The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

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.”

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.

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.

The grid was never built to be robust in the midst of wastelands. But these empty places tend to be where wind and solar power are most effectively produced.

Without specific information, one study showed, consumers of electricity “have a hard time estimating the costs and benefits of their actions.” This is part of why we pay electricity no mind.

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.

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

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.

His first major stumbling block was the intractability of electricity itself: since it can’t be stored it can’t be stockpiled; since it is indivisible, it is difficult to count and accurately bill for; since it is lethal, it requires a highly trained workforce to manage; and since it is utterly inseparable from the infrastructure that carries it, one has to bear the cost of building and maintaining that infrastructure.

Unlike the trusts held by Standard Oil or U.S. Steel that attempted to control the entire U.S. market there were many electric companies—they simply never overlapped. In this way, the term “monopoly” took on a very particular meaning when speaking of power projects; despite the fact that there were numerous players in the market there was no competition between them because the market itself had been divided into quadrants, the borders of each enforced by a political apparatus designed largely for that purpose. In this the utilities bore a certain resemblance to modern-day street gangs whose territorial agreements, hashed out albeit with submachine guns rather than governmental subcommittees, sport a similar structure. One simply doesn’t offer one’s product in territory claimed by someone else. Prices are fixed by the provider and the structures of power in place brook no complaint.

A traditional power plant is exactly such an engine: it turns fuel into heat. This heat is then used to convert water into a furious jet of steam directed at the blades of a turbine which, with their spinning, turn a shaft. This shaft then pokes into a giant electromagnet, and as the shaft spins inside the magnet, it produces an electric current. The efficiency of any system that converts a fuel—any fuel, coal, uranium, oil, biomass, or trash—into heat is limited by the maximum temperature of the engine.

Technologically, we can now build a steam plant that works at 40 percent efficiency. 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. The construction of a machine robust enough to perform this task 24/7 for thirty years has turned out to be both fraught and expensive. The closer a steam plant comes to 40 percent efficiency, the more routine maintenance it needs, the more often it breaks down despite the constant upkeep, and the more costly the high-tech alloys necessary to endure this onslaught. Sooner or later even these fancy crafted metals will fatigue and give way. 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.

There was no place for choice or self-sufficiency and no reward for conservation or efficiency. Carter may have championed less rather than more, but before his legislation began to force change upon the status quo, acts of conservation or efficiency were without reward. One could use less power, but because of the tiered rate structures that charged the most for the first few kilowatt-hours used in any given billing period—a system put into place by Samuel Insull—these efforts were only minimally reflected in the dollar amount owed on the bill.

Energy historian Richard Hirsh takes it one step further, arguing that for decades the utilities had been attracting the bottom of the graduating classes from engineering schools: the students who didn’t want an exciting career in “the glamor industries—electronics, aerospace or computers” or who weren’t quite agile enough to land a more interesting job. It was a stagnant sector that promised no adventure and a steady paycheck. As a result, the most risk averse and least facile minds were running the game.

The utilities quickly found themselves with a plethora of new problems. Never before had they had to deal with variable generation, never before had they had to deal with distributed generation, and never in the seventy years of their existence had they lost control over the production side of their business. At issue wasn’t that they suddenly had to integrate a massive amount of new power but that they weren’t getting to decide how much, where, or when relatively small amounts of electricity would come streaming onto their networks. They just had to pay for it and distribute it when it got there. Their business model had no provisions for this new reality.

The problem with the Swiss cheese model, which is otherwise remarkably robust (we have it to thank for the past thirty years in which flying has been consistently safer than driving; even frequent fliers are more likely to be killed in a lawn mower accident than an airplane crash), is that the grid, like any complex mechanical system, is not just a machine but also the regulatory, business, cultural, and natural environments within which this machine functions. The grid is constituted by its physics, mechanics, engineering, construction, management, upkeep, and use. And also by the storms, earthquakes, laws, hatreds (and other personal opinions), and profit motives that surround it, that change over time, and that can differ drastically between one state, one city, one climactic zone and the next.

The Energy Policy Act did nothing to upgrade the lines. The result was a simple one. The free trade of electricity meant that there was too much electricity traveling too far. Lines were getting overburdened, heating up, sagging, shorting out, arcing, and filling with harmonic resonances. All of which are both very bad for reliability and wasteful, and thus bad for efforts at conservation.

Consistency, however, is not the point. Control is. When, back in the day, limitless consumption was what customers desired, they felt in control of their electricity. There was always enough power available to them to do whatever struck their fancy. For the most part there still is. When conservation became a new value for America in the late 1960s, this sense of control was eroded as customers began to discover that it was very difficult to use substantially less electricity than they had been and even more difficult to see attempted changes in consumption reflected on their monthly bills. They also felt like there was little say they could have in how their electricity was being made, from what kinds of fuel, and with what environmental after-effects. Regulation since that time has had a profound effect upon the workings of the supply side of the grid, and even some ripples in the construction of more efficient appliances, but demand-side frustrations haven’t changed very much. Customers still don’t under-stand their bills, usage still doesn’t seem to be linked to cost, and the promise of being able to choose cleaner, more efficiently produced electricity is held consistently at bay.

Once a technological revolution gets rolling it has the potential to outstrip even the most radical predictions regarding its end point. We might, in other words, lose a lot of wires in the coming decades. Not because we invent our way out of the need for long-distance transmission capacity—efficient wireless transmission of high voltages does not seem to be near at hand—but because distributed generation is bringing electricity production much closer to home. We aren’t (yet) inventing our way around the wires, but we are changing our habits to make them less necessary. However, back in 2008, when Xcel started construction of its SmartGridCity in Boulder, this notion was so far beyond the pale as to be unimaginable.

