Toward the end of 2014 Lockheed Martin’s super-secret research and development wing “Skunk Works” made a surprising announcement. Even more surprising was the brouhaha with which it was greeted in energy circles and even some mainstream media outlets. Their claim was to have shrunk the time horizon for a viable fusion reactor from thirty years to ten. This modest change in the time-until-release of a nonexistent technology would seem a funny thing to have made such a big splash. To understand why it did, it is necessary to know the backstory, now transformed into a running joke, about the future of fusion.
For decades it has been said that nuclear fusion is thirty years away. In the 1950s we could be certain of its arrival in the 1980s; by the 1970s, the year 2000 was the promised time; in 2010 it seemed that the kinks might be worked out of the process by 2040. Before Lockheed Martin stepped in and shrunk this ever-receding future down to ten years it seemed that our cars would fly, our refrigerators think, and nanobots swarm through our bodies eating our cancers before nuclear fusion would ever power our world.
Despite the retreating horizon of its success, fusion has, at least since the 1950s, been the promised end point of our energy woes. As a “clean” energy source, fusion produces no radiation, it uses a neutral isotope found in water as its fuel, and the reactor that produces it can’t melt down. With fusion we would have a limitless source of nonpolluting power. If Lockheed Martin wins the race toward a fusion-powered future we will even get a smallish reactor that can be both mass-produced and strategically deployed. Imagine the tiny town of Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, with a fusion-powered microgrid. No supply chain, no pollution, total energy, total energy security. The problem is that it takes about as much electricity to run a fusion reactor as that reactor produces. It is a zero-net-energy machine; the power that goes in equals the power it spits out. Nevertheless, for over half a century, fusion has been the electricity industry’s holy grail: limitless power from water.
Fusion hasn’t lost all its sparkle; it still maintains a tiny glint of grailness. The French have been building a very big fusion reactor for the better part of the last decade, and Lockheed’s efforts to come up with a smaller machine also prove that fusion-fueled dreams still have the power to motivate substantial research and development projects. Upon reading the small print of Lockheed’s announcement it becomes clear, however, that the company’s ten years might as well be thirty. The press release was basically a job ad. Lockheed does have a fusion reactor on paper and is casting about for “fusion experts” to help translate the thing from design to prototype. And, as they search for the right guys to make their sketches into reality, other holy grails rise and fall from favor. So is it today, so has it always been. What counts as the holy grail changes as our visions for a more perfect future are themselves transformed by present-day concerns. Today the grail is less a new way to make power than it is to find a really good way to store it.
Engineering a means to effectively store electricity is not a new problem. It’s been a priority for those involved in making, and making money off of, electricity since the Insull days. Figuring out this problem has risen up to grail-level urgency today because every dream for a cleaner energy future that involves a lot of renewables requires that we have some way to put aside the too much electricity they are capable of making.
At present, our capacity to integrate renewable generation gets complicated as we approach 15 percent of peak power—or 25 percent of daily electricity use. This does not change with the size of a grid. A diesel generator is a better power system than a single solar panel, unless that panel comes with a battery pack. A 500-megawatt coal-burning plant is a better power source than are 500 megawatts made by a wind farm, unless a means of balancing the wind is built into the grid that that farm powers. And though we do have batteries robust enough to back up a home solar system, for the moment most people installing these systems don’t bother with the expense. After all, they have the grid to help them out when their panels fail. Scale up the renewables and storage becomes even scarcer.
For the moment we solve this problem by doing things backward. Rather than storing excess power we use generation to “balance” generation. Every time a cloud goes by and diminishes solar output for a second or two, we burn some fossil fuels to generate enough little jolts of electricity to even out the electron flow. If we use a traditional power plant for this job, it will operate at only 2 percent of its productive capacity. These massive machines were built to be efficient only if running full bore all the time. With the introduction and spread of renewables we now require something else, something not as staid as a big coal-burning factory and not as mercurial as a wind turbine, something that can run for a little while on call, be it two or three seconds, or two or three hours (but rarely two or three days).
