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The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
A revelatory look at our national power grid--how it developed, its current flaws, and how it must be completely reimagined for our fast-approaching energy future.
America's electrical grid, an engineering triumph of the twentieth century, is turning out to be a poor fit for the present. It's not just that the grid has grown old and is now in dire need of basic repair. Today, as we invest great hope in new energy sources--solar, wind, and other alternatives--the grid is what stands most firmly in the way of a brighter energy future. If we hope to realize this future, we need to reimagine the grid according to twenty-first-century values. It's a project which forces visionaries to work with bureaucrats, legislators with storm-flattened communities, moneymen with hippies, and the left with the right. And though it might not yet be obvious, this revolution is already well under way.
Cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke unveils the many facets of America's energy infrastructure, its most dynamic moments and its most stable ones, and its essential role in personal and national life. The grid, she argues, is an essentially American artifact, one which developed with us: a product of bold expansion, the occasional foolhardy vision, some genius technologies, and constant improvisation. Most of all, her focus is on how Americans are changing the grid right now, sometimes with gumption and big dreams and sometimes with legislation or the brandishing of guns.
The Grid tells--entertainingly, perceptively--the story of what has been called "the largest machine in the world": its fascinating history, its problematic present, and its potential role in a brighter, cleaner future.
America's electrical grid, an engineering triumph of the twentieth century, is turning out to be a poor fit for the present. It's not just that the grid has grown old and is now in dire need of basic repair. Today, as we invest great hope in new energy sources--solar, wind, and other alternatives--the grid is what stands most firmly in the way of a brighter energy future. If we hope to realize this future, we need to reimagine the grid according to twenty-first-century values. It's a project which forces visionaries to work with bureaucrats, legislators with storm-flattened communities, moneymen with hippies, and the left with the right. And though it might not yet be obvious, this revolution is already well under way.
Cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke unveils the many facets of America's energy infrastructure, its most dynamic moments and its most stable ones, and its essential role in personal and national life. The grid, she argues, is an essentially American artifact, one which developed with us: a product of bold expansion, the occasional foolhardy vision, some genius technologies, and constant improvisation. Most of all, her focus is on how Americans are changing the grid right now, sometimes with gumption and big dreams and sometimes with legislation or the brandishing of guns.
The Grid tells--entertainingly, perceptively--the story of what has been called "the largest machine in the world": its fascinating history, its problematic present, and its potential role in a brighter, cleaner future.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published July 12, 2016
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September 19, 2016
This book, unfortunately, is a perfect example of a magazine article's worth of concept, analysis, and insight stretched too thinly to book length. The Bloomsbury editors -- who clearly have zero background in electricity, as a business or discipline -- failed Bakke, and failed her readers. Such a disappointment.
December 20, 2016
This book provides a thorough explanation of both the history and the details of how the electrical power grid works. The book then proceeds to discuss prospects for its future. Anyone who is an advocate for the "greening" of the electrical power should read this book to be informed about the complexities involved in the introduction of renewable and alternative sources of power into a grid that has evolved over the years based on a concept of regulated utilities with a large central source of power generation.
To put it bluntly, installation of lots of solar and wind generation will not allow coal and gas powered generation to go away any time soon. There are times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, and many people seem to not comprehend the reality that electricity can't be stored for such times. Granted, there are some ways to store power (e.g. batteries, stored pumped hydraulic, air pressure, etc), but when it comes to grid scale and national scope there is NO feasible way to store electricity. And there is no anticipated technological break through on the horizon that's going to change this situation.
One of the popular suggestions for solving the electrical storage problem is for everyone to own electric automobiles and have them plugged into the grid whenever they're not being used. That way their unused storage could be utilized by the grid as needed. Great concept, but there's no sign of movement in that direction. Actually, Denmark made a sincere effort to move in that direction by developing a tax incentive that allowed purchase of a new electrical car at half price if the buyer promised to make the battery available to peak grid loads. The program was not successful. If the Danes can't do it, USA certainly won't be able to do it.
Some of the most interesting parts of this book are the stories of failures in the grid (i.e. blackouts). The explanation of the causes of the big northeast blackout of 2003 was of particular interest.
The discussion of vulnerabilities to terrorist attack was particularly scary. I spent much of my working career in the electrical utility field and I've heard many engineers who were concerned about attack by vandals who had knowledge of the critical points in the grid. An outstanding example of this was a sophisticated attack on an electrical substation located near San Jose, California in 2013. Attacker(s) using rifles and an informed knowledge of where to aim their shots were able to cause $15 million worth of damage.
The following is a link to an NPR Fresh Air interview with Gretchen Bakke:
http://www.npr.org/2016/08/22/4909323...
To put it bluntly, installation of lots of solar and wind generation will not allow coal and gas powered generation to go away any time soon. There are times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, and many people seem to not comprehend the reality that electricity can't be stored for such times. Granted, there are some ways to store power (e.g. batteries, stored pumped hydraulic, air pressure, etc), but when it comes to grid scale and national scope there is NO feasible way to store electricity. And there is no anticipated technological break through on the horizon that's going to change this situation.
One of the popular suggestions for solving the electrical storage problem is for everyone to own electric automobiles and have them plugged into the grid whenever they're not being used. That way their unused storage could be utilized by the grid as needed. Great concept, but there's no sign of movement in that direction. Actually, Denmark made a sincere effort to move in that direction by developing a tax incentive that allowed purchase of a new electrical car at half price if the buyer promised to make the battery available to peak grid loads. The program was not successful. If the Danes can't do it, USA certainly won't be able to do it.
Some of the most interesting parts of this book are the stories of failures in the grid (i.e. blackouts). The explanation of the causes of the big northeast blackout of 2003 was of particular interest.
The discussion of vulnerabilities to terrorist attack was particularly scary. I spent much of my working career in the electrical utility field and I've heard many engineers who were concerned about attack by vandals who had knowledge of the critical points in the grid. An outstanding example of this was a sophisticated attack on an electrical substation located near San Jose, California in 2013. Attacker(s) using rifles and an informed knowledge of where to aim their shots were able to cause $15 million worth of damage.
The following is a link to an NPR Fresh Air interview with Gretchen Bakke:
http://www.npr.org/2016/08/22/4909323...
July 14, 2023
The Grid started strong, and then, in my opinion, lost its way. Gretchen Bakke does a good job explaining how electricity works, but when she starts trying to describe the problems with the US grid, she gets a bit too strident and apocalyptic. One of the problems is that this book was written in 2016, so her data is at least seven years old at this point. Interestingly, she put a negative spin on most projections for the increase in the use of non-fossil fuel power sources and EV's, and as I checked her numbers, she was wrong in every case about how she thought non-carbon-based solutions would grow over time. For instance:
- She spends a paragraph saying the Obama Administration's plans were overly ambitious for increasing renewable energy (the goal was to get to 25% by 2022). At the time the goal was set, 2012, the US was only at 12.4%. In 2022, the US achieved 24% energy from renewables, so not too bad.
- She is somewhat dismissive of solar power, noting that "currently" solar represents only 0.6% of electricity produced. As of 2021, the number was 2.8%, and in 2022 it was 3.64%, and the growth is unabated. At this rate, solar will be easily over 5% in 2024. Even today, in Spring / Summer many months are over 4.3%. So while wind grew faster initially, back in the 2010's, solar is taking off now.
- She is even more dismissive of the idea of rapid growth of electric vehicles as part of the US market, implying it is fanciful to think that "we the people will be buying EV's by the millions in 30 years". Well, the sale of EV's in 2022 was 807,000 vehicles, and the number can be expected to break 1 million in 2023, barring a recession. So Americans will likely be buying "millions" of EV's about ten years from the date of her writing, not thirty.
About the first 120 pages of the book is devoted to the history of the grid, and I found that interesting. I took a year of electrical engineering as an undergraduate engineer, so I have an understanding of the concepts of electricity, and I thought her explanations of the basics were good. Ms. Bakke does not have a STEM degree, so I suspect that having to understand the concepts herself made her a good descriptor of how electricity works.
One of the problems she focuses on extensively is how to store excess energy generated by renewables. Solar and wind, unlike fossil-fuel plants, are a bit harder to "turn down" when the grid does not require the power they are producing, such as when wind gusts cause wind turbine output to spike, or the natural diurnal cycle of solar generation which causes a spike each day and then drops to zero at night. This is a real issue which needs a better solution. But the author presents this problem as if it were an almost unsolvable dilemma - it's not. Decades ago in school, I learned about energy storage via pumped water and gravity batteries, and while she discusses pumped water storage, she doesn't even mention "gravity batteries", except to mock a German engineer who had an admittedly overly ambitious idea in this regard. Gravity batteries are simply a way to store energy by lifting weights (say, a couple of tons) many meters, thereby storing the energy used to lift them. When one needs that energy, the weight is lowered and it turns a turbine / flywheel which is geared to the amount of weight that is being lowered. A recent article noted that there are enough abandoned mineshafts worldwide to store as much energy as the entire world produces in a day. https://www.techspot.com/news/97306-g... By the way, gravity batteries have the enormous advantage of not losing energy over time, unlike chemical batteries, which discharge naturally to some degree.
Some of Ms. Bakke's digressions are interesting, but many are either irrelevant or only peripherally relevant. When she started describing the US military's use of renewables, I thought she was going to describe the excellent initiative by the Obama Administration to promote solar-wind adoption by directing military bases to install them. That was a real stroke of genius that helped develop the skills and supply chain for large scale deployment, particularly of solar. Instead, there was a protracted discussion of how the Army tried to put small scale solar into Afghanistan to reduce the use of diesel generators because fuel trucks tended to get ambushed.....sorry, but what does this have to do with the US grid? Finally, she did discuss the microgrids established at many military installations, but she does not acknowledge the jumpstart those investments gave to solar/wind, along with the Obama-era investments in renewables research.
She spends a lot of time on a couple in California who installed solar and small-scale wind to protect themselves from black-outs, and on a woman who threatened to shoot an electric company employee who was trying to install a wireless meter on her house. The woman with the gun believed the utility company was going to use the wireless meter to spy on her and possibly turn off her air conditioning to reduce peak energy use in the summer. And Ms. Bakke seems to give oxygen to that conspiracy theory, so that was about the point I stopped taking her very seriously. However, she does hit on a real factor in the deployment of renewables and EVs - the desire of many people to be independent, to make their own energy which powers their house and their car, and also the desire of many people to help the environment by transition to renewables and EVs. That's a real factor, and has helped drive the movement toward sustainable energy and transportation in the US. A generational difference she identifies is the tendency of younger people to buy less junk, and more longer-lasting, high-quality goods as compared to older consumers. This results, according to Ms. Bakke, in fewer appliances, and less consumption in general, and hence lower levels of electricity use. It is true that electricity consumption in the US peaked about 2010 and has been on a plateau ever since, but if EV's become a large portion of total vehicles, might this change? We'll see.
