The Grid Quotes

“America does not run on gas, oil, or coal any more than we may one day run on wind, solar, or tidal power. America runs on electricity.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“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.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“Growth was not so much an industry watchword as a dogma that would carry it, and us, forward until, bit by bit, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, all the truths of the electricity business began to break down. Only then, seventy years after Samuel Insull took the helm of tiny Chicago Edison, fifty years after he turned all of Chicagoland’s electricity into a monopoly enterprise, thirty-five years after the collapse of his empire and thirty years after his own ignominious death in a Paris metro station, did the “natural” laws of the utility business, discovered and instrumentalized by Insull himself, prove to be little more than willfully held articles of faith and carefully engineered blindnesses.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“What is new with the Energy Policy Act is that these investors in electrical generation, large and small, don’t need to give much thought as to how the grid, in often very out-of-the-way places, might deal with the influx of unpredictable power. Nor do they need to care for how utility companies will manage the task of keeping people’s lights on when they are faced with the problem of too much power one instant, and too little the next.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“There is water, there are fish, there are laws, there are power lines with a finite capacity to transport electricity, and there is a market that just might not be big enough to use all the power they are being fed.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“This is our grid in a nutshell: it is a complex just-in-time system for making, and almost instantaneously delivering, a standardized electrical current everywhere at once.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“it is a jury-rigged result—highly inventive in places, totally stodgy in some, fantastically Rube Goldberg in yet others. As implausible as it must sound, the machine that holds the whole of our modern life in place “works in practice, but not in theory.” No one can see, grasp, or plan for the whole of it.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“In 2011, a stretch of high-voltage lines outside Missoula, Montana, were shorted out by the carcass of a deer freshly killed by a juvenile bald eagle, who then picked it up and attempted to fly away only to discover (much to his chagrin) that a deer is too heavy for an eagle to carry. Down that deer came, accompanied by a hail of sparks, and once again, the power was out.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“It took only a generation after the end of the Depression for Americans to become consummately modern individuals, until as a nation we had lost working knowledge of a coal brazier, a kerosene lamp, a latrine, an ice box, a well, a mangler, or anything else more complicated than a switch, a button, an outlet, a socket, a tap, or a flusher. And yet, it was the case that almost no one had any idea how the replacement technology (a coal-burning power plant for a brazier, or sewer treatment plant for an outhouse, or water purification plant for a well) worked. By the mid-1970s, who, driving down the highway, could tell the difference between an oil refinery and a coal-burning power plant? A sewage treatment plant and a water purification plant (or, for that matter, a fish hatchery)? Realistically, who needed to be able to distinguish among these classes of support? Nobody, except the professionals charged with maintaining them. As long as the switches, buttons, outlets, sockets, taps, and flushers worked, the benefit of all the rest having become distant undertakings running along long wires and through long pipes was they at they were no longer our immediate concern.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

“The belief that past successes might be projected indefinitely onto the future regardless of inconvenient truths like the workings of physics was a foolish way to run a business”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

“among U.S.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“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.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“We kept saying a turbine lasts twenty years. That was our vision.” Cashman laughs. “But none of our turbines lasted twenty years. As a matter of fact, Alcoa Aluminum had a huge Darrieus Rotor that they had made, just straight aluminum. They thought they were going to be the wind energy guys, you know, really big. It fell down the day before we had the annual American Wind Energy Association Conference at their headquarters. It was going to be the big symbol, and it fell down—it got resonant vibrations.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“One thing is clear: American utility companies cannot maintain the transmission and distribution systems on our grid by charging customers solely for how much electricity they individually consume. Customers”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“The grid is awesomely complex. It is the largest machine in the world.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“All we really want when we get home is for the TV to work and the beer to be cold.” It was almost as if Xcel couldn’t hear what people were saying no matter how clearly these people articulated their positions on the matter.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“Customers still don’t under-stand their bills, usage still doesn’t seem to be linked to cost, and the promise of being able to choose cleaner, more efficiently produced electricity is held consistently at bay.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“Historically, utilities made money when people used electricity; the more we used the more money they made. Now they don’t. Today’s utilities make money by transporting power and by trading it as a commodity.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“As we know from chapter 2, electricity does not move by human logic—it does not, for example, take the shortest path between two points. Nor does it move by water’s logic, though there are certain similarities—it does not, for example, “flow downhill” or “puddle” on even terrain. Nicely, too, it won’t drip out of an “open” outlet.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“In the early days of electrification, however, this sense of power as a common good was not how electricity was made or marketed. It was by definition an elite product, not for everybody but for those who could afford it.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“Despite an intense interest in electricity and the machines one might devise to make it, it remained unclear well into the 1860s what electricity might be good for.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“pole-top transformers to the system as a whole. That this is how electricity works in America is not the logical outcome of physics, it’s the product of cultural values, historical exigencies, governmental biases, and the big money dreams of financiers.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“Maine is aiming for 40 percent by 2017, California for 50 percent by 2030—and these numbers don’t even include the electricity made from rooftop solar systems. Vermont, ever the tiny optimist, has a goal of 75 percent by 2032. Hawaii is aiming for 100 percent. These are not impossible objectives, but they will require us to utterly reimagine our grid.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“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. Everything has gone a bit topsy-turvy.”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“significant power outages are climbing year by year, from 15 in 2001 to 78 in 2007 to 307 in 2011. America has the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation—coming in at about six hours per year, not including blackouts caused by extreme weather or other “acts of God,” of which there were 679 between 2003 and 2012. Compare this with Korea at 16 outage minutes a year, Italy at 51 minutes, Germany at 15, and Japan at 11. Not”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

“There is, however, another issue pressing its way into the system that brings a new urgency to the inevitable task of reforming our grid. It turns out that transitioning America away from a reliance on fossil fuels and toward more sustainable energy solutions will be possible only with a serious reimagination of our grid. The more we invest in “green” energy, the more fragile our grid becomes. A”
― Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era