Up until now the most common means for doing this has been natural-gas turbines, which most large renewable-development companies also invest in as they build their wind farms or solar fields. But nobody says this “something” needs to be a new form of electrical generation, though if it is we’ll need to learn to think more symphonically. “In a symphony,” says Clay Stranger, “no instrument plays all the time, but the ensemble continuously produces beautiful music.” So too, he suggests, might we learn to conduct our grid, more artfully and with less of a lead foot. Storage at this point is a far more popular solution and a lot of people are working on it with some admirably creative ideas entering the mix. There are also plenty of slightly boring but efficacious ideas floating around. What all of them have in common is a gut-felt understanding that a way to store electricity is necessary, if we are to meet the future with open arms and an optimist’s heart.
As improbable as it may seem, though we have been making and using electricity for nearly 150 years, there is still no way to put it aside for later use. One can’t loan a cup of watts to a neighbor who is short a few to bake a cake. One can’t fill barrels with the stuff and then load these onto train cars or ocean-going tankers and ship them across continents or overseas. Imagine, if some of that way-too-much wind power from the Columbia River Gorge could be packaged up and sent by rail or interstate to West Virginia where coal still fuels 98 percent of the local power plants. There it could sit in a warehouse until it was needed and then this nicely aged green power could be emptied into the local substation and sent on its way. It could be a year, or thirty years, later, and the electricity would be just as fresh as when it was plucked from the air. As odd as it sounds, this is precisely how oil and coal work today. It doesn’t matter when or where they were extracted, and it doesn’t matter how long it takes for us to get around to using them. They can wait. Time, the crippling, confounding factor in electricity production, is almost not a factor at all when thinking about the other things we use to fuel our world.
Most of us, when we think about storage, think first of batteries, but though batteries may be good for bringing electricity with you, they have not, until recently, been very good for storing power at grid scale. At the moment there is only one battery on our grid: a 22,000-square-foot, 1,300-ton nickel-cadmium battery that was built outside Fairbanks in 2003. This can supply 40 MW of power for about seven minutes, though it is most often used for twice as long at half the power. Though it does keep the lights on and heaters running for a bit, it isn’t exactly a backup-power system for the grid; it’s a stopgap that allows the local utility the necessary quarter of an hour that it takes to fire up their diesel generators. These then run the grid for the duration of the blackout. For the moment, this is both the biggest chemical means for storing electricity at “grid scale” and also the one with the longest duration. The rest of the meager means we do have for storing electric power for our grid are electrically driven mechanical processes that can be reversed to regenerate an electric current and these options are all limited by topography rather than technology.
For places with mountains, there is “pumped hydro.” It’s a sort of man-made dry lakebed near an existing hydroelectric dam. When there is too much water, whether run-off or rain, some of the electricity the dam makes is used to pump the excess water uphill, into a second reservoir, where it sits until additional power is needed, then this water is allowed to flow naturally downhill again passing through a set of turbines at the bottom to generate a “new” electric current.
Ninety-five percent of the electricity “stored” in the United States is guarded in this way—22 gigawatts’ worth or the equivalent of 2 percent of our national generating capacity. Pumped hydro works great in places with hills and dammed rivers. It’s less great in the prairie, swamp, or desert states. From Nevada all the way to Indiana, there are effectively none. And where the South flattens out, so, too, do the pumped hydro stations thin and disappear.
A couple of Gulf states do have something as useful for electricity storage as a hill near an existing reservoir. Alabama and Mississippi have salt domes. Starting just north of Mobile and stretching all the way under southern Mississippi are a warren of natural salt caverns long used for dumping toxic chemical waste. These can be just as profitably used to store compressed air. This is precisely what the CAES plant, in McIntosh, Alabama, does. When electricity is cheap or there is too much of it, usually at night, the excess is used to condense air and force it into these caverns. Then, during the day, when demand is high, the air is released. As it expands, or decompresses, it spins a turbine to regenerate an electric current. Unlike pumped hydro, however, this air isn’t storable indefinitely.
Compressed air is a twenty-four-hour affair. Electricity is used to “charge” the plant during off-peak hours, and decompressing air is used instead of coal to make electricity during peak demand the next day. Unlike a battery—the workings of which a compressed air plant mimics—the benefit of a mechanical rather than a chemical “charge-discharge” storage system is that it’s good pretty much indefinitely. The Alabama plant has been running this diurnal cycle, day in and day out, for twenty-five years (it was completed in 1991) with no appreciable loss in efficacy. There are no batteries in existence that can compete with this, though “flow” batteries—a grail many feel is worth questing for—seem to hold the promise of almost twenty years of rechargeability. Flow batteries are, if rumors are correct, only a year or two in the future.