Ultimately, Ms. Bakke has a bit of the attitude that frustrates me with some non-STEM commenters on STEM-related issues; there seems to be a belief that technology got us into the mess we are in, and therefore we should be suspicious of technological solutions. The engineer's view of this is that technology has to be a part of the solution, though of course, people have to actually want a solution and government has to work to facilitate that solution. If you read a book like Drawdown (a comprehensive text on how to decarbonize, written by engineers and scientists), it presents an array of technical solutions to technical problems; some are quite simple, like changing the type of refrigerant used in air conditioners, and some are complex and difficult, like the transition to a smart grid. We have to forge ahead with additional solar and wind, and we have to fix the grid. Will we break things and make mistakes while doing that? Sure we will, and then we'll correct our errors and move forward. Because we have to, in order to avoid a climate catastrophe.
I wish this had been a better book about the grid, and about the opportunities to improve it, but ultimately I was disappointed. Maybe a good science writer like Elizabeth Kolbert will tackle this subject someday. That said, if non-technical people read this book, and are alerted to the basic issues we face with regard to modernizing the grid, and become better voters because of that knowledge, so much the better. A basic understanding of the issues is better than no knowledge that they exist. I'm sorry if that sounds like faint praise, but it's the best I can offer The Grid.
Update - 1/25/2023: I just pre-ordered No Miracles Needed (available Feb 2nd) by Mark Jacobson. I think that may turn out to be the right book to explain how to integrate renewables to the grid.
Update - 7/14/2023: Jacobson's book was as good as I had hoped, putting aside a rather pedantic writing style. I recommend it for those wanting an engineer's view of the many viable solutions available to decarbonize the grid.
- She spends a paragraph saying the Obama Administration's plans were overly ambitious for increasing renewable energy (the goal was to get to 25% by 2022). At the time the goal was set, 2012, the US was only at 12.4%. In 2022, the US achieved 24% energy from renewables, so not too bad.
- She is somewhat dismissive of solar power, noting that "currently" solar represents only 0.6% of electricity produced. As of 2021, the number was 2.8%, and in 2022 it was 3.64%, and the growth is unabated. At this rate, solar will be easily over 5% in 2024. Even today, in Spring / Summer many months are over 4.3%. So while wind grew faster initially, back in the 2010's, solar is taking off now.
- She is even more dismissive of the idea of rapid growth of electric vehicles as part of the US market, implying it is fanciful to think that "we the people will be buying EV's by the millions in 30 years". Well, the sale of EV's in 2022 was 807,000 vehicles, and the number can be expected to break 1 million in 2023, barring a recession. So Americans will likely be buying "millions" of EV's about ten years from the date of her writing, not thirty.
About the first 120 pages of the book is devoted to the history of the grid, and I found that interesting. I took a year of electrical engineering as an undergraduate engineer, so I have an understanding of the concepts of electricity, and I thought her explanations of the basics were good. Ms. Bakke does not have a STEM degree, so I suspect that having to understand the concepts herself made her a good descriptor of how electricity works.
One of the problems she focuses on extensively is how to store excess energy generated by renewables. Solar and wind, unlike fossil-fuel plants, are a bit harder to "turn down" when the grid does not require the power they are producing, such as when wind gusts cause wind turbine output to spike, or the natural diurnal cycle of solar generation which causes a spike each day and then drops to zero at night. This is a real issue which needs a better solution. But the author presents this problem as if it were an almost unsolvable dilemma - it's not. Decades ago in school, I learned about energy storage via pumped water and gravity batteries, and while she discusses pumped water storage, she doesn't even mention "gravity batteries", except to mock a German engineer who had an admittedly overly ambitious idea in this regard. Gravity batteries are simply a way to store energy by lifting weights (say, a couple of tons) many meters, thereby storing the energy used to lift them. When one needs that energy, the weight is lowered and it turns a turbine / flywheel which is geared to the amount of weight that is being lowered. A recent article noted that there are enough abandoned mineshafts worldwide to store as much energy as the entire world produces in a day. https://www.techspot.com/news/97306-g... By the way, gravity batteries have the enormous advantage of not losing energy over time, unlike chemical batteries, which discharge naturally to some degree.
Some of Ms. Bakke's digressions are interesting, but many are either irrelevant or only peripherally relevant. When she started describing the US military's use of renewables, I thought she was going to describe the excellent initiative by the Obama Administration to promote solar-wind adoption by directing military bases to install them. That was a real stroke of genius that helped develop the skills and supply chain for large scale deployment, particularly of solar. Instead, there was a protracted discussion of how the Army tried to put small scale solar into Afghanistan to reduce the use of diesel generators because fuel trucks tended to get ambushed.....sorry, but what does this have to do with the US grid? Finally, she did discuss the microgrids established at many military installations, but she does not acknowledge the jumpstart those investments gave to solar/wind, along with the Obama-era investments in renewables research.
She spends a lot of time on a couple in California who installed solar and small-scale wind to protect themselves from black-outs, and on a woman who threatened to shoot an electric company employee who was trying to install a wireless meter on her house. The woman with the gun believed the utility company was going to use the wireless meter to spy on her and possibly turn off her air conditioning to reduce peak energy use in the summer. And Ms. Bakke seems to give oxygen to that conspiracy theory, so that was about the point I stopped taking her very seriously. However, she does hit on a real factor in the deployment of renewables and EVs - the desire of many people to be independent, to make their own energy which powers their house and their car, and also the desire of many people to help the environment by transition to renewables and EVs. That's a real factor, and has helped drive the movement toward sustainable energy and transportation in the US. A generational difference she identifies is the tendency of younger people to buy less junk, and more longer-lasting, high-quality goods as compared to older consumers. This results, according to Ms. Bakke, in fewer appliances, and less consumption in general, and hence lower levels of electricity use. It is true that electricity consumption in the US peaked about 2010 and has been on a plateau ever since, but if EV's become a large portion of total vehicles, might this change? We'll see.
Ultimately, Ms. Bakke has a bit of the attitude that frustrates me with some non-STEM commenters on STEM-related issues; there seems to be a belief that technology got us into the mess we are in, and therefore we should be suspicious of technological solutions. The engineer's view of this is that technology has to be a part of the solution, though of course, people have to actually want a solution and government has to work to facilitate that solution. If you read a book like Drawdown (a comprehensive text on how to decarbonize, written by engineers and scientists), it presents an array of technical solutions to technical problems; some are quite simple, like changing the type of refrigerant used in air conditioners, and some are complex and difficult, like the transition to a smart grid. We have to forge ahead with additional solar and wind, and we have to fix the grid. Will we break things and make mistakes while doing that? Sure we will, and then we'll correct our errors and move forward. Because we have to, in order to avoid a climate catastrophe.
I wish this had been a better book about the grid, and about the opportunities to improve it, but ultimately I was disappointed. Maybe a good science writer like Elizabeth Kolbert will tackle this subject someday. That said, if non-technical people read this book, and are alerted to the basic issues we face with regard to modernizing the grid, and become better voters because of that knowledge, so much the better. A basic understanding of the issues is better than no knowledge that they exist. I'm sorry if that sounds like faint praise, but it's the best I can offer The Grid.
Update - 1/25/2023: I just pre-ordered No Miracles Needed (available Feb 2nd) by Mark Jacobson. I think that may turn out to be the right book to explain how to integrate renewables to the grid.
Update - 7/14/2023: Jacobson's book was as good as I had hoped, putting aside a rather pedantic writing style. I recommend it for those wanting an engineer's view of the many viable solutions available to decarbonize the grid.
May 20, 2016
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. I can't believe how much I enjoyed this book... I am not in any way an energy person, but this book caught my eye -- maybe for just that reason -- and I am delighted to have read it. I learned something new on almost every page. The history of the development of the electric grid in the United States fascinated me. And the inherent unplanned results of that unique history being played out today is eye-opening to be sure. Other reviewers have called this book even-handed, but I don't really know if that is accurate. Yes, Dr. Bakke is critical of all sides of the debate concerning energy production, potential storage, distribution and regulation of energy in the United States, yet her biases are quite evident. References to the "tin-foil hat crowd" and "criminal industry leaders" don't quite match up with the terms "hippies" and "greenies" on the "other side." She speaks often of the environmental eyesores that are high voltage power lines, but never once seems to imagine that the massive, sprawling, butt-ugly, horribly-destructive wind turbine "farms" hold perhaps an even more reviled place in the minds of most "regular folks" whose lands have been overrun by them over their vehement objections and legal attempts to stop their growth. That both the ruination and disruption of formerly natural areas in the mountains, deserts and the plains being destroyed for miles upon miles by these erratically-producing and reliably unreliable turbines don't seem to register in her psyche. Other basic assumptions concerning "global-warming" (a term that seems outdated somehow) and government regulation were also telling... But I digress! So much to learn here! Electric cars and smart meters are not about transportation and accurate measurement of electricity respectively, as one might think. They are about more grid control for the power companies who can remotely operate your home thermostat to help lessen peak demand or suck stored energy out of your dormant, but connected electric car battery when they need more energy to even out the grid. Regulations passed in the 1970s are being used in ways never thought about at the time to force energy companies and customers in preferred directions which might or might not make much sense. For the first time in decades, customers are moving back to the early days of electrical usage by establishing small scale, local energy production -- nano-grids for homes and micro-grids for universities, hospitals, industrial complexes, localities, etc. This is both good and bad for the grid and for the country as a whole. Regulations are harming upkeep of the infrastructure in numerous ways and promoting useless, and sometimes dangerous, approaches to energy distribution by paying utility companies for the wrong things and not paying them for the very things that need to be done to protect the grid and its customers! Cronyism and political expediency are alive and well in the energy business in America... My favorite story of all, however, was the tale of the magical energy world that was to be created in the lucky city of Boulder, Colorado by their (then) power company Xcel in 2008. The dream of a smart grid city was way premature and totally-misconceived, and the ridiculousness of the effort is a wonderful tale of putting dreams before reality and spending lots of money for nothing... (Though a few lucky citizens were actually given hybrid/electric cars and smart appliances by the company before the project was abandoned.) Coherence and the national grid are not wedded at this point -- and never have been. What happened in Boulder is a small-scale example for the country as a whole. And how it ended there is illuminating for all of us as well -- like-minded people banding together to build their own municipal micro-grid for themselves. Too bad common sense is not high on the list for the planners of our energy future just now and the competing interests of all the parties are seemingly too overwhelming to be overcome in our present political environment despite that fact that many basic goals would be readily agreeable to almost everyone with skin in the game -- which is each of us.