Said Xcel, “Since the Petersons started the program, they have been able to produce 590.7 fewer pounds of carbon, saving enough to microwave 154 pizzas. Multiply that by fifty thousand customers—the number currently expected to install the system—and it can make quite an impact.” No matter how much carbon the Petersons might have saved with their Prius and panels and battery packs, it will never be enough to microwave a pizza—not even one pizza—because running a microwave oven on carbon is about as feasible as flying an airplane with coal or running a hot water heater on bananas. Carbon is not a power source. I point out such factual troubles because, in general, the places where facts get wobbly help us, as readers of interviews with “satisfied customers,” understand not so much what they have and what it does but what they’d like to have and what they would like it to do. As such, these interviews can be very revealing.

The smart meter is the only part of the SmartGridHouseCarNanoGridComboPack that is actually necessary to the utilities, because, to borrow the words of the technology journalist Glenn Fleishman, “shedding 5 to 10 percent of their load at peak times on demand could reduce or eliminate turning to the expensive spot power market or powering up dirty old power plants. Shaving that usage can have enormously disproportionate cost and environmental savings.”

What matters here is the emotional force behind the idea for a certain kind of customer. No one connected to the grid, even if they pay the surcharge, is getting 100 percent of their electricity from “immaterial” fuels. Nor is their power, on a grid that spans half a continent, guaranteed to be more local. The same terms may be used to laud an environmentally friendly, locally produced electron as an organic, locally grown tomato, but the two entities are impossibly different. Both a customer who has checked the renewable fuels surcharge box and her neighbor get the same electricity. The principal difference is that the electric bill of the “Windsourse® for Residences” customer runs her four dollars more every month.

The surcharge does usually factor into a utility’s budget for the immediate purchase and longer-term investment in renewable power. You may not get to use 100 percent wind power, but you do subsidize the increase of this means of making electricity for everyone on the grid over the long haul. The fact that this choice is available allows individuals to take a measure of fiscal responsibility onto their own shoulders as a means of committing to immaterial fuel sources that make sense to them. The argument, then, that our grid wouldn’t be in such a dire state if only people were willing to pay more for their electricity is largely moot. People are willing to pay more, but only for certain things. The less solid these things, the less visible, and the more thoroughly integrated into the built environment they are, the more likely individuals and companies are to volunteer their money for the cause.

the rising tide of concern for “green” energy makes the utilities’ job easier. If renewables will help raise revenue, then renewables will show up on the bill.

At issue is that as poor as the utilities are at accepting small reforms by small players, Americans, in general, are not especially practiced at ascribing a value to what is not-used, especially when the count is of something as abstract as a watt. And yet conservation and efficiency measures that reduce our need for electricity are as important to reforming our energy system as is the mainstreaming of renewable ways of making that electricity—large and small.

Two different sorts of things, then, need to be integrated into our accounting. First, all the electricity made, no matter who is making it. And second, all the electricity not used, no matter who is saving it. If we can work out how to do this, systemically, it will start to matter when a couple of big-box stores, a cement factory, or a subdivision or two are energy-efficient enough that a utility, or anyone else, can avoid building a new power plant.

What he saw when he looked at his grocery store was not a power plant but a machine for making negawatts; it was that machine that all of the rest of us had trouble seeing precisely because it looked, and worked, exactly like a grocery store. The lighting was perhaps marginally more pleasant, but otherwise, what had been accomplished was praiseworthy less in relationship to how the power for this store was generated and more in terms of the various ways that the whole thing had been redesigned not to need it.

as Amory Lovins (who coined the term “negawatt” way back in 1990) said, “Customers don’t want kilowatt-hours; they want services such as hot showers, cold beer, lit rooms,” and this can “come more cheaply from using less electricity more efficiently.”

We don’t use what isn’t made, and (this is the new bit) this non-use will get factored into our financial thinking about the grid, and its reform. If it can be given a stable price, a negawatt will matter as much to how actors big and small choose to reform our grid as a tax cut, a subsidy, or a guaranteed low-interest loan does now.

Within five years of the rollout, the data produced by smart meters was proving essential to the creation of predictive models of electricity use, minute by minute, as well as providing occasional real-time data about peaks and troughs in variable and distributed electricity production. And they were enabling real-time “demand-response,” which is to say that they gave the utility the capacity to ask big electricity consumers to ramp down consumption as a means of balancing the grid. Rather than going offline and using diesel generators to provide backup power for a bit while the utility straightened things out, smart meters can be linked to efficient buildings that automatically deploy grid-scale conservation. At times this is accomplished by something as simple as dimming the lights. Negawatts, in other words, can now be ordered up by the utility and delivered by an Albertsons. Network enough of these power-savers into a flexible, smart piece of software, and you have your platform.

Rather, it is largely because “alternative energy” has been sold in America as a money-making scheme that renders each home solar installation a tiny factory for producing watts that are guaranteed by law to be purchased at market price. The seller—you or I—doesn’t have to do a thing to insure this. No marketing, no sales pitches, no advertising campaigns, no haggling over the price. Going off the grid would mean losing this income, and it would also necessarily involve investing a lot more money in home storage systems and other small-power solutions for balancing the unwieldy electrical demands of a single customer. Getting off the grid would, in other words, be costly and complicated, just as it has always been. Insull sold Chicago on central station power to begin with, way back at the turn of the last century, on precisely these same terms. Sharing, when it comes to electricity, is simpler and more cost effective, than doing it for oneself.

Taken together it can be said with some certainty that we’d like the grid to move us less, to be less polluting, more adaptive, and more reliable. We’d like systems change to be more about responding to the powers to come and less committed to maintaining the powers that be. We’d like some control over how our power is made and also some legible way to understand how it is used. Despite all of this we’d also prefer a grid—an electrical system—in common.