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November 3, 2022 - January 29, 2025
a tax break of nearly 50 percent.
Taken together, ISO4 and the state’s overly generous tax credits created a glut in the renewables market.
“tax credits were so lucrative that they attracted those who knew more about constructing a deal than about building wind turbines.”
“an awful lot of machines were put up that were worthless.” Nobody, at least no one in America, had figured out how to build an industrial grade wind turbine.
they designed their turbines with floppy flexible blades based on the aerodynamics of helicopters.
“On a helicopter,” Cashman explains, “you need lightness because you have to get off the ground, but you don’t want lightness in a wind turbine. Heavy is what you want, brute force, and another thing—when a helicopter goes in the air it has a chance to move with big movements of wind whereas a turbine can’t … it’s just standing there beating its brains out against the wind all the time … and there were other problems too: flexibility of joints and everything; wind turbines don’t need that either.” Since the helicopter guys had the wrong theory, once they got to the trial and error phase of
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it got resonant vibrations.”
the Danes were former blacksmiths. “They had a totally different relationship with metal,” Cashman explains. “They spent their time fixing large-scale farm equipment, so machinery was their model.”
that excess heat, for example, not be wasted, or that efficiency be a value in and of itself.
technology, of making 80 percent of American power from renewable sources.
The unexpected success of PURPA was a momentous outcome for the culture of electricity in this country.
The problem is that nuclear plants are huge and complex. It seems that for all their looking, nobody saw the metal rust and nobody saw the wood rot. For the decades it took the elements to eat through the rebar and timber holding up this tank, nobody noticed.
As a result, in 2005, a full fifth of America’s power plants were over half a century old and reliant upon technology that was state of the art in the 1950s.
This fragility can take many forms. One nuclear power plant may age, leak, break, may be decommissioned, or be taken offline. This is a stress on a grid organized around the presence, rather than the absence, of that source of power. Or viny kudzu may creep with its unerring tenacity to the tops of local utility poles to drape wire and wood and ceramic insulators alike in a thick blanket of green. This, too, is a fragility. Foliage causes shorts and, occasionally, even more dramatic flashovers when our oh so carefully domesticated electricity goes instantly wild again and shoots like a bolt of
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variability without storage (chapter 1) and radically distributed, privately owned generation without oversight (chapter 8).
caused by three overgrown trees and a computer bug near Akron, in the territory of the selfsame utility that operated Davis-Besse—Ohio’s FirstEnergy.
And while there was at the time no national standard for how tall trees near high-voltage lines might be allowed to grow, it is generally agreed that fifty feet is about a decade more growth than is acceptable.
This offending tree was one of 767 violations in that county alone, all of which PG&E knew about and ignored, while simultaneously reducing tree-trimming crews from three to two men, shifting their cutting schedule from three to five years, and lobbying the California legislature to change the recommended clearance between the treetops and power lines from four feet to just six inches. The Trauner fire of 2004, much like the East Coast blackout of 2003, was caused by a tree that was at least a decade behind on its trimming schedule.
the greatest threat to the security and reliability of our electrical infrastructure is foliage. Trees most especially, though kudzu and its ilk are troublesome creepers in their own right.
Reproduced with permission from “What’s wrong with the electric grid?” Eric J. Lerner. Published online with Physics Today on August 14, 2014. Copyright 2014, American Institute of Physics)
when 800 megawatts surged suddenly westward—effectively being sucked out of their system toward Ohio—and then abruptly reversed direction and shot back into New York when the sink it was reacting to proved false.
So much power was moving around so fast from one imbalance to another that American Electric Power (FirstEnergy’s neighboring utility to the west) reported that one line was carrying 332 megavolt-amperes (MVA) despite being rated for only 197 MVA.
Without these alarms it’s questionable whether any normal human being is capable of noticing critical shifts in data patterns or laggardly mechanical behavior.
Just a glitch, more of a programming error than anything else.
In effect what this bug, called XA/21, did was cause a machine to respond with a busy signal when multiple systems tried to access it simultaneously rather than prioritizing these requests and then taking each of the “calls” in turn.
As more and more data points were rebuffed, they started to stack up rather than being logged and then deleted. Like silt in a water purification system or cholesterol in your artery, all these tiny bits of retained information started to stanch the free flow of all information, slowing everything down, way down, and eventually crashing the main server. All the accumulated unprocessed events were then transferred to the backup server, which was no better equipped than its predecessor to handle this vast backlog and so it, too, failed. At which point, an hour or so after the first line failure
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Like rust and rot, like tiny leaks and hairline cracks, like age itself, the tree and bug were too minor and too quiet to catch anyone’s eye. And yet there they stand at the beginning of the cascade, singular monuments to all the smallnesses that can add up, with time and opportunity, to total systems collapse.
the grid has become so much less stable since the early 2000s (and it has),
It did so for a reason, and that reason was energy trading.
Energy Policy Act
much of the innovation we see in power production—from the rampant adoption of rooftop solar to the new popularity of natural gas fracking—is the direct result of competition in this sector.
had a profound effect both on how much electricity we as a nation use (less) and on the way that electricity moves through the grid (farther).
All of which are both very bad for reliability and wasteful, and thus bad for efforts at conservation.
the number of Transmission Loading Relief Procedures on the East Coast’s grid was six times what it had been a year earlier.
a lot more data is now needed to manage the electricity moving on the system at any given moment.
Not even, oddly, the utilities themselves, since they now have so much information to contend with that most of it sits unprocessed in giant servers called “historians.”
Hmmmm big D opportunity
decreased consumption. By the late 1970s, big capital investments in electrical infrastructure had slowed to a trickle, where it remained until the act made it startlingly lucrative to start buying or building new generation facilities again.
In the case of nuclear this lack of desire to make significant investments in upkeep is the most worrying because the results of plant failure can be the most catastrophic.
for this they were fined $5 million by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the largest fine the NRC has ever levied, and they paid another $28 million to the U.S. Department of Justice for deliberate obfuscation of the facts.
our seemingly insatiable hunger for air conditioners.
roughly 90 percent of power outages in the United States now start on distribution systems that have not been the object of the same care or recipient of cash.
This is what vars do: they help ensure a constant voltage in times of stress.
This lack of vars on the grid has been called “a key factor in the great Northeast blackout of August 2003” as well as in a series of blackouts on the Western Interconnection in the summer of 1996.
Problems like power surges (when voltage leads current) or brownouts (when current leads voltage) normally happen in the transmission of electricity, not its production.
The physics and the economics of the system today have no choice but to work at cross-purposes.
Realistically, the replacement of the analog meter by the smart meter cannot have been motivated by a desire to improve the accuracy of measuring electricity consumption.
Since the introduction of digital smart meters, outage times have shrunk over all the United States.
TV pickup—a surge in demand during the ads of widely watched TV shows as television viewers head to the kitchen to boil up a spot of tea. This is a common enough phenomenon that England’s utility often has three or four of these 400-MW surges to deal with every day.
and a poorly timed rate increase unrelated to the new meters had been rolled out as a means of covering the unexpectedly high costs of integrating more renewable energy into the grid.
“safety standards for peak exposure limits to radio frequency have not been developed to take into account the particular sensitivity to eyes, testes and other ball-shaped organs.”