March 7, 2018
I really thought The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era was going to be a heck of a lot more interesting and informative than it was. Another reviewer here rightly suggests that this is a book-length magazine article—Bakke circles the drain on many of her points, repeating opinions and insights ad nauseam, diluting their weight and readerly interest. This is an odd point to make about a <300 page book about something as complex and tangled as "the grid."
Bakke is successful in many ways though—namely, addressing the naivety of our current push toward green energy. Perhaps I'm just more ignorant than the average individual, but I hadn't realized the extent to which inconsistency in production from renewables (particularly from wind and solar) can disrupt the grid's ability to deliver electricity—often overwhelming the system to the point that it either blacksout or the producer has to be turned off, thus wasting energy.
She's also successful in presenting a way forward; a kind of utopian vision of the future grid. An "intelligent grid" or even an "integrated grid" beyond the imagining of the "smart grid." The idea essentially boils down to applying the ideas and concepts of blockchain to the power grid. That is, decentralized power production with grid-level storage capabilities and individual production feeding into storage and grid with integrated software solutions to smooth and even out the transmission of individual-created energy. It's hard to envision getting there—one idea floating around suggests electric cars plugged into the system would be a smart way to incorporate grid-level storage to a renewable-powered electrical grid. But beyond the ideas of batteries, new and creative storage solutions need to be created. She had some interesting case uses of excess-produced energy being used to compress air into caverns, which can be tapped to produce energy when the sun's not shining or the wind's not blowing. One example had to do with a kind of salt that is turned into molten by powerful solar reflectors, which would be used to create steam after the sun has gone down.
Bakke also suggests the world of wireless power isn't far off and would further alter the way we think about the grid. We get to watch this come alive now as our smart phones are more and more able to charge by setting them down on a electromagnetic pad that is easily hidden/integrated into furniture, making wires even less visible.
Ultimately, the book just takes too long to make its points and is perhaps a little too utopic/optimistic about what is achievable in terms of regulatory reform, corporate initiative, and end-user participation. The examples of attempts to modernize the grid to meet our ever-evolving electrical needs (particularly the spectacular failure of Xcel's SmartGridCity in Boulder, CO) shows how corporate interests will always remain at odds with consumer interests, and make any swift or significant advancements either a) pointless (or detrimental) to the end-user, or b) unprofitable and thus a failure on a grand scale, or c) both.
The grid may just be an example of an America in severe decline—it was a system created ad hoc and slapdash and has basically just been getting band-aids stuck on for the past century and a half. There's insane complexity to fixing the problem, especially as it becomes more unstable and customer demands for things like renewable energy increase, and end-users leave the grid to produce their own electricity. Real reform will have to come from regulation, corporate utilities, the people who use electricity (everyone), and a sobering ability to affect change that has real foresight despite immediate (and substantial) expenses to modernize one of our biggest national weaknesses.
Bakke is successful in many ways though—namely, addressing the naivety of our current push toward green energy. Perhaps I'm just more ignorant than the average individual, but I hadn't realized the extent to which inconsistency in production from renewables (particularly from wind and solar) can disrupt the grid's ability to deliver electricity—often overwhelming the system to the point that it either blacksout or the producer has to be turned off, thus wasting energy.
She's also successful in presenting a way forward; a kind of utopian vision of the future grid. An "intelligent grid" or even an "integrated grid" beyond the imagining of the "smart grid." The idea essentially boils down to applying the ideas and concepts of blockchain to the power grid. That is, decentralized power production with grid-level storage capabilities and individual production feeding into storage and grid with integrated software solutions to smooth and even out the transmission of individual-created energy. It's hard to envision getting there—one idea floating around suggests electric cars plugged into the system would be a smart way to incorporate grid-level storage to a renewable-powered electrical grid. But beyond the ideas of batteries, new and creative storage solutions need to be created. She had some interesting case uses of excess-produced energy being used to compress air into caverns, which can be tapped to produce energy when the sun's not shining or the wind's not blowing. One example had to do with a kind of salt that is turned into molten by powerful solar reflectors, which would be used to create steam after the sun has gone down.
Bakke also suggests the world of wireless power isn't far off and would further alter the way we think about the grid. We get to watch this come alive now as our smart phones are more and more able to charge by setting them down on a electromagnetic pad that is easily hidden/integrated into furniture, making wires even less visible.
Ultimately, the book just takes too long to make its points and is perhaps a little too utopic/optimistic about what is achievable in terms of regulatory reform, corporate initiative, and end-user participation. The examples of attempts to modernize the grid to meet our ever-evolving electrical needs (particularly the spectacular failure of Xcel's SmartGridCity in Boulder, CO) shows how corporate interests will always remain at odds with consumer interests, and make any swift or significant advancements either a) pointless (or detrimental) to the end-user, or b) unprofitable and thus a failure on a grand scale, or c) both.
The grid may just be an example of an America in severe decline—it was a system created ad hoc and slapdash and has basically just been getting band-aids stuck on for the past century and a half. There's insane complexity to fixing the problem, especially as it becomes more unstable and customer demands for things like renewable energy increase, and end-users leave the grid to produce their own electricity. Real reform will have to come from regulation, corporate utilities, the people who use electricity (everyone), and a sobering ability to affect change that has real foresight despite immediate (and substantial) expenses to modernize one of our biggest national weaknesses.
September 27, 2016
This book represents a great idea (the need to explain how our electricity system and the grid work) in desperate need of a greater editor. The topic might not be "sexy" but that doesn't mean the writing has to be robotic and repetitive. This book was a real slog to get through and I have to admit that, despite being an academic used to dry scholarly writing, I couldn't finish this.
October 30, 2017
A rambling and repetitive look at the power grid written by an unqualified author. Painful to read at times. Do not let the "PhD" on the cover fool you, the Gretchen Bakke does not understand basic electrical theory, technology, nor economics for that matter (I looked it up, her proudly displayed PhD is in anthropology). The publisher could have at least found an editor with a technical background to correct some the mistakes.
Honestly, The Grid reads like a Trump speech: "Our power grid is bad. Trust me, I know people who tell me it is really bad, because it is old, and trees and animals and even people break it, all the time. Electricity, I mean, no one really understands it, but I know people who do, and I do, but I won't describe it, because, it's really complicated, electrons. There's renewable energy, that the sun and wind and solar and farms, and electrons, but trust me, its a bad deal, the worst deal, because the grid is old, and that's what we have, an old grid, and squirrels break it."
If you are actually interested in learning about power grids and their deficiencies, save yourself time and a headache by just reading the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electri...
It has more information than the entirety of this book, and delivers it without the pointless analogies, anecdotes, and reiterations.
Honestly, The Grid reads like a Trump speech: "Our power grid is bad. Trust me, I know people who tell me it is really bad, because it is old, and trees and animals and even people break it, all the time. Electricity, I mean, no one really understands it, but I know people who do, and I do, but I won't describe it, because, it's really complicated, electrons. There's renewable energy, that the sun and wind and solar and farms, and electrons, but trust me, its a bad deal, the worst deal, because the grid is old, and that's what we have, an old grid, and squirrels break it."
If you are actually interested in learning about power grids and their deficiencies, save yourself time and a headache by just reading the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electri...
It has more information than the entirety of this book, and delivers it without the pointless analogies, anecdotes, and reiterations.
June 14, 2018
For the first time in my life, I actually think I understand how electricity works, how it is generated, why it does what it does and how it gets to you and me from where it starts. I don't think I could clearly explain it to you but Gretchen Bakke certainly clearly explained it to me. In addition to talking about the grid as it exists today, she also gives a clear history of how we got here and a really fascinating idea of where we might be going. In fact, the major story here is where we really need to be going. Like most of us nowadays, I'm a proponent of using as much renewable energy sources as possible i.e., solar, wind, geothermal. And I always thought it was simply a problem of forcing utilities to get with the plan and switch out their coal and oil plants for newer, cleaner energy production. Not quite so simple, as it turns out. With an aged grid, there are problems with injecting sudden large amounts of solar or wind power into systems not really built to handle it and storage is not really possible or way too expensive to be practical. Ms. Bakke's book explains all the results that can occur and all the new laws, systems, etc. that keep the grid from being able to swiftly change course. The future looks bright (pun definitely intended) but it may take awhile to get there.
May 25, 2023
I decided to mark it as DNF very early on - just after completing one chapter. It's written by a cultural anthropologist and it was very clear that this book was going to be about the minutiae of human ecosystem of power production & transmission (in the US) rather than the engineering of the grid.
I also found the author's strong conclusions without any evidence backing & insultive tone offputting
Some samples (and there are many more) from just 50 pages of reading.
1. Claims power production surges by renewable energy microproducers are a huge problem - heavy "citation needed" vibes.
2. Just insults older industry executives over and over again for being too rigid and stodgy to deal with changing power production modalities based on nothing except that they are old.
3. "Lefty Northwesterners who want clean energy but also want to make their toast in the morning" - what the hell is this even, as if the two things are mutually incompatible.
Just not my book. Would prefer something written by an engineer or maybe even an economist on the dynamics of an interestingly complicated economic system.
I also found the author's strong conclusions without any evidence backing & insultive tone offputting
Some samples (and there are many more) from just 50 pages of reading.
1. Claims power production surges by renewable energy microproducers are a huge problem - heavy "citation needed" vibes.
2. Just insults older industry executives over and over again for being too rigid and stodgy to deal with changing power production modalities based on nothing except that they are old.
3. "Lefty Northwesterners who want clean energy but also want to make their toast in the morning" - what the hell is this even, as if the two things are mutually incompatible.
Just not my book. Would prefer something written by an engineer or maybe even an economist on the dynamics of an interestingly complicated economic system.
December 11, 2016
Very interesting history lesson of how we got our current (terribly antiquated) grid, as well as the monopoly/monopsony powers the utilities running the grid have wielded. Especially interesting to me was the impact of PURPA, legislation passed in the 70s that flew under the radar but forced utilities to buy back power produced by smaller players, which allowed for today's solar-panel-on-the-home business model.
Some of the problems that we face in our grid today are also super interesting: all revolving around the "virtual power plant". There is an enormous amount of waste at the moment, and solutions will require some remarkable systems engineering technologies.
All the same, this is another one of those books that I would have preferred to have read in a long-form article.
Some of the problems that we face in our grid today are also super interesting: all revolving around the "virtual power plant". There is an enormous amount of waste at the moment, and solutions will require some remarkable systems engineering technologies.
All the same, this is another one of those books that I would have preferred to have read in a long-form article.
January 5, 2020
The grumpus23 (23-word commentary)
I work in the electric industry and this book still offered plenty of insight regarding the past, present, and future of our grid.
