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.

America has the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation—coming

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

The grid, then, is built as much from law as from steel, it runs as much on investment strategies as on coal, it produces profits as much as free electrons.

In 1979, in the wake of America’s second energy crisis that decade, the Lovinses prepared a report for the Pentagon on the state of America’s domestic energy infrastructure. Their conclusion was surprising: national security was threatened more by the “brittleness” of America’s electrical grid than by possible future disruptions in the flow of imported oil.

America’s infrastructure is being colonized by a new logic: little, flexible, fast, adaptive, local—the polar opposite of the way things have been up until now.

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.

The 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.

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 energy that runs America is brittle—easily shattered by accident or malice. That fragility frustrates the efforts of our Armed Forces to defend a nation that literally can be turned off by a handful of people.

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