The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

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.

Boulder, Colorado—America’s SmartGridCity.

efficient wireless transmission of high voltages does not seem to be near at hand—but

but because distributed generation is bringing electricity production much closer to home.

Boulder has a lot more hard rock nestled just up underneath its pavement than anyone had predicted, or budgeted for.

did they not do a geo analysis?

broadband-over-powerline (BPL) cabling had been put to ground, at a cost of $21 million.

They laid wires when wirelessness, in all things, was the more popular path. They actually reduced customers’ ability to understand their electricity consumption without contributing in any way to the one thing modern-day electricity customers want the most: the capacity to understand and control their own consumption and its cost, coupled with some measure of control over where and how their power is made.

It seemed that both the radical vision for the SmartGridCity and the reality of the halfway-done, sort-of-smartish grid the city actually got offered even less control to customers than they’d had under the old system. As a result, almost more than any other group of smart grid resisters in the nation, Boulder’s residents rejected their utility’s efforts on their behalf. They took their expensive utility-provided smart thermostats off the wall and put them in the kitchen junk drawer; they ignored their meters or refused to let the utility install them; they did nothing to limit or change their behaviors in relationship to restructured rates; and they grew furious as the project went over budget. When they were asked (along with the rest of Colorado’s utility customers) to pay for these cost overruns, they lobbied the Colorado Public Utilities Commission to be freed from a burden they’d never signed up for.

stop drawing power from the big grid during heat waves in exchange for substantial cash payments.

These remain, however, critical elements of contemporary imagining of a future perfect grid.

when ice should be made in the rooftop freezer (later melted to cool the home, thus doing away with air-conditioning altogether).

troglodytic,

The utilities don’t know how to upgrade existing technology without putting themselves out of business. Nor do they know how to continue with the existing infrastructure without going out of business.

use about 14 percent of domestic power.

Still other things are culturally predictable. Between five and six P.M., Americans tend to come home from work. When this happens we use all kinds of electrical devices we weren’t using before: big TVs, microwaves, washing machines, and garage door openers. On average we open our fridge nine times in the hour before dinner. All of these things add up to a fairly substantial jump in demand from just after the close of the workday until about ten P.M., at which point demand begins a slow downward slide that ends at four A.M.—the hour of minimum load.

making renewables without backup storage the least useful means of producing power at the most necessary moment of the day.

as population shifts toward the southern states,

The air conditioner is here to stay. And, as Fleishman, quoted above, succinctly points out: “Anywhere there’s air-conditioning, smart grids will likely prosper.” This is not just because these devices use a lot of electricity (they do), but because everybody uses them at the same time and because when it’s very hot outside the utilities are already having a difficult time for a variety of reasons: long-distance wheeling goes up, spot markets get expensive, and lines sag and grow less efficient.

Massoud Amin,

declined to less than half and is currently [2008] at 10 to 15 percent.”

had utility investment in infrastructure kept pace with population growth and GDP growth, peak-load days would simply not be the sort of panic-inducing and blackout-causing affairs that they are today.

The phenomenon is what needs to be done away with, and without a viable means to store electricity the only way to control it is to control the part of the system that creates it—us.

At issue is not how much electricity we collectively use but when we use it.

On very hot days, or less often on very cold days, the utilities literally pay lumber mills and smelters, prisons and public schools, to stop drawing power from the grid. Most of these big consumers don’t have microgrids. They are 100 percent grid dependent, and using less power means making life pretty unpleasant for their workers and other inhabitants.

It’s worth adding that it is easier to take something away from prisoners and other institutionalized persons (like high school students) than from suburbanites. Turning the air-conditioning off in a prison or in a high school (New York’s other high performer in 2010 was LaGuardia High School) is, as they say, “picking the low-hanging fruit” off the peak-load tree.

In 2014 the people of Boulder voted to municipalize their electrical infrastructure.

big bankruptcy filing was PG&E in 2001

Look into this

These bigger systems rely on expert knowledge to plan, build, install, and manage, while in the case of the distributed solar revolution, third-party ownership (which basically means that the panels are leased from a private company that installs them on homes, garages, and other structures) has become the norm—75 percent of California’s residential solar works in this way.

Generators, batteries, and even electric cars are only as robust as their supply chain, and this, in a pinch, is rendered almost immediately as fragile as the system it is meant to buoy up.

“It was just a fertilizer sprayer that you buy at the hardware store with a shower head on it and you pump that up, get the pressure up manually, and then the water comes out.”)

Some of them are using fuel cells or solar and wind with backup battery storage, but, like the Straws, fewer every year are relying upon diesel generators, and for the same reasons.

resiliency in a crisis needs to be built into the system, from the ground up.

smaller, more flexible, more self-contained, less polluting, and closer to home was the wisest way to proceed.

Third, they are flexible and relatively simple to understand.

should integrate a number of technologically different sources of generation, with different weaknesses and different supply chain problems.

has a microgrid fueled by a cogeneration plant—a technology for making heat and power that dates back to the 1880s.

currently the world leader in such systems—half

Usually smaller than 50 MW,

This usually means the ability to remotely shut down nonessential power-consuming devices like air conditioners or clothes dryers.

3 MW of solar and 3 MW from a natural-gas-powered fuel cell to their 30 MW combined heat and power plant

most especially those built for isolated communities in the Canadian north or for mobile command units of the U.S. military in the Middle East.

Rather, it means, more simply, that they no longer rely solely upon diesel-powered generators.

More than 80 percent of the supply convoys in Afghanistan are, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, “for transporting fuel and they repeatedly come under attack. The demand for electricity generation also weighs down our fighting forces and the rising cost of energy puts a major strain on military budgets.”

military’s most immediate goal, according to Phillip Jenkins, is to cut the amount of fuel it takes to support a marine in the field in half—from eight gallons a day to four.

they can help keep the lights on during severe weather or other “complexity” generated blackouts (like the East Coast blackout in 2003) and further afield they simplify supply chains that are inherently vulnerable to disruption or attack.

now ranges from 65 to 95 pounds, almost half of which is either portable electronic devices or the batteries needed to run them.

The weight of the technology meant to ease victory on the field of battle now structures and limits our strategic options, and rarely in ways that make our soldiers safer.

more than 80 percent of the energy needed to power devices like computer displays, infrared sights, global positioning systems, night vision, and other sensor technologies each soldier carries comes from disposable batteries.

the transportation of liquid fuel into Afghanistan is so dangerous that the military prefers to fly in thousands of pounds of new disposable batteries than to truck in the gasoline that would be necessary to run the generators to rejuvenate rechargeables already in place on the ground.

95 percent of the base’s electricity went to “air condition, inefficiently, tents sitting in a hot sandy place.”