I work in the electric industry and this book still offered plenty of insight regarding the past, present, and future of our grid.
January 16, 2017
Very interesting overview of the grid and its many ailments, as well as a meditation on our relationship with electricity. I'm surprised I knew as little about the grid as I did going into this, considering it's the infrastructure that allows for modern life to be what it is.
January 28, 2017
The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke
“The Grid” is an insightful yet verbose book on America’s grid technology; it’s history together with the laws, people and logic that brought it into existence. Author Gretchen Bakke holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and is currently a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada brings us this seldom told story of the evolution of an essential infrastructure. This interesting 364-page book includes the following nine chapters: 1. The Way of the Wind, 2. How the Grid Got Its Wires, 3. The Consolidation of Power, 4. The Cardigan Path, 5. Things Fall Apart, 6. Two Birds, One Stone, 7. A Tale of Two Storms, 8. In Search of the Holy Grail, and 9. American Zeitgeist.
Positives:
1. A well-researched, accessible book.
2. The seldom-told story of our electrical-grid infrastructure.
3. Does a good job of describing the grid and its problems. “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.” Bonus, “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.”
4. Explains the most common causes of power outages. “Overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.”
5. Shares interesting findings. “National security was threatened more by the “brittleness” of America’s electrical grid than by possible future disruptions in the flow of imported oil.”
6. One of the most interesting topics covered has to do with the problems of integrating renewables into the existing grid. This is a recurring topic in the book. “The problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century.”
7. Key discoveries behind the grid. “This subtle-seeming transition in the structure of circuitry, from serial to parallel, was the grid’s first revolution. Though we tend to give Thomas Alva Edison the credit for having invented the lightbulb (he did not), he did devise something just as remarkable—the parallel circuit, one of his greatest if least lauded contributions to technological underpinnings of our modern world.”
8. The key steps to big grids. “The first step toward a big grid, one that would make it possible to universalize access to electric power, was the invention and successful manufacture of alternating current (AC) electrical systems in 1887.”
9. Discusses the history of big electrical business. “By 1925 almost nobody in the electricity business could even imagine a system for making, transmitting, distributing, or managing electric power other than as a monopoly enterprise.”
10. An interesting look at electrical efficiency. “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.”
11. A look at President Carter’s impact on energy. “This turn toward conservation and energy efficiency was the first crisis, of three, that would shock the electric utilities during the Carter era.”
12. A look at the wind industry. “The combination of federal and California incentives and innovative state regulations launched the wind industry in the U.S.”
13. Blackouts and their causes. “A case in point: On August 14, 2003, eighteen months after Davis-Besse was shut down for repair, the largest blackout in our nation’s history, and the third-largest ever in the world, swept across the eastern half of the United States and parts of Canada, blacking out eight states and 50 million people for two days. So thorough and so vast was this cascading blackout that it shows as a visible dip on America’s GDP for that year. The blackout, which covered 93,000 square miles, accounted for $6 billion of lost business revenue. If ever it was in doubt, the 2003 blackout proved that at its core America’s economy is inexorably, indubitably electric.” Bonus, “In the case of the 2003 blackout the error on the grid took the form of overgrown trees and the error on the computers took the form of a line of code that disallowed simultaneous incoming data reports.”
14. Financial challenges of the electric industry. “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.”
15. A look at “smart grids”. “The “smart” grid uses computers to alleviate the abiding problem of peak load.”
16. Find out the impact of climate change to the grid.
17. A look at the impact of major storms to the grid. “After Superstorm Sandy, the Northeast began to witness the return of the tiny grid. These new constructions bear a lot in common with Edison-era private plants, which generated customized electricity for a single owner on-site. Unlike Edison’s private plants, these modern microgrids can connect and unconnect as needed to the big grid (which is now increasingly known as the “macrogrid”). And, unlike any system since the consolidation of power in the early twentieth century, these microgrids work perfectly well in “island” mode.”
18. Military applications. “Anything that can be done to eliminate the necessity of diesel generators, and reduce the amount of oil necessary to feed them on the field of battle, strengthens—adds resiliency, flexibility, and mobility to—the war effort. Mobile, matte, lightweight, and diversified systems for keeping the lights on, the data safe, and the troops cool are critical to mission success. For while some of this fuel is poured into gas tanks, a lot of it is used to make electricity.” Bonus, “As a result, the DoD, which operates a fleet of 200,000 nontactical vehicles, is working to convert them all to electricity with vehicle-to-grid technologies designed in from the start.”
19. The “holy grail” of electricity, storage. “Today the grail is less a new way to make power than it is to find a really good way to store it.”
20. The future of the grid. In the final chapter, the author discusses the consumers’ personal interactions with power that may shape the grid of the future.
21. Plenty of links in the notes section.
Negatives:
1. Verbose. It could and probably should have been a hundred pages fewer.
2. Lack of supplementary visual material that could have done wonders to complement the narrative. The general public knows very little about how electricity works and this kind of book begs for diagrams and visual material, yet there is very little here.
3. Not only does the book lack visual material it lacks supplementary material that would of have been of interest to the public. As an example: maps of key grids, table of electrical consumption around the country, timelines, charts and diagrams showing the use of renewables versus non-renewable energy sources, etc.
4. Not only verbose but at times even tedious to read.
5. Missed opportunities to “shock” the reader with interesting tidbits or curiosities.
6. Lacks scientific rigor, the book is intended for the masses.
7. No formal bibliography.
In summary, this book should have been much better. The topic of the grid is personally interesting to an engineer like myself but I’m very disappointed on how verbose and poorly presented the material was. The lack of supplementary materials did the book no favors either. On the other hand, I agree with the findings and conclusions of the author and I did learn a lot about the electric grid as en essential and pervasive infrastructure. More like a 3.5-star quality book, if you are interested in the grid by all means read this book but you just need to be patient with it. A mild recommendation.
Further recommendations: “Living on the Grid” by William L, Thompson, “Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World” by Jill Jonnes, “AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War” by Tom McNichol, “Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics” by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon, “The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell” by Basil Mahon, “The Electric Life of Michael Faraday” by Alan Hirshfeld, and “Tesla” by W. Bernard Carlson.
“The Grid” is an insightful yet verbose book on America’s grid technology; it’s history together with the laws, people and logic that brought it into existence. Author Gretchen Bakke holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and is currently a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada brings us this seldom told story of the evolution of an essential infrastructure. This interesting 364-page book includes the following nine chapters: 1. The Way of the Wind, 2. How the Grid Got Its Wires, 3. The Consolidation of Power, 4. The Cardigan Path, 5. Things Fall Apart, 6. Two Birds, One Stone, 7. A Tale of Two Storms, 8. In Search of the Holy Grail, and 9. American Zeitgeist.
Positives:
1. A well-researched, accessible book.
2. The seldom-told story of our electrical-grid infrastructure.
3. Does a good job of describing the grid and its problems. “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.” Bonus, “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.”
4. Explains the most common causes of power outages. “Overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.”
5. Shares interesting findings. “National security was threatened more by the “brittleness” of America’s electrical grid than by possible future disruptions in the flow of imported oil.”
6. One of the most interesting topics covered has to do with the problems of integrating renewables into the existing grid. This is a recurring topic in the book. “The problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century.”
7. Key discoveries behind the grid. “This subtle-seeming transition in the structure of circuitry, from serial to parallel, was the grid’s first revolution. Though we tend to give Thomas Alva Edison the credit for having invented the lightbulb (he did not), he did devise something just as remarkable—the parallel circuit, one of his greatest if least lauded contributions to technological underpinnings of our modern world.”
8. The key steps to big grids. “The first step toward a big grid, one that would make it possible to universalize access to electric power, was the invention and successful manufacture of alternating current (AC) electrical systems in 1887.”
9. Discusses the history of big electrical business. “By 1925 almost nobody in the electricity business could even imagine a system for making, transmitting, distributing, or managing electric power other than as a monopoly enterprise.”
10. An interesting look at electrical efficiency. “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.”
11. A look at President Carter’s impact on energy. “This turn toward conservation and energy efficiency was the first crisis, of three, that would shock the electric utilities during the Carter era.”
12. A look at the wind industry. “The combination of federal and California incentives and innovative state regulations launched the wind industry in the U.S.”
13. Blackouts and their causes. “A case in point: On August 14, 2003, eighteen months after Davis-Besse was shut down for repair, the largest blackout in our nation’s history, and the third-largest ever in the world, swept across the eastern half of the United States and parts of Canada, blacking out eight states and 50 million people for two days. So thorough and so vast was this cascading blackout that it shows as a visible dip on America’s GDP for that year. The blackout, which covered 93,000 square miles, accounted for $6 billion of lost business revenue. If ever it was in doubt, the 2003 blackout proved that at its core America’s economy is inexorably, indubitably electric.” Bonus, “In the case of the 2003 blackout the error on the grid took the form of overgrown trees and the error on the computers took the form of a line of code that disallowed simultaneous incoming data reports.”
14. Financial challenges of the electric industry. “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.”
15. A look at “smart grids”. “The “smart” grid uses computers to alleviate the abiding problem of peak load.”
16. Find out the impact of climate change to the grid.
17. A look at the impact of major storms to the grid. “After Superstorm Sandy, the Northeast began to witness the return of the tiny grid. These new constructions bear a lot in common with Edison-era private plants, which generated customized electricity for a single owner on-site. Unlike Edison’s private plants, these modern microgrids can connect and unconnect as needed to the big grid (which is now increasingly known as the “macrogrid”). And, unlike any system since the consolidation of power in the early twentieth century, these microgrids work perfectly well in “island” mode.”
18. Military applications. “Anything that can be done to eliminate the necessity of diesel generators, and reduce the amount of oil necessary to feed them on the field of battle, strengthens—adds resiliency, flexibility, and mobility to—the war effort. Mobile, matte, lightweight, and diversified systems for keeping the lights on, the data safe, and the troops cool are critical to mission success. For while some of this fuel is poured into gas tanks, a lot of it is used to make electricity.” Bonus, “As a result, the DoD, which operates a fleet of 200,000 nontactical vehicles, is working to convert them all to electricity with vehicle-to-grid technologies designed in from the start.”
19. The “holy grail” of electricity, storage. “Today the grail is less a new way to make power than it is to find a really good way to store it.”
20. The future of the grid. In the final chapter, the author discusses the consumers’ personal interactions with power that may shape the grid of the future.
21. Plenty of links in the notes section.
Negatives:
1. Verbose. It could and probably should have been a hundred pages fewer.
2. Lack of supplementary visual material that could have done wonders to complement the narrative. The general public knows very little about how electricity works and this kind of book begs for diagrams and visual material, yet there is very little here.
