The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

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.

overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.

Sustainable energy sources provide something else: an inconsistent, variable power that our grid is unprepared to adapt to.

don’t have are many people to use this power or very good long-distance power lines to carry it to more promising markets.

the local balancing authority—charged with making sure the amount of electricity going into the grid and the amount being drawn from it are exactly the same—has to pay some of the wind farms to shut down their turbines and also pay large industrial concerns to take and use more power than they actually need. In Texas, one blustery September day in 2015, the price per megawatt-hour of electricity dropped to negative 64¢. The utilities were actually paying their customers to use power.

because all the cameras set to watch the infrastructure age were pointed elsewhere and the maintenance checklists didn’t include the beams that held the cooling tower up.

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

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 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.

why would they start construction before they had arrangements for transmission

This has nothing to do with how fast the wind blows across American plains versus German ones; it has everything to do with the wires these massive machines feed into.

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.

not the same thing as getting the state of California, balky after the deregulation debacle of the late 1990s, to talk to anybody about cross-border transmission. Pointing out a series of best practices is not the same as persuading consumers to let their obtuse utility company take remote control of their home air-conditioning. And throwing money at the problem is not the same as figuring out how to get Vermonters (or anyone else) to allow high-voltage lines to be built in their backyards.

The things we build, especially the big things, and the institutions we invent to support these are far more permanent than the ways we choose to live.

from serial to parallel, was the grid’s first revolution.

how arc lighting works—each network consists of a short string of tremendously bright lights powered by a single generator.

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; if one provides forty paths, this pattern of all-options-at-once travel is the same. The simplest explanation of the difference between the two kinds of circuits is that parallel circuits allow for this sort of both/and flow pattern, whereas series circuits give electricity only a single path to follow.

disagree. length & resistance does matter

Pearl Street Station is where, in the American popular imagination, the electric age began.

copper wires insulated in cotton, and incandescent lightbulbs with carbonized bamboo filaments.

less a problem in the West, where low-velocity, high-volume mountain streams run at a remarkably consistent rate as gradual snowpack melts meld into early-autumn rains.

how much electricity really isn’t like anything else we know or manage.

Though we tend to overlook it, hot water and cold air can, much like electricity, be produced more economically in densely populated areas by central stations than by individuals.

Possible to do in the field with MSF?

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.

but couldn't the state control and provide the microgrids as well?

it wasn’t until after the Great Depression that the notion that one could make money by selling lots of cheap things to lots of relatively poor people made any inroads at all.

the rotary converter—“a single armature for changing direct current first into polyphase and then the reverse.”

by water under pressure, by compressed air, or by manila rope.

what is manila rope?

phase converters (which made single-phase AC systems interoperable with multiphase systems)

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.

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 its infrastructure.

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. A system like this, that converts a fuel—any fuel, coal, plutonium, oil, gas, biomass, or trash—into heat, is going to top out at about 50 percent efficiency. This is an inevitable law. No power plant built by man or some yet-to-be-invented machine intelligence will ever do better than just under 50 percent.

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.

a plant run at just over 30 percent efficiency was both the most reliable and the most cost-effective way to make electricity.

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.

Today, for all our worry about carbon emissions, we at least no longer suffer crop failures and fish die-offs from acid rain.

the price of electricity had always dropped; the cost of making electricity had also always dropped, while plant efficiency had always risen and electricity consumption too had always risen.

The reason for this long-standing state support was that electricity was deemed that peculiar kind of public good whose price is driven up rather than down by competition and whose availability is disturbed rather than assured by multiple, competing providers.

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.

(called a PUD in the West or a PPD in Nebraska)

Marin Clean Energy,

one of the most powerful things one could do with money, and to make money, was to use information to manipulate public opinion and influence public investment.

What this clause said was simply that the utilities would need to buy, and move to market, electricity produced by any facility with an output of less than 80 MW (about a tenth of what might have been produced by an average nuclear power plant at the time). And, just as important, they would be obliged to pay a nonmiserly rate for it. This rate would be set according to what were called “avoided costs”—that is, the money it would have cost the utility to make that precise amount of electricity for themselves.

Thus did America lose one kind of knowing—that involved in managing a low-tech household—without gaining another kind of knowing—that of the distant complexity undergirding a high-tech household.

“the glamor industries—electronics, aerospace or computers” or who weren’t quite agile enough to land a more interesting job.

Not only were they the only ones providing electricity within a given territory but they were legally also the only buyer available should some other intrepid industry—or one that generated a lot of excess heat in its daily operations, like a smelter—try to make and sell electricity within this same territory.

Senator Durkin’s goal was to assure that a garbage-burning plant in his district could start to move the electricity it was making to market

like the New Hampshire trash immolation facility.

As of 2015, there were more than 3,600 factories in the United States making 12 percent of our electricity as a by-product of their own industrial processes.

California is the state that lives in the history books because of the unique (some might say spectacular) way in which their contracts opened the states’ electricity markets to “frontier electric technologies” rather than to cogeneration, which was the winner in most other places. California gave the hippies their due, and many of these leapt at the chance to make the state’s electricity, often with far more gumption than manifest skill.

“The combination of federal and California incentives and innovative state regulations launched the wind industry in the U.S.,”

“By 1990, California had become home of 85% of the world’s capacity of electricity powered by the wind and 95% of the world’s solar power electricity.”

Tax credits,