Another even more recent stab at energy storage has come in the form of concentrating solar towers. In the United States we have two of these, both in Southern California, with a third nearly complete in Nevada. Similar to pumped hydro and compressed air, concentrating solar towers employ a battery-style logic. An array of mirrors is situated in a sunny place, usually a desert, with all of their angles adjusted such that their individual beams of sunlight are directed at a looming central tower filled with something rather like table salt, which liquefies at right around 530 degrees Fahrenheit.
The first two months after the plant is turned on, all the force of the sun is needed just to melt the salt; after that it remains liquid, its temperature rising and falling with the diurnal cycle. The sun’s daytime heat is stored in the liquid salt until needed, and then that heat is used to boil water, which drives a normal steam turbine to generate electricity.
If pumped storage can hold “the potential to generate electricity” indefinitely, molten salt towers, like compressed air plants, work for only about twenty-four hours. Solar trough plants, some of which also have molten salt storage, are good for about six hours of power production after the sun sets. This may seem like a brief period, but in solar-powered states, six hours is all that is necessary to get everyone home from work, fed, TV’ed, and into bed. At this point electricity use plummets and molten salt becomes a little too cool to continue to do much good. There are currently eight solar trough plants in the United States. Six are in the Southwest, split unevenly between California, Arizona, and Nevada, and half of these, including the big ones (over 250 MW), have come online since 2013.
That’s about it. Grid-scale storage, an element we need in order to integrate significant variable generation into the grid and to deal with our market proclivities for selling and shipping electricity as if it were a regular commodity, is limited to this: some artificial lakes, one compressed air plant, three molten salt towers, eight solar trough plants, and a lot of dreams about batteries. Each of the existing systems is a custom-designed one-off. We may be able to store electricity for all of southern Alabama, but we can’t yet do it for the few solar facilities that make the meager 0.8 percent of that state’s power. Yet we are going to need dispatchable electricity at a grand scale if we are to have any hope of even approaching the goals set during the 2015 Paris climate change talks and similar sorts national and international of conversations. These include: “Eliminate burning fuels wherever possible in favor of using electricity” and “Generate electricity with clean power sources—such as wind and solar—and eliminate coal- and gas-fired power plants.” And we need dispatchability and probably storage now, at a smaller scale, so that the one technology that people actually seem to love—the solar panels—can be a part of the renewable-energy revolution we are more globally attempting to bring to pass.
People like to imagine this will be a battery but it needn’t be. In fact, limiting our imagination in this way from the start is probably the worst thing we can do as we move into the twenty-first century. As the anthropologist Akhil Gupta reminds us: “We need to reimagine electricity use in the future that does not simply seek to extend patterns in the present.” Rooftop solar forces our hand in this regard. The solar revolution is already well under way, and its particular failings (namely, solar’s diurnal cycle, its minute-to-minute jitter, and its tendency to overload the grid at noontime) are pushing us right now toward a broader imagination of “other possible electric futures” for storage, for more efficient design of everything from house walls to clothes dryers, as much as how, where, for whom, and by whom electricity gets made.
Hawaii is neither the sunniest place in the United States nor the most cloudless. But it’s sunny enough, and its electricity rates are high enough, that solar power generating capacity in the state has doubled every year since 2005. Hawaii now has the second-highest penetration of rooftop solar in the country (after Arizona) and the quickest payback on the investment anywhere. A home-owned rooftop solar system in Hawaii will pay for itself in just about four years—or faster than a car loan. Part of this is because Hawaii is the only state in the nation that still makes its electricity from oil, floated over on tankers from the mainland, and thus has electric rates more than twice that of any other state and almost three and a half times the national average. This extra-expensive electric power, in a mid-ocean archipelago where most things already cost more than in the contiguous states, is part of what has convinced Hawaiians to opt for rooftop solar. More than 12 percent of them now have panels on their roofs. And these privately owned, rooftop-mounted solar systems on bright sunny days often produce more than 100 percent of the State’s electricity needs.