3. Not only does the book lack visual material it lacks supplementary material that would of have been of interest to the public. As an example: maps of key grids, table of electrical consumption around the country, timelines, charts and diagrams showing the use of renewables versus non-renewable energy sources, etc.
4. Not only verbose but at times even tedious to read.
5. Missed opportunities to “shock” the reader with interesting tidbits or curiosities.
6. Lacks scientific rigor, the book is intended for the masses.
7. No formal bibliography.
In summary, this book should have been much better. The topic of the grid is personally interesting to an engineer like myself but I’m very disappointed on how verbose and poorly presented the material was. The lack of supplementary materials did the book no favors either. On the other hand, I agree with the findings and conclusions of the author and I did learn a lot about the electric grid as en essential and pervasive infrastructure. More like a 3.5-star quality book, if you are interested in the grid by all means read this book but you just need to be patient with it. A mild recommendation.
Further recommendations: “Living on the Grid” by William L, Thompson, “Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World” by Jill Jonnes, “AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War” by Tom McNichol, “Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics” by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon, “The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell” by Basil Mahon, “The Electric Life of Michael Faraday” by Alan Hirshfeld, and “Tesla” by W. Bernard Carlson.
December 20, 2023
not it taking a thousand years to read this book. but also like fair because it’s so niche and like who really wants to read about the electric grid,, me apparently, but only in like tasteful snippets. that said i do feel like chapter 7-9 should be a mandatory read for all because it does provide a sexy high level (albeit repetitive) overview of what i mean when i respond “utility and regulatory innovation” when asked what i do… and that doesn’t even cover gas 😵💫
anyway s/o to aileen for letting me borrow this book for seven thousand year….. should i bill all hours dedicated to this book to mcknight ?? joyce ??? oooop 🤫🤪
anyway s/o to aileen for letting me borrow this book for seven thousand year….. should i bill all hours dedicated to this book to mcknight ?? joyce ??? oooop 🤫🤪
May 25, 2022
This book exceeded my expectations for helping conceptualize and visualize what "the grid" is, how it works, and many of the modern challenges (lack of investment/upkeep, regulatory changes, small power producers, highly variable power sources coming on the grid, etc.). While I studied electrical engineering (although I don't practice in power systems) and have been more and more fascinated by power generation and policy in recent years, the grid remained a pretty abstract, or taken-for-granted idea in the back of my mind. This book was a great primer and is definitely accessible enough for non-EE's!
Some interesting bits and highlights:
- This is obvious to power engineers but mysterious to the rest of us: power is consumed the instant it is produced. With some very small exceptions like batteries, dams, pumped hydro storage, and concentrating solar on molten salt, electricity cannot be stored or banked. Production has to match consumption.
- p9: A coal-burning power plant pulverizes and combusts, on average, 125 tons of coal every 5 minutes. Wild! From my time in the potash industry, this is approximately the weight of a fully loaded grain/potash railcar.
- p20: Challenge of distributed home solar PV (photovoltaic) is that utilities don't get paid for power. In fact, they often pay you - and in fact, are legislatively mandated to accept (at least in the US) - your excess power. With that arrangement, what incentives to the utility companies and grid infrastructure owners have to generate revenue to maintain their assets? Solar PV is great until the grid fails when the sun goes behind a cloud...
- p93: A monopoly has an echo on the consumer side of the world called a monopsony. Whereas a monopoly is the sole seller for a product, a monopsony is the sole customer. Utility companies are regional monopsonies, where they have to buy whatever (crappy, intermittent) electricity is connected to their grid. As we learned in chapter 1, electricity demand is always equal to electricity supply, so what happens to stable base power producers when a bunch of variable sources have to dump their intermittent loads onto the grid?
- p143: In the states, utilities used to make money by selling electricity. Due to deregulation, bad incentives, and increasing energy independence from consumers and companies alike, utilities now make money by transporting power over long distances and selling it as a commodity. A simple example, a utility might make more money firing up a plant and "shipping" that power halfway across the country to the highest bidder. This strains long-distance systems, and is also ecologically inefficient; line losses means that it is more efficient to produce and consume power locally/regionally.
- p165: Smart meters... pretty much zero incentive for consumers to adopt these, as the data is often inaccessible to consumers (this is my experience - can't access data generated at your home!). Some regions have programs where you sign up for the regional utility to remotely control your air conditioner based on grid demand in the region. Sounds awesome, right?
- p175: At 5pm every day, power plants all over America have been ramping up to meet daily peek load as some workers arrive at home, while some work late in the office. Interestingly, this is also the time of day where the wind tends to die down, and at some latitudes and times of year, where the sun starts to set. A "fun" challenge for grid operators.
- p205: According to Amery Lovins, 95% of a US "forward military base" power goes to air conditioning inefficient tents sitting in hot sand. US military is trying to curb reliance on fossil fuels and build mixed-source micro-grids with solar, wind, battery, and diesel backup.
- p230-232: "Had more electric companies gotten into the solar panel business earlier, this switch from paying a utility bill to paying a [leased solar] panel company for electricity might not have led to the dire situation faced by our grid today. As more and more people opt for the panels, the electric company is left with little to no revenue with which to maintain the grid - the way utilities have dealt with this in Hawaii, but also in Southern California and especially in Arizona, is to raise rates on the customers they still have. [...] distributed solar is flooding the grid with electricity, at least for part of the day, while starving it of money."
- p234: "This is what is meant by the utility death spiral: 'as grid maintenance costs go up and the capital cost of renewable energy moves down, more customers will be encouraged to leave the grid. In turn that pushes grid costs even higher for remaining customers, who then have even more incentive to become self-sufficient.'" I have another book queued that I hope will explore this idea in deeper detail: Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Spicy title!
-p259: On grid reforms: "One recent author described the project of overhauling the grid as akin to 'rebuilding our entire airplane fleet, along with our runways and air traffic control system while the planes are all up in the air, filled with passengers.'"
- p277: The idea of "negawatts" and Demand-Response capacity for utilities. Essentially, load that they can remotely shed (disable, turn off) to avoid peak loading.
Criticisms:
- Bakke frequency mentions "plutonium" as a nuclear reactor fuel source, in the same context as one might discuss a pile of coal, biomass, or a pipeline full of natural gas. I was almost certain she was wrong and confirmed it after finishing the book: in the US (and Canada), plutonium is not used a raw fuel. It's produced during uranium-238's fission reaction and itself starts reacting, generating a substantial amount of a reactor's power, but it's not a raw input to the plant.
- The last chapter or two were a bit soft, more predictive/hopeful than grounded in reality.
One last thought which is not quite a criticism. I don't love the author's conclusion that reduced consumption and improved energy efficiency are key for long-term energy security in America (basically, Canada). I'm attracted to an alternative narrative around a potential massive nuclear build-out that is very appealing: not only solve energy poverty and energy security with known technologies, but to create an environment of energy abundance (decoupled from environmental impacts), enabling society to take all the engineers and technologists working on (boring) energy efficiency projects and get them working on more interesting, innovative, life-changing ideas and projects. However, Bakke's book had a few hard-to-swallow pills: for instance we could not simply 3x or 4x the amount of power on our existing grid, because America's electricity consumption has been flat since the late 90s.
Discovered via a comment at #RWRI16
Some interesting bits and highlights:
- This is obvious to power engineers but mysterious to the rest of us: power is consumed the instant it is produced. With some very small exceptions like batteries, dams, pumped hydro storage, and concentrating solar on molten salt, electricity cannot be stored or banked. Production has to match consumption.
- p9: A coal-burning power plant pulverizes and combusts, on average, 125 tons of coal every 5 minutes. Wild! From my time in the potash industry, this is approximately the weight of a fully loaded grain/potash railcar.
- p20: Challenge of distributed home solar PV (photovoltaic) is that utilities don't get paid for power. In fact, they often pay you - and in fact, are legislatively mandated to accept (at least in the US) - your excess power. With that arrangement, what incentives to the utility companies and grid infrastructure owners have to generate revenue to maintain their assets? Solar PV is great until the grid fails when the sun goes behind a cloud...
- p93: A monopoly has an echo on the consumer side of the world called a monopsony. Whereas a monopoly is the sole seller for a product, a monopsony is the sole customer. Utility companies are regional monopsonies, where they have to buy whatever (crappy, intermittent) electricity is connected to their grid. As we learned in chapter 1, electricity demand is always equal to electricity supply, so what happens to stable base power producers when a bunch of variable sources have to dump their intermittent loads onto the grid?
- p143: In the states, utilities used to make money by selling electricity. Due to deregulation, bad incentives, and increasing energy independence from consumers and companies alike, utilities now make money by transporting power over long distances and selling it as a commodity. A simple example, a utility might make more money firing up a plant and "shipping" that power halfway across the country to the highest bidder. This strains long-distance systems, and is also ecologically inefficient; line losses means that it is more efficient to produce and consume power locally/regionally.
- p165: Smart meters... pretty much zero incentive for consumers to adopt these, as the data is often inaccessible to consumers (this is my experience - can't access data generated at your home!). Some regions have programs where you sign up for the regional utility to remotely control your air conditioner based on grid demand in the region. Sounds awesome, right?
- p175: At 5pm every day, power plants all over America have been ramping up to meet daily peek load as some workers arrive at home, while some work late in the office. Interestingly, this is also the time of day where the wind tends to die down, and at some latitudes and times of year, where the sun starts to set. A "fun" challenge for grid operators.
- p205: According to Amery Lovins, 95% of a US "forward military base" power goes to air conditioning inefficient tents sitting in hot sand. US military is trying to curb reliance on fossil fuels and build mixed-source micro-grids with solar, wind, battery, and diesel backup.
- p230-232: "Had more electric companies gotten into the solar panel business earlier, this switch from paying a utility bill to paying a [leased solar] panel company for electricity might not have led to the dire situation faced by our grid today. As more and more people opt for the panels, the electric company is left with little to no revenue with which to maintain the grid - the way utilities have dealt with this in Hawaii, but also in Southern California and especially in Arizona, is to raise rates on the customers they still have. [...] distributed solar is flooding the grid with electricity, at least for part of the day, while starving it of money."
- p234: "This is what is meant by the utility death spiral: 'as grid maintenance costs go up and the capital cost of renewable energy moves down, more customers will be encouraged to leave the grid. In turn that pushes grid costs even higher for remaining customers, who then have even more incentive to become self-sufficient.'" I have another book queued that I hope will explore this idea in deeper detail: Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Spicy title!
-p259: On grid reforms: "One recent author described the project of overhauling the grid as akin to 'rebuilding our entire airplane fleet, along with our runways and air traffic control system while the planes are all up in the air, filled with passengers.'"
