The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

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.