The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

Steward’s Folly,

Come on, this is just sloppy.

The government had gotten us ass over teakettle in Vietnam, and at home our prosperity was made fragile by our dependence on foreign oil, the steady supply of which we couldn’t control, while the material bounty that flowed from our industry had saddled us with a set of pressing environmental issues that regular folks had no power to correct.

Unexpected folksiness.

To continue with the old car metaphor, shutting down San Onofre and building thirty scattered natural gas combustion turbines to replace it is rather more like trading in your 1964 Cadillac Fleetwood for a garage full of jet packs rather than a brand-new Prius.

Is this metaphor supposed to mean something to the reader?

Had the tree not been there, or had it been trimmed down, both it and the line would have survived the limpid afternoon, rather than a bang! and a fizzle and the smell of charred wood.

Jarring lack of parallel sentence structure.

and this is gossip, mind you, not fact—system

This kind of obfuscation isn't coy or cute. It just fails to make clear what ought be be straightforward: who told the writer this, and on the basis of what information? What shit writing.

Or, to put it differently, one doesn’t try to eliminate the holes in the Swiss cheese—by compacting all cheese into cheddar, for example—but rather to keep the holes in the cheese from lining up, from becoming one big hole that runs through the entirety of the loaf.

An informal straw poll I did found that no one had ever referred to a block of cheese as a "loaf." Nor does a Google search for "loaf of cheese" or "loaves of cheese" return anything other than recipes for cheesy breads.

is that the grid, like any complex mechanical system, is not just a machine but also the regulatory, business, cultural, and natural environments within which this machine functions.

Whereas airplanes exist entirely apart from these kinds of human factors?

In order to understand why the grid has become so much less stable since the early 2000s (and it has), it is important to return again to a more careful consideration of the aftereffects of the Energy Policy Act and accompanying Order 888. Much like the 1996 deregulation bill in California (that made Enron momentarily very rich and that state by equal measure poor), the Energy Policy Act did not separate generation from transmission and distribution just for shits and giggles.

Read this passage and note how it goes from dry legalese to backwoods folksiness in two sentences. This may be a valid stylistic choice but I find it jarring and unpleasant.

Vars are even more problematic non-things to understand (if not to make) than are watts.

Maybe you ought to explain what those are, then. (Spoiler alert: she does not.)

The long-established laws of the electricity game have shifted under their feet—which are our feet as well—and, even without knowing it’s happened, we can all feel it. In our collective gut we know the utility with its often graceless attempts at demand-side control has crossed some invisible line and is now, officially, behaving unusually. We are rightly suspicious of them, even if spuriously so.

I have no idea what this means.

The radiation emitted by the meters is very similar to that emitted by cell phones and wireless Internet routers, which while not proven to be safe

I would love for Gretchen Bakke to explain in detail the process by which meter radiation, or WiFi signals, or table salt, can be "proven safe."

that have what the Lovinses would call the tail of a Manx—naturally quite short.

This sentence makes no sense.

One can’t loan a cup of watts to a neighbor who is short a few to bake a cake. One can’t fill barrels with the stuff and then load these onto train cars or ocean-going tankers and ship them across continents or overseas.

This folksiness is so obnoxious.

the next quarter of a century to have solar panels or not to have them? The answer, quite often, is yes.

If the question is "to have them or not to have them," then the answer should be either "have them" or "don't have them." Saying the answer is "yes" is sloppy writing.