- p277: The idea of "negawatts" and Demand-Response capacity for utilities. Essentially, load that they can remotely shed (disable, turn off) to avoid peak loading.
Criticisms:
- Bakke frequency mentions "plutonium" as a nuclear reactor fuel source, in the same context as one might discuss a pile of coal, biomass, or a pipeline full of natural gas. I was almost certain she was wrong and confirmed it after finishing the book: in the US (and Canada), plutonium is not used a raw fuel. It's produced during uranium-238's fission reaction and itself starts reacting, generating a substantial amount of a reactor's power, but it's not a raw input to the plant.
- The last chapter or two were a bit soft, more predictive/hopeful than grounded in reality.
One last thought which is not quite a criticism. I don't love the author's conclusion that reduced consumption and improved energy efficiency are key for long-term energy security in America (basically, Canada). I'm attracted to an alternative narrative around a potential massive nuclear build-out that is very appealing: not only solve energy poverty and energy security with known technologies, but to create an environment of energy abundance (decoupled from environmental impacts), enabling society to take all the engineers and technologists working on (boring) energy efficiency projects and get them working on more interesting, innovative, life-changing ideas and projects. However, Bakke's book had a few hard-to-swallow pills: for instance we could not simply 3x or 4x the amount of power on our existing grid, because America's electricity consumption has been flat since the late 90s.
Discovered via a comment at #RWRI16
March 10, 2017
I thought this book certainly lived up to its promise - it was at least as good a history, exposition, and analysis of our electrical grid as I expected; an in fact was both more thorough and more creative than I had anticipated. The thoroughness may have been at the heart of my biggest struggle with the book; for the first two-thirds, it was a real slog for me. Although I'm science-friendly, and often enjoy science written for non-scientists, with this book I had difficulty retaining some of the technical information, and for those first two-thirds I couldn't consistently get engaged. There's a lot of narrative groundwork required, a lot of backstory (both scientifically and historical), for the layperson to be able to get the picture. And as urgent and interesting as the overall topic is, that scientific/technical backstory is hard to make into consistently scintillating reading. Making matters worse, I had mixed feelings about the writer's actual style.
However, in the end, I came away feeling that it was an incredibly useful and ambitious book, and that I got a lot out of it. The parts that did engage me, engaged me a lot. The last third or so, when the author covered current developments in grid use and potential strategies for the future, was both more accessible and more lively than earlier chapters. I learned about some interesting and creative possibilities for electrical "storage" that I'd had no idea of before. Although ultimately not reassuring, because of the situation we're in and the many social, bureaucratic, and business-interest barriers to implementation, it was a truly fascinating and exciting part of the book.
However, in the end, I came away feeling that it was an incredibly useful and ambitious book, and that I got a lot out of it. The parts that did engage me, engaged me a lot. The last third or so, when the author covered current developments in grid use and potential strategies for the future, was both more accessible and more lively than earlier chapters. I learned about some interesting and creative possibilities for electrical "storage" that I'd had no idea of before. Although ultimately not reassuring, because of the situation we're in and the many social, bureaucratic, and business-interest barriers to implementation, it was a truly fascinating and exciting part of the book.
December 31, 2016
Entirely too wordy - where was the editor? On the other hand, I now know far more about our electric systems. One core idea is that creating a watt should be valued the same as a negative watt (a watt not consumed). Another is that we desperately need distributed energy storage - oil and gas are fantastic for moving energy around (they're energy dense) and they store energy. In contrast when your solar panels generate a watt that watt has to be consumed right then as there isn't s place to store it.
December 11, 2018
Pretentious twaddle, as far as I got. Best to look at the better one-star reviews here and at Amazon, before starting this book -- which I was looking forward to reading. Looks hopeless; abandoned. Life is too short....
October 14, 2020
I am writing this review a day after a blackout happened in India's financial capital, Mumbai, due to grid failure. There are very few books out there which talk about electricity grid, an omnipresent but complex infrastructure without which life in a city (and increasingly villages) will be unimaginable. The book begins by attempting to explain the basic concepts of electricity and the grid in very simple manner. Electric current doesn't behave like other commodities such as oil, coal etc, and works on different principles. The author mostly succeeds in helping the reader see the various moving parts and multiple systems at play in keeping this complex machine stable. However, when that stability is impacted, we see familiar events like blackouts. A failure in one part of the grid can bring down the whole system even after having multiple built in safety nets. In fact, blackouts might be the result of the triggering of one of those safety systems built within the grid. The book uses real world examples and case studies to help demonstrate how a tree branch can trigger a state wide blackout.
It also highlights that instances of these failures might increase as goverments push toward large scale deployment of renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions. Besides being variable and inconsistent in its generation of electricity, the renewable generation is being built out too fast for the vast monolith of grid to adapt. The utilities and goverment are also trying to think of new solutions to rationalize a market distorted by factors such as rising rooftop solar generation, which is reducing utilities' revenues in the US, thus starving utilities of capital to maintain the grid.
However, before diving into these complex questions, the book charts the history of electricity generation and development of grids. It is interesting that electricity generation started with the rich operating their own small coal fueled power plants. However, with the advent of large grids, electricity became an affordable and a basic commodity. Today, we are back to square one, where people are using solar panels to again operate private power plants.
While the book delves into these issues in most of the chapters, the author seemed to have the lost her trajectory in last few chapters. The last part seemed to be incoherent, and sounded more of a monologue into what might or might not happen to the grid.
We also need to keep in mind that the book focuses entirely on the US grid and while it does impart a lot of knowledge, every country works differently. The model of development for grid in India will be different keeping in mind that it is yet to reach every Indian. Unlike US, electricity in India is still unaffordable for many and therefore a lot of distribution is still subsidised and handled by goverment-owned entities. Hence, developing countries have to chart their own path, which fulfills both development and market needs wherever necessary.
Still, this book will really help the reader in deepening their understanding of this vast synchronized machine that looms large in our imagination via those big towers dotting suburban and rural landscapes.
It also highlights that instances of these failures might increase as goverments push toward large scale deployment of renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions. Besides being variable and inconsistent in its generation of electricity, the renewable generation is being built out too fast for the vast monolith of grid to adapt. The utilities and goverment are also trying to think of new solutions to rationalize a market distorted by factors such as rising rooftop solar generation, which is reducing utilities' revenues in the US, thus starving utilities of capital to maintain the grid.
However, before diving into these complex questions, the book charts the history of electricity generation and development of grids. It is interesting that electricity generation started with the rich operating their own small coal fueled power plants. However, with the advent of large grids, electricity became an affordable and a basic commodity. Today, we are back to square one, where people are using solar panels to again operate private power plants.
While the book delves into these issues in most of the chapters, the author seemed to have the lost her trajectory in last few chapters. The last part seemed to be incoherent, and sounded more of a monologue into what might or might not happen to the grid.
We also need to keep in mind that the book focuses entirely on the US grid and while it does impart a lot of knowledge, every country works differently. The model of development for grid in India will be different keeping in mind that it is yet to reach every Indian. Unlike US, electricity in India is still unaffordable for many and therefore a lot of distribution is still subsidised and handled by goverment-owned entities. Hence, developing countries have to chart their own path, which fulfills both development and market needs wherever necessary.
Still, this book will really help the reader in deepening their understanding of this vast synchronized machine that looms large in our imagination via those big towers dotting suburban and rural landscapes.
September 25, 2022
Pretty good overview, learned some things. Think this whole book could’ve been condensed in half, a lot of really overly drawn out and not very helpful metaphors. Also author is an anthropologist and I think I was hoping for slightly more like physics explanations of things than I got.
Read
February 27, 2024literally F this book but had to read it for class so didn’t have high hopes.
January 20, 2023
Loved it. I work in the renewable energy sector because of all the dreams of a better future described in this book.
However accurate or inaccurate it is, the spirit of creativity and hope the permeates the this book is a not so gentle reminder that we can create fantastic things.
However accurate or inaccurate it is, the spirit of creativity and hope the permeates the this book is a not so gentle reminder that we can create fantastic things.
June 14, 2022
The Grid is a very thorough and view-expanding read on the thing that literally powers our lives and its increasingly complicated and fraying wires. Bakke is obviously incredibly well researched on the North American electrical grid and she covers all the bases of where improvement and innovation is needed to keep us out of the dark while also preventing a climate disaster (Hint: storage, storage, and more storage). The book felt somewhat repetitive and longer than necessary, and I found myself taking breaks from it. Overall though, I am glad that I read it and I learned a lot about the grid.
October 27, 2018
This book being a 2016 Bill Gates pick set high expectations. The Wall Street Journal called it "a lucid and thought-provoking book". I disagree.
My first negative impression starts on the outside of the book. The PhD title of the author, Gretchen Bakke, is prominently featured on the cover. On closer inspection, this turns out to be in cultural anthropology. Featuring your PhD title in this way implies a certain understanding of the topic at hand. This turns out to be false. She keeps mixing up simple physical concepts, such as energy and power, which is extremely irritating and completely unnecessary. More advanced concepts are not explained, they are named, and the reader is told that few people understand it and that it's complicated. This is a missed chance, since I would have loved to know how for example load balancing works, or how net operators predict the demand, or how different plants fit into the grid in terms of the speed at which they can adjust their power output, etc.
The book does an OK job explaining the history of the power grid, and the regulation surrounding the electricity market. All the stories are told anecdotally. The reader never gets the feeling of having an overview, but is simply presented with a number of stories which have the same subject: the grid. Everything is told in an extremely wordy way. Allow me to show how the following relatively trivial bit of information is told. First my summary: "After hurricane Sandy people thought about how to build a more resilient power grid". Ok, here goes Gretchens version: "... Sandy has had a more profound impact on our thinking about what infrastructures mean for living life in common. In that storm's wake we began asking in earnest how this infrastructure might be built to work in the aftermath of disaster. If it can't be made to bend in a high wind at least, the new thinking goes, perhaps we can avoid its being so inexorably broken; perhaps we can rebuild it in such a way to assure its ability to recover quickly." This makes for a very tiring read, since the same information could have been presented in a much smaller book. The book is pretty repetitive, often puts words in "quotes" which I find annoying, and generally seems to prefer form over function.