FIG 5 Solar production and electricity consumption vary over the course of a day. From noon to about five P.M. solar, in some states, can produce more than the electricity consumed by everyone plugged into the grid. Without a means of storing or using the excess, this bounty makes little impact on the needs of utility customers during all the other hours of the day. (Reproduced with permission from the Edison Foundation Institute for Electric Innovation, “Value of the Grid to DG Customers” IEE Issue Brief October 2013. http://www.edisonfoundation.net/iee/Documents/IEE_ValueofGridtoDGCustomers_Sept2013.pdf)
This “more than 100 percent” of daytime demand is the number to keep in mind when people cite national statistics regarding solar power production. It is true that nationally 0.6 percent of the electricity on our grid is currently made from solar, but this aggregate hides local truths (and worse, in many places, it doesn’t include the power made by home owners at all but only the solar from big, corporately owned plants). In certain densely populated sunny places, like Hawaii and Phoenix and likely soon the whole of the L.A. basin, privately owned solar feeding the grid provides up to and, at times, more than the daytime electricity needs of local people, factories, and businesses. As with wind power (at 5 percent nationally) local developments in small solar are more indicative of problems that still lurk on the horizon for most of America than they are of “national” realities, produced from aggregate statistics.
Though privately owned, all the electric power made by rooftop systems, everywhere in America (including Hawaii), is fed by law back into the public grid. These aren’t private power systems; they are tiny public power plants that function, effectively, like a big power plant in shards, its many megawatts made in 10-kilowatt packages by any private citizen willing to foot the initial investment. Each roof a power plant, not for the house it sits upon, but for all of us. Their power feeds the grid every bit as much as a centralized coal-burning plant or a hydroelectric dam. And these small producers are using power from the grid too, at night, when there is no sun, on cloudy days and even minute to minute as the electricity their panels produce runs in little jagged peaks and troughs out of the panels and into our common set of wires.
Here is how it works. A home or business owner, considering the empty and non-profitable space of her roof, calls a panel company, which comes out and waves something rather like an iPad-on-a-stick around on top of the house and from this determines what portion of the roof would need to be covered in photovoltaic cells in order to offset actual electricity use. Then they offer a package that spreads the cost of these panels over a set period of time, in the neighborhood of 240 months. This rate per month is designed to zero out a panel owner’s electricity bill, and it is usually about what a customer was paying to their utility to start with. The main difference is that like a mortgage this rate is invariable and, critically, it isn’t paid to the utility. The money rather goes to the panel company or, in certain cases, to the bank. Most often what this package includes is the panels, installation costs, another meter, a DC/AC converter box, and maintenance. It could also include a big battery or some smart appliances, but for the moment it does not. Then, in theory and often also in practice, once the panels are up they feed roughly the same amount of electricity into the grid over the course of a year that the house or business pulls out of the grid over the same period.
The numbers might not cancel each other out day to day, what with clouds and weak winter sunlight, but over the long term the amount of power in and power out is structured to be more or less equal. The electric bill, always a tricky bit of documentation to understand and an impossible one to control, is thus nullified, and the only thing the home owner has to come up with at the end of the month is a known, mortgage-like payment to the panel company.
As it has been engineered by the panel providers and the electric company this decision is neither one of increasing energy security nor of greening home electricity consumption. Rather it comes down to dollars and cents. Will it be cheaper over the next quarter of a century to have solar panels or not to have them? The answer, quite often, is yes. If the angle of your roof is good and there aren’t too many trees or tall buildings around, it will. Especially given the tax credits and rebate systems currently in place.
This turn toward economic rationality and away from ideological points of argumentation for solar has caused a lot of people in America who don’t think much about the environment to adopt home solar systems. While those who do care about making the world a better place by making power differently were always an easy sell. Together, the two groups have contributed to a 1,500 percent jump in solar panel sales since 2009, and not just in the Southwest or on tropical islands. The Live Free or Die states in the Northeast are also proving to be rapid adopters of rooftop solar despite not having anything like the sun of their fairer-weather brethren. Even without perfect conditions, residents in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts are betting that they can still have a smaller monthly energy bill with solar than without. Maybe not in the twenty-teens, but certainly over the long haul. Electric bills, after all, have a tendency to go up, while the monthly payment on the panels is guaranteed not to.
