makes clear, to make it illegal for any company to hide their debts in “holding companies”—special shell corporations that made the actual worth of an enterprise impossible for investors to determine.

By 1925 almost nobody in the electricity business could even imagine a system for making, transmitting, distributing, or managing electric power other than as a monopoly enterprise. This was an extraordinarily rapid transition from chaos and competition to a single service provider. Remarkably disparate interests, including advocates of municipal power networks, of public power projects, and even electricity cooperatives, were all convinced by the 1920s that the monopoly was the best way to manage the manufacture and sale of electric power.

Much of the credit for this change goes to the hard, thoughtful work (as well as some barely legal machinations with piles of cash behind the scenes) of Samuel Insull. Born and raised in England, Insull spent his first twenty years in America as Thomas Edison’s personal secretary. Apparently his success in this job was attributed not only to his fastidiousness in all things, but also to the fact that he was one of the few people who needed as little sleep as the inventor. If Edison wanted to order a bunch of copper at two in the morning, Insull was at his desk, ready to make it happen.

As electricity shifted from being a game inventors could win to one better left to the balance sheets and business strategies of businessmen, Edison retreated from the limelight, leaving Insull to manage more and more of the inventor’s holdings. By 1892, when Edison had to admit defeat in the battle between his DC system and Westinghouse and Tesla’s AC system, retiring to his New Jersey laboratory to work on fluorescent lighting (a project that ended badly for him, blinding him in one eye and killing an assistant), Insull stepped firmly out from his august patron’s shadow and took up the standard of American power.

Insull wanted the kind of monopoly that Rockefeller had made with Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan had made with U.S. Steel. The best he’d manage was almost this kind of monopoly because of the ways in which his product was crucially not the same as theirs. Molding the electricity business into the form du jour of American monopolists was one of the most remarkable projects, intellectually as well as fiscally, of the twentieth century.

Because electricity is a temporal product, customers’ consumption also had to be arranged, in roughly equal measure, around the clock. If profitability is the goal, midnight load needs to be on par with five P.M. load and ten A.M. load.

At night, in the Loop, when no one was at work, in the mornings, and for most of the day (most especially during the summer), Chicago Edison’s sole power plant, fully capable of supplying its 3,200 kilowatts all the time, sat idle or was massively underutilized. As Insull once famously said: “If your entire plant is only in use 5.5 percent of the time, it is only a question of when you will be in the hands of a receiver.” He needed a way to sell power the rest of the day or his company would founder.

If in 1892 Chicago had a million people, fewer than 5,000 of them used electricity at home.

Of the many strange financial logics that adhere to the electricity business, two gave Insull the most pause. Both of these, it would turn out, had the same cause. First was that the lower the price he charged for electricity, the more money he made. Second, and related, was that his costs remained relatively constant regardless of how much electricity he sold. If he ran the Adams Street Station full bore only 5.5 percent of the time, the costs of running his company (including the station but also personnel, system maintenance, line upkeep, sales, and coal) was virtually the same as if he ran the power plant at full capacity 95 percent of the time.

In 1892 the Pearl Street Station ran at 2 percent efficiency—which is to say, it transformed about 2 percent of the potential energy in the coal it burned into electricity—twelve years later the Harrison Street Station had an efficiency rating of 12 percent and Fisk Street, Chicago’s first AC power plant, completed in 1903, did even better. By 1940 even average power plants were running at 20 percent efficiency. One can see why Insull found technological improvement such a promising route toward profitability.

We had some of these already in the 1960s. Practically speaking, this means superheating water to over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit while upping the pressure to an awesome 3,200 pounds per square inch to convert this water straight into dry, unsaturated steam without boiling it.

By the mid-1960s it had become clear to utility men that a plant run at just over 30 percent efficiency was both the most reliable and the most cost-effective way to make electricity. The truth of this has not changed in the fifty years since. In 2012, the best fossil fuel power plants in America ran at 42.5 percent efficiency—but this number is only for a few natural gas combustion (no-steam) turbines. The newest steam plants operating in the United States between 2007 and 2012, whether fueled by coal or plutonium or petroleum, came in right around 34 percent efficiency.

The price of labor and material necessary for plant construction rose 120 percent between 1970 and 1979 (compared with 23 percent the previous decade), and time to completion of these plants also expanded. From start to finish, a power plant begun in the late 1960s took seven years to come online, while one started in the late 1950s had taken only five.

There are 3,306 electrical utility companies in the United States, yet two thirds of us (68.5 percent) pay our bill to one of the 189 big for-profit, investor-owned leviathans.

No matter how delimited its service area or how small its customer base a municipal utility is just as much a monopoly as is an investor-owned utility. Both are protected by law from competition; both are prohibited by law from price gouging. And the only way to break out, or in, to another company’s territory is through legislative action.

This is exactly what Marin County did in 2010. Many residents of Marin—a dry, half-empty, hyperwealthy, lefty stronghold in the sun-beaten hills north of San Francisco Bay—wanted the right to produce more of their power locally from renewable resources, or in their terms, to “locally curate” their energy while also managing their prices, rate structures, and customer relations for themselves. In essence, what they wanted was to get out from under the thumb of PG&E—the colossus of Northern California, which has never been known for having a light touch when it comes to community relations.

The careful placement of ads, editorials, and informational bulletins and the money spent by PG&E—a cool $43 million—made clear how desperately the utility wanted to keep the Pandora’s box of community choice aggregation firmly shut.

And when PG&E lost this ballot measure, despite having outspent Marin County 430 to 1 (Marin managed to raise slightly less than $100,000 for their part of the campaign), the borders of California’s utility map were redrawn with a new player, Marin Clean Energy, standing guard over their own small patch of land within which they can decide what constitutes power.

but of which sort of monopoly an electricity customer might find themselves a part of: a nonprofit municipal network or a for-profit investor-owned utility.

Last but not least, regardless of where one lived in the nation, rates were structured in such a way that the more electricity one used the less money one paid.

For example, in a 1934 bulletin, Southern California Edison details what their customers might expect to get from a modest monthly “light” bill. Saying: “In the typical six-room house, electricity does all of the washing, ironing and sweeping. It makes a pot of coffee and eight slices of toast every morning with waffles on Sunday. It supplies energy for radio three hours a day and provides for the occasional use of the curling iron, fan, warming pad, and other appliances—all for an average monthly bill of $1.92. For an additional $2.00 or $2.50 monthly, electric refrigeration may be added, while complete electric service including dishwasher, mangle, and a modern range to do all the cooking costs on the Edison market an average of only $6.55 a month. There is no cheaper servant on the market.”

It is clear that this is not yet everybody’s power: for most it is still a “light” bill, in part because few people had six-room homes in the mid-1930s, not to mention a spare $6.55 a month to spend on power for th...

Nevertheless the future is clear, the home will become a hub of happy consumption, not just of electricity but of all the material conven...

If in 1920 only the poor and the rural had no access to electricity, not just in Chicago but everywhere in America, then in 1950 it was inconceivable that power might be made privately on-site, and by 1970 only suspect radicals and known freaks were off the grid.