In the last chapter the book fully derails in my opinion. An outlook is presented. Although there are interesting insights, there are very confusing sections about how the grid needs to be inclusive. Allow me another quote: "But if the undeniable fact of gender has not percolated up into the consciousness of those who make, and remake, our grid, what else is being lost?". Sorry but I don't see how gender is relevant in this respect, electrons don't discriminate. Some big corporation bashing follows. Then there is a whole bit on energy saving, which sounds good, until you hear the contribution of the author. A corner of her house is not insulated, and since she lives in a cold region the bathtub drain freezes in winter. Her solution is to keep the water running all winter. Her defense: "We won't be taking a home loan in the near future to pay thousands of dollars to have our bathroom ripped up in order to install $150 worth of insulation into a single wall". Seriously? A loan just to insulate one wall? How big is her bathroom? Anyway, do as I say and not as I do, is the take away message there I guess. Afterward she continues about a "community-wide drop in power consumption", right.
At the end of the outlook she really goes of the trolley in my opinion. Her vision of a future grid: "... a beautiful one, minimally invasive, that shines rather than glowers and that is wrought into the leitmotif of the century we are only just now stepping into in earnest". I'm happy that many decisions regarding the grid are made by real scientists, who at least occasionally have to deal with this thing called "reality".
My first negative impression starts on the outside of the book. The PhD title of the author, Gretchen Bakke, is prominently featured on the cover. On closer inspection, this turns out to be in cultural anthropology. Featuring your PhD title in this way implies a certain understanding of the topic at hand. This turns out to be false. She keeps mixing up simple physical concepts, such as energy and power, which is extremely irritating and completely unnecessary. More advanced concepts are not explained, they are named, and the reader is told that few people understand it and that it's complicated. This is a missed chance, since I would have loved to know how for example load balancing works, or how net operators predict the demand, or how different plants fit into the grid in terms of the speed at which they can adjust their power output, etc.
The book does an OK job explaining the history of the power grid, and the regulation surrounding the electricity market. All the stories are told anecdotally. The reader never gets the feeling of having an overview, but is simply presented with a number of stories which have the same subject: the grid. Everything is told in an extremely wordy way. Allow me to show how the following relatively trivial bit of information is told. First my summary: "After hurricane Sandy people thought about how to build a more resilient power grid". Ok, here goes Gretchens version: "... Sandy has had a more profound impact on our thinking about what infrastructures mean for living life in common. In that storm's wake we began asking in earnest how this infrastructure might be built to work in the aftermath of disaster. If it can't be made to bend in a high wind at least, the new thinking goes, perhaps we can avoid its being so inexorably broken; perhaps we can rebuild it in such a way to assure its ability to recover quickly." This makes for a very tiring read, since the same information could have been presented in a much smaller book. The book is pretty repetitive, often puts words in "quotes" which I find annoying, and generally seems to prefer form over function.
In the last chapter the book fully derails in my opinion. An outlook is presented. Although there are interesting insights, there are very confusing sections about how the grid needs to be inclusive. Allow me another quote: "But if the undeniable fact of gender has not percolated up into the consciousness of those who make, and remake, our grid, what else is being lost?". Sorry but I don't see how gender is relevant in this respect, electrons don't discriminate. Some big corporation bashing follows. Then there is a whole bit on energy saving, which sounds good, until you hear the contribution of the author. A corner of her house is not insulated, and since she lives in a cold region the bathtub drain freezes in winter. Her solution is to keep the water running all winter. Her defense: "We won't be taking a home loan in the near future to pay thousands of dollars to have our bathroom ripped up in order to install $150 worth of insulation into a single wall". Seriously? A loan just to insulate one wall? How big is her bathroom? Anyway, do as I say and not as I do, is the take away message there I guess. Afterward she continues about a "community-wide drop in power consumption", right.
At the end of the outlook she really goes of the trolley in my opinion. Her vision of a future grid: "... a beautiful one, minimally invasive, that shines rather than glowers and that is wrought into the leitmotif of the century we are only just now stepping into in earnest". I'm happy that many decisions regarding the grid are made by real scientists, who at least occasionally have to deal with this thing called "reality".
March 6, 2022
DISCLAIMER: I have never done a book review before. So if you have any suggestions please let me know. This might be a bit long so TL;DR: Read this book, very informative, you will not regret it.
I read with some enjoyment The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and our Energy Future. An anthropologist by training, author Gretchen Bakke is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany. This is Bakke’s fourth book – the first three focused on anthropology and the human-environment system, so this offering branches out from her comfort zone. Bakke is an exuberant writer, who presents unexpected interactions and different ways of looking at things. This book is directed at inquisitive readers who are interested in things such as sustainability, alternative energy, and the complexities behind things we take for granted. The purpose of this book is to bring her readers to the understanding that last century’s marvel of engineering does not meet our needs today, and that we need to reinvent the grid to meet the changes that a cleaner, more energy-diverse, future will bring.
The title of this book is very evocative. The short title, The Grid, simply tells readers to expect a discourse on the electric infrastructure. However, the subsequent subtitle hints at what the reader might expect to encounter in the book. The “fraying wires” tells readers up front that the author believes all is not well with the grid. The “energy future” hints at changes that need to be made. It is not clear from the subtitle alone whether those needed changes are to maintain the status quo, i.e., if we need to physically repair the infrastructure that has frayed, or whether it refers to adaptations we need to make as energy and electricity sources have been expanded and redefined in ways that do not fit well with the current way the grid exists and functions.
Bakke’s writing in this book is generally fun and engaging. Words are selected to help paint a visual picture of the issues and concerns that she raises. She uses a very broad vocabulary; some of the words seem to be self-generated, such as “ingigliated,” so readers might want to bone up on using context to define words, or keep a dictionary on hand. But this does not interfere with the story she is telling, and helps keep readers’ attention. Bakke presents the grid and how it works (or does not work) in a style that is interesting to read. However, she tends to skip around a lot, and this can lead to the perception of a lack of cohesion throughout the book.
The basic premise of the book is laid out in the introduction: Not only is the grid beginning to fail to reliably provide electricity safely and efficiently, it is in no way suitable in its current configuration for the green energy that is soon to come its way en masse. When people talk about going green, when it comes to energy what they very often fail to realize is that there is a massive obstacle to this desired, even needed, change to our power generation methodologies. The grid, the electrical delivery system for the energy we use -- whether coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, or solar -- is not only crumbling, but it is unsuited to "green" energy. For example, the grid does not like when, a cloud moves in front of a solar energy production array and causes a massive decline in energy output; the grid does not like when the wind suddenly stops blowing and the wind farm sits motionless. The grid is designed for a constant flow of energy, always the same voltage, always the same speed. Bakke argues that in order to effectively utilize "green" energy on a wide-scale basis, one first must look at the delivery system. If our energy delivery system is based on steady power from 20th century fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, how do we expect it to properly utilize new power generation methods from the 21st century?
The meat of the book begins with an excellent discussion about the author’s trip to something known as “Grid Week.” Thousands in the energy production business along with politicians, educated peoples, and many others attended this weeklong event. I think that the most important sentence of the book is found on page 7: "This is our grid in a nutshell: it is a complex just-in-time system for making an almost instantaneously delivering a standardized electrical current everywhere at once." After reading this book, I agree with this. If you take away nothing else from this book, it should be that the grid is a massive behemoth desperately in need of some money, love, and attention, and that if we want to “greenify” our energy production, we need to first work on the grid, for it is not meant for the “green energy” world that is coming. The background in Chapter 2 about the development of electricity and early grid systems, and the complexities that ultimately led the many grid companies to be consolidated into a single system, helps the reader of any background, to easily understand the science along with the people behind these early developments. It remains clear that the greatest advancement during the early stages of the grid was not on the technology side of things, but on the business side: It could be argued that one Samuel Insull single-handedly created the grid that we know today when he took the reins of Chicago Edison, one of Thomas Edison's many franchise cities, wherein the grid was in a pickle. The greatest problem Insull had to solve was to deal with the very nature of the business of energy production. In order to run a central power station efficiently enough to make money off the sale of the electricity that it generates, it must run consistently throughout the 24-hour day. But energy demand is not constant! Insull had to find a way to encourage people to use electricity throughout the day in a more or less consistent manner. Further, the power plants run more efficiently if they are running full bore all the time. Therefore it was his primary interest to engineer a scheme that would make this happen. By making electricity cheap, everyone would use it, keeping demand up, and ultimately, greating a monopoly for Chicago Edison! The scary thing that occurred to me as I read this chapter is that the grid that was built back in the Insull days is basically the same one we have today! It is a very old grid, and it is not getting very much attention, which is a disaster, given how much we rely on it.
At this point, Bakke introduces the reader to the growing environmental movement in the 1970s in the United States, and how the adoption of the Public Utitlities Regulatory Policies Act reduced the monopsony powers of the utilities. This allowed small energy companies, as well as individuals with solar or other alternatvie energy generation systems to generate their own power, selling any excess to the local utility. This chapter may be interesting to readers with a political bent, but failed to capture my interests, although for some reason I did not quite follow, it segued into a lengthy discussion about wind power. Whilst interesting in its own right, it detracted from the main message of the chapter. The next chapter includes a riveting tale of how a sagging wire, over grown foliage (this causes the most number of blackouts and is the single greatest threat to our grid), and a computer bug, blackedout the entire East Coast and parts of Canada for 2 days, affecting over 50 million people. So great was this blackout it appeared as a visible dip in that year’s GDP, about $6 Billion in lost revenue. This exemplifies how tied the nation now is to the grid and to a steady supply of electricity.
The author discusses the advantages and concerns with smart meters to normalize energy uses, as well as microgrids, and how advances in microgrids can help improve the reliability of the primary grid. But here, towards the end of the book, she introduces the importance of developing effective and efficient means of storing energy, especially as we bring more renewables online that do not allow continuous energy generation, such as solar and wind power. This second to last chapter is a very useful deep dive into some of the tech currently out there.
Overall, I recommend this book. Dr. Bakke did a good job explaining in a simple but effective manner the technology, physics, people, and history that went into the grid’s creation and use up to the modern day. She stays amazingly neutral on politics and clearly presents the facts. However, she sometimes seems to lose track of the purpose of writing this book, and it is unclear overall whether she feels green energy, and the storage of said energy, is the holy grail for meeting the nation’s electricity needs or the final nail in the coffin of the grid. Decide for yourself: The book is available from booksellers on-line. ISBN: 978-1-63286-568-7.
I read with some enjoyment The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and our Energy Future. An anthropologist by training, author Gretchen Bakke is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany. This is Bakke’s fourth book – the first three focused on anthropology and the human-environment system, so this offering branches out from her comfort zone. Bakke is an exuberant writer, who presents unexpected interactions and different ways of looking at things. This book is directed at inquisitive readers who are interested in things such as sustainability, alternative energy, and the complexities behind things we take for granted. The purpose of this book is to bring her readers to the understanding that last century’s marvel of engineering does not meet our needs today, and that we need to reinvent the grid to meet the changes that a cleaner, more energy-diverse, future will bring.