Another pocketbook-driven cause for the massive jump in the amount of solar in the United States in the past five years is that the price of very good panels has fallen by half. This is largely due to incentives to Chinese producers for the German and Japanese markets, but the United States has been happy to get in on the boom times. As the price of panels goes down, paying for grid-provided electricity becomes less and less appealing to home owners of moderate to substantial means, especially in places where big-grid electricity is expensive (such as Hawaii) and in civilizational pockets where consuming locally produced products is part of the local cultural ethos (such as Vermont or North Carolina).
Had more electric companies gotten into the solar panel business earlier, this switch from paying a utility bill to paying a 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 the 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. People without panels end up paying much higher utility bills to maintain the infrastructure that the people with panels still use every day (as they pump electricity into the grid) and every night (as they draw electricity down from it). They use the system, we all do, but grid maintenance is left on the shoulders of the remaining ratepayers. And though this isn’t fair, utility attempts to get reasonable line access fees or standby fees (that allow solar panel owners to use grid-provided electricity when their systems fail) passed in states with high solar penetration have foundered. For years the utilities used these same rate structures, set at exorbitant levels, as well as fees of every imaginable sort—like demanding thousands of dollars just to read the applications of wannabe solar power producers—to keep home panel owners from entering the market at all. State legislatures thus don’t trust the utilities not to take a mile if granted an inch, and they deny them any access to rates or fees that might be manipulated to reduce alternative power generation.
It used to be the case that the nonadopters of rooftop solar were renters, or people of such modest means that even if they did own their homes they did not have the resources to buy panels. These, the poorest and most transient members of our population, were stuck with their utility, and so they were also stuck footing the bill for the rest of us.
This loophole was soon closed, however, with solar panel leasing programs, which now account for 75 percent of the rooftop solar in Southern California and 85 percent in Arizona and with solid inroads in the Nevada and Utah markets. Now anyone without a mountain of debt and with a roof can rent the panels and still pay less than their normal monthly electric bill. For their part, community organizations are helping to fund opt-in installations for apartment dwellers and encouraging developers to build rental units with the panels already installed. The lease, or the loan, is then folded into the cost of renting the space.
The true owner of the panels is the company from which they are leased and they cover all installation, maintenance, and equipment costs in exchange for the right to collect state and federal renewable energy subsidies. They also receive payments from the customer over the life of the lease. Everybody wins. Except people with bad credit, unstable jobs, or transient lives. Except the utility. Except the grid.
The ever-shrinking number of grid-only-electricity customers are rightly irate. The cost of maintaining our grid in common, the grid we all still use twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, is now on their backs. Because rooftop solar installations don’t take people off the grid, and they aren’t transforming individual homes into islandable nanogrids or neighborhoods into discrete, sustainable microgrids. Indeed just the opposite. Distributed solar causes the once “somewhere” of electricity production to start to look a lot like the more familiar “everywhere” of electricity consumption. But while electricity is increasingly made everywhere and also used everywhere the grid still stands as it long has between production and consumption; it still interconnects us all.
The grid as a common infrastructure is what makes distributed solar possible. And, because we don’t have a way to store any of the electricity these home systems are making, distributed solar is flooding the grid with electricity, at least for part of the day, while starving it of money.
All of this new activity is happening on the bit of the grid designed for distribution—the low-voltage wires slung between homes and pole tops in residential neighborhoods. Ironically, this is also the weakest part of the system, the most likely to give way, and the least well kept up. Between the 1950s and 1980s, outages increased modestly, from two to five significant outages each year, compared with 76 in 2007 and a whopping 307 in 2011. Almost all of these more recent blackouts, much like the big East Coast blackout of 2003, started and propagated on underfunded distribution networks.
Meanwhile transmission systems—those long high-voltage lines that stretch between distant power plants where electricity was once solely made and the urban centers where it is still mostly used—are much less prone to outages. This is in part because of their simplicity and their height. It’s harder for a tree to fall on a line 110 feet in the air. Their relative reliability is also the result of substantial commitment to upkeep over the past fifteen years. Since 2001, investment in high-voltage transmission infrastructure has held steady at about 7 percent a year, while investment in low-voltage distribution networks, including smart meters, is below the necessary threshold for basic maintenance.
One analyst nicely summed up this industrywide care for long-distance wires when all the new activity, and the stressors that come with it, is happening on local, tightly woven, short distance wires, saying: “A continued reliance on centralized generation and the relative fragility of high-voltage transmission lines is completely out of alignment with the growing acknowledgment amongst regulators, political leaders, and industry that grid resiliency is not addressed in this way.”
A recent special report in the Economist took it one step further. As a result of the veritable explosion in rooftop solar, “the power grid is becoming far more complicated. It increasingly involves sending power at low voltages over short distances, using flexible arrangements: the opposite of the traditional model.”
The grid, in other words, is changing. We, the people, are changing it. The utilities, so long the only game in town, are not keeping up. It’s not just a question of correct investment, it’s also about thinking on their toes. They don’t. As a result lighter, quicker competitors, some of which are companies, many of which are just regular folks, are running circles around the traditional utilities. Though the situation in the United States is dire, in many parts of Europe, and in Germany most especially, the crash that experts fear here has already happened. While we talk about the utility death spiral—where renewables ruin the grid by putting the utilities out of business—as something that might still be avoided, something that large-scale and small-scale electricity storage might stave off, in Western Europe it has already begun.
In 2013 Germany’s two largest utilities lost a collective $6 billion as many of that country’s corporate entities g0t off the grid altogether. In the United States we raise electricity prices on poor and transient populations (people who don’t own houses, mostly); in Germany, however, they raise rates on businesses and manufactories. The companies are the ones being asked to foot the bill for the expansion of renewable generation across all sectors. As a result, they have begun to walk away from grid-provided electricity entirely. They can do this because unlike renters, German companies have the capital to build themselves private plants. If, in 2013, 16 percent of German companies were already energy self-sufficient, this was 50 percent more than the previous year, and another 23 percent were actively investing in a near future defection.
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 the remaining customers, who then have even more incentive to become self-sufficient.”
Meanwhile, utilities are stuck with a bunch of stranded assets. Those big, expensive power plants the utilities built throughout the twentieth century aren’t needed much, if at all, anymore. They are still being paid off, however, even if they are largely inactive. Much like all those unfinished nuclear cooling towers that dotted the American landscape in the early 1980s, big fossil fuel power plants, in Germany as in Hawaii or Arizona, stand as a testament to massive investment in the wrong path. The CEO of the German utility REW, who has been charged with overseeing his company’s collapse, admitted that the utility invested too heavily in fossil fuel plants at a time when it should have been thinking about renewables. “I grant we have made mistakes,” he said. “We were late entering into the renewables market—possibly too late.” All of this, he continued, adds up to “the worst structural crisis in the history of energy supply.”
If variable generation is bad for the grid, then distributed, renewable generation is worse. If utilities have been slow to adapt to a customer base at long last given a modicum of control over their bill, then government actions, mostly in the form of subsidies that support ever-increasing renewable generation goals, have transformed utilities into dinosaurs. In 2015 the utilities are lumbering remnants of a twentieth-century way of doing things. And though many are now scrambling to find new ways of generating revenue, they are hamstrung at every moment by a regulatory structure that impedes quick changes and trial balloons.
One thing is clear: American utility companies cannot maintain the transmission and distribution systems on our grid by charging customers solely for how much electricity they individually consume. Customers, homeowners as well as industrial concerns, want to use less power, want to make more power (and get paid for it), and want the grid to make these things possible. New modes of billing will need to be developed (and some are already in the works) but because utilities don’t set their prices or develop their billing schemes themselves, all of this work must pass through a regulatory bureaucracy, and in some places also through a state’s legislature. As such, easy fixes are all but impossible to come by. What is perhaps most surprising about all of this is the degree to which the conversation about solutions to the revenue problem are only just getting started. It is as if the utilities woke up one chilly morning in 2014 and realized that their ship was about to be sunk.
All of this would also be playing out differently if only there was a way for the utilities to put some of this locally made solar power and farm-made wind power aside for evenings and winters, calm and cloudy days. Finding a way to store electricity so that it is there to be used when we need it is at the top of every ideologue’s list. This is true whether one wants to save the big grid or replace fossil fuels entirely with 100 percent renewable generation; whether one wants to chop the existing grid into overlapping, interlinking microgrids, or just create a universe of islands in which every enterprise has a private grid and every home is an isolate. While different visions of our collective future produce a need for different kinds and scales of storage, they all rely upon electric storage of one form or another. As a result, if one can look beyond the battery, the work being done on this front is both prodigious and intensely imaginative.