The title of this book is very evocative. The short title, The Grid, simply tells readers to expect a discourse on the electric infrastructure. However, the subsequent subtitle hints at what the reader might expect to encounter in the book. The “fraying wires” tells readers up front that the author believes all is not well with the grid. The “energy future” hints at changes that need to be made. It is not clear from the subtitle alone whether those needed changes are to maintain the status quo, i.e., if we need to physically repair the infrastructure that has frayed, or whether it refers to adaptations we need to make as energy and electricity sources have been expanded and redefined in ways that do not fit well with the current way the grid exists and functions.
Bakke’s writing in this book is generally fun and engaging. Words are selected to help paint a visual picture of the issues and concerns that she raises. She uses a very broad vocabulary; some of the words seem to be self-generated, such as “ingigliated,” so readers might want to bone up on using context to define words, or keep a dictionary on hand. But this does not interfere with the story she is telling, and helps keep readers’ attention. Bakke presents the grid and how it works (or does not work) in a style that is interesting to read. However, she tends to skip around a lot, and this can lead to the perception of a lack of cohesion throughout the book.
The basic premise of the book is laid out in the introduction: Not only is the grid beginning to fail to reliably provide electricity safely and efficiently, it is in no way suitable in its current configuration for the green energy that is soon to come its way en masse. When people talk about going green, when it comes to energy what they very often fail to realize is that there is a massive obstacle to this desired, even needed, change to our power generation methodologies. The grid, the electrical delivery system for the energy we use -- whether coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, or solar -- is not only crumbling, but it is unsuited to "green" energy. For example, the grid does not like when, a cloud moves in front of a solar energy production array and causes a massive decline in energy output; the grid does not like when the wind suddenly stops blowing and the wind farm sits motionless. The grid is designed for a constant flow of energy, always the same voltage, always the same speed. Bakke argues that in order to effectively utilize "green" energy on a wide-scale basis, one first must look at the delivery system. If our energy delivery system is based on steady power from 20th century fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, how do we expect it to properly utilize new power generation methods from the 21st century?
The meat of the book begins with an excellent discussion about the author’s trip to something known as “Grid Week.” Thousands in the energy production business along with politicians, educated peoples, and many others attended this weeklong event. I think that the most important sentence of the book is found on page 7: "This is our grid in a nutshell: it is a complex just-in-time system for making an almost instantaneously delivering a standardized electrical current everywhere at once." After reading this book, I agree with this. If you take away nothing else from this book, it should be that the grid is a massive behemoth desperately in need of some money, love, and attention, and that if we want to “greenify” our energy production, we need to first work on the grid, for it is not meant for the “green energy” world that is coming. The background in Chapter 2 about the development of electricity and early grid systems, and the complexities that ultimately led the many grid companies to be consolidated into a single system, helps the reader of any background, to easily understand the science along with the people behind these early developments. It remains clear that the greatest advancement during the early stages of the grid was not on the technology side of things, but on the business side: It could be argued that one Samuel Insull single-handedly created the grid that we know today when he took the reins of Chicago Edison, one of Thomas Edison's many franchise cities, wherein the grid was in a pickle. The greatest problem Insull had to solve was to deal with the very nature of the business of energy production. In order to run a central power station efficiently enough to make money off the sale of the electricity that it generates, it must run consistently throughout the 24-hour day. But energy demand is not constant! Insull had to find a way to encourage people to use electricity throughout the day in a more or less consistent manner. Further, the power plants run more efficiently if they are running full bore all the time. Therefore it was his primary interest to engineer a scheme that would make this happen. By making electricity cheap, everyone would use it, keeping demand up, and ultimately, greating a monopoly for Chicago Edison! The scary thing that occurred to me as I read this chapter is that the grid that was built back in the Insull days is basically the same one we have today! It is a very old grid, and it is not getting very much attention, which is a disaster, given how much we rely on it.
At this point, Bakke introduces the reader to the growing environmental movement in the 1970s in the United States, and how the adoption of the Public Utitlities Regulatory Policies Act reduced the monopsony powers of the utilities. This allowed small energy companies, as well as individuals with solar or other alternatvie energy generation systems to generate their own power, selling any excess to the local utility. This chapter may be interesting to readers with a political bent, but failed to capture my interests, although for some reason I did not quite follow, it segued into a lengthy discussion about wind power. Whilst interesting in its own right, it detracted from the main message of the chapter. The next chapter includes a riveting tale of how a sagging wire, over grown foliage (this causes the most number of blackouts and is the single greatest threat to our grid), and a computer bug, blackedout the entire East Coast and parts of Canada for 2 days, affecting over 50 million people. So great was this blackout it appeared as a visible dip in that year’s GDP, about $6 Billion in lost revenue. This exemplifies how tied the nation now is to the grid and to a steady supply of electricity.
The author discusses the advantages and concerns with smart meters to normalize energy uses, as well as microgrids, and how advances in microgrids can help improve the reliability of the primary grid. But here, towards the end of the book, she introduces the importance of developing effective and efficient means of storing energy, especially as we bring more renewables online that do not allow continuous energy generation, such as solar and wind power. This second to last chapter is a very useful deep dive into some of the tech currently out there.
Overall, I recommend this book. Dr. Bakke did a good job explaining in a simple but effective manner the technology, physics, people, and history that went into the grid’s creation and use up to the modern day. She stays amazingly neutral on politics and clearly presents the facts. However, she sometimes seems to lose track of the purpose of writing this book, and it is unclear overall whether she feels green energy, and the storage of said energy, is the holy grail for meeting the nation’s electricity needs or the final nail in the coffin of the grid. Decide for yourself: The book is available from booksellers on-line. ISBN: 978-1-63286-568-7.
September 28, 2017
I thought this book was excellent, really insightful, well researched and somehow also funny. As someone who works in energy it has changed my perspective on why the grid is what it is and what needs to happen to help it help us get off fossil fuels in our increasingly electronically connected society. Recommended!
February 3, 2017
Actually an interesting subject but sorely in need of heavy editing. Towards the end there are obvious typographical errors in the text which make the last half a slog to get through.
January 23, 2017
Ended up skimming most of the second half of the book. Lots of interesting concepts but felt like the book could've very easily been 1/2 as long and gotten the same points across.
May 1, 2020
Thoughtful, well-written exploration of the opportunities and very real technical, economic, and political challenges for renewable energy and a new way of thinking about electricity.
January 9, 2022
I did not expect to enjoy a book about electricity this much. One point that the author drives home is how intertwined our lives are with the grid and how dependent we are on it. It might sound obvious when said out loud, but this book really makes you appreciate the complexity of “the world’s largest machine” and its impact on your daily life.
I most enjoyed the chapters on the history of electricity and the grid (including when the grid failed), the current grid, and renewables. Until reading this book, I never quite understood the importance and difficulty of electricity storage at-scale. Wind power makes power when the wind blows. When the wind does not blow, we don’t have power. Viable storage technologies do not exist to provide us with electricity with stored wind power during these times. Thus, power utilities are forced to burn oil or gas to keep our lights on and our phones charged.
It seems like the grid is in an ongoing transition from a “centralized” form to a “distributed” form. This concept is quite well known in the technology space where products move fast and ideas move faster. The author explains indirectly why this transition is not an easy process for the grid ecosystem: it is weighed down by regulation, bureaucracy, legacy systems, and capitol requirements that make the required upgrades prohibitively expensive (for the history buffs, she also explains how we got here).
Overall, I would say this is a must-read for anyone interested in the grid (my interest was spawned from the 2021 Texas power disaster from a once-in-a-decade winter storm), as well as for anyone interested in pursuing green or off-the-grid technologies for their home. Personally, this book motivated me to look into such technologies for my own home (or more specifically, for my hypothetical future home).
Of course, no book is perfect, and while this book’s flaws do not warrant a drop to 4 stars, I feel compelled to call them out. First and foremost, commas!! Look at this sentence: “In the decades preceding the 2003 blackout money didn’t flow toward the upkeep and new construction of long-distance transmission lines.” Are you serious?! Where is the comma? A 4th grader would know where the comma is missing from this sentence. And this isn’t the only sentence with this problem. Open up any page in this book and read for a few minutes, you will find another example. Given that this book covers some legitimately dense material, these comma issues make the book noticeably harder to read. Second, the book goes on a bit too long (just like this review ;)). The final chapter in particular. The author discusses the future of the grid, but the future of the grid is a constant topic throughout the rest of the book. This chapter should have been a brief summary instead of 30mins revisiting prior points with additional anecdotes. Looking back, the first half of the book was very well put together and flowed well. It lost steam in the second half. Is that when the editor decided to put down their pen or something? And did the editor even bother looking for missing commas?!
I most enjoyed the chapters on the history of electricity and the grid (including when the grid failed), the current grid, and renewables. Until reading this book, I never quite understood the importance and difficulty of electricity storage at-scale. Wind power makes power when the wind blows. When the wind does not blow, we don’t have power. Viable storage technologies do not exist to provide us with electricity with stored wind power during these times. Thus, power utilities are forced to burn oil or gas to keep our lights on and our phones charged.
It seems like the grid is in an ongoing transition from a “centralized” form to a “distributed” form. This concept is quite well known in the technology space where products move fast and ideas move faster. The author explains indirectly why this transition is not an easy process for the grid ecosystem: it is weighed down by regulation, bureaucracy, legacy systems, and capitol requirements that make the required upgrades prohibitively expensive (for the history buffs, she also explains how we got here).
Overall, I would say this is a must-read for anyone interested in the grid (my interest was spawned from the 2021 Texas power disaster from a once-in-a-decade winter storm), as well as for anyone interested in pursuing green or off-the-grid technologies for their home. Personally, this book motivated me to look into such technologies for my own home (or more specifically, for my hypothetical future home).
Of course, no book is perfect, and while this book’s flaws do not warrant a drop to 4 stars, I feel compelled to call them out. First and foremost, commas!! Look at this sentence: “In the decades preceding the 2003 blackout money didn’t flow toward the upkeep and new construction of long-distance transmission lines.” Are you serious?! Where is the comma? A 4th grader would know where the comma is missing from this sentence. And this isn’t the only sentence with this problem. Open up any page in this book and read for a few minutes, you will find another example. Given that this book covers some legitimately dense material, these comma issues make the book noticeably harder to read. Second, the book goes on a bit too long (just like this review ;)). The final chapter in particular. The author discusses the future of the grid, but the future of the grid is a constant topic throughout the rest of the book. This chapter should have been a brief summary instead of 30mins revisiting prior points with additional anecdotes. Looking back, the first half of the book was very well put together and flowed well. It lost steam in the second half. Is that when the editor decided to put down their pen or something? And did the editor even bother looking for missing commas?!
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