I saw a man in Stuttgart proposing “buried” hydro in place of “pumped” hydro storage for the Germans. Pumped hydro is impracticable in Germany because the citizenry like their mountain valleys for tourist activities and dwelling places. Instead, he suggested, a great mass of earth could be perforated all the way around, a bunch of giant O-rings installed under it, and then excess electricity be used to pump water down into the earth, raising this “plug” of land up to 275 feet high. Imagine, perfectly cylindrical artificial mountains rising up in the middle of fertile German plains. He’d done the math and he was serious. These pistons of bedrock would then be allowed to sink, with gravity, pushing the water out again and through a standard turbine to create electricity when needed, using essentially the same physics as regular pumped hydro storage.
Closer to home, there is a grand plan afoot in the West that would hook up compressed-air storage in Utah to wind farms in Wyoming and then, using an existing high-voltage line from the more southern installation, to send power to Los Angeles—a line that is becoming available because the last coal plant it was designed to serve will be retired in 2027. The line will be serviceable but empty; the salt caves, prepared and treated to hold natural gas, will also be empty (the shortages of that substance proved a fleeting fear), while the fierce bluster of wind across Wyoming will at long last be harvestable for an urban population dense enough to make use of it. This project shimmers with the future-possible. It is practicable, like the basalt land plug, but far further along in the permitting and funding process. It will gather its monies from a mix of private investors, government subsidies for kooky but viable ideas (called ARPA-E), and state and federal funds set aside for infrastructural upgrade.
The feasibility of these kinds of big, better-than-a-battery projects is not dependent upon scientific ingenuity so much as the difficult process of translating ideas through real-world bureaucratic and cultural systems, gathering both money and support along the way. All too often the inventors of the next big thing are so focused on the fact that they have found the grail that they forget how hard it is to materialize and then sell it. A great many potential solutions to our grid’s problems have been sketched out on company drawing boards, all of them capable of radically changing how we make, use, and even store the power we need in order to live and prosper. The only ones that matter, however, are those capable of moving from sketch to prototype, from prototype to extant, and from extant to ubiquitous. It turns out that the more land to be disrupted and the more visibly unusual that disruption, the harder it is to move even a brilliant project (like the basalt plugs) off the drawing board and into our common landscape.
To get from here, where we have an immediate problem of too much variable generation, to there, where we can use this “too much” to help us get off of fossil fuels entirely, will involve a lot of small steps in more or less the same direction. And because change, especially of this scale, makes people nervous, it turns out that the storage solutions winning the minuet toward the future are the ones that either don’t look “infrastructural” at all (like repurposed salt caverns) or those that at the very least mimic the infrastructural forms of things we are already comfortable with, like how pumped hydro storage looks like, and is, just another reservoir. The closer new projects of infrastructural revolution come to more populous areas and the more they stand out, the more stringent resistance on all fronts becomes.
This invisibility, or capacity to disappear into the given, is also a part of what storage needs to accomplish in order to succeed, not physically so much as culturally. And mimicking familiar urban “skins” seems to hold a great deal of promise for the adoption of new electricity-storage technologies, both large and small. Three familiar forms are getting most of the attention from consumers and the press; these are the air conditioner, the office tower, and the car.
Let us begin with the little one. Air-conditioning, as we well know, is the grid’s true nemesis. If the grid were a James Bond movie, the air conditioner would play the villain. A subtle madness in its eye as the planetary weather warms and as climate-controlled spaces become increasingly normal, air-conditioning bides its time. It is waiting for that moment when we all, of our own accord, fire it up and the need for electricity now shoots through the roof, the whole grid sagging, cracking under the weight of our collective demand. No true Bond villain could hope for a more nefarious outcome.
Everywhere, and often inefficient, air-conditioning is finally being replaced in some places by an ingenious, if old-school, energy-storage device—an icebox that uses electricity during the middle of the night to make ice and then blows hot daytime air over that same ice during peak demand hours. Where an electromechanical air conditioner, the kind most of us use, employs electricity to move hot air over a refrigerant to be cooled and dehumidified the icebox uses a fan to blow hot outside air over ice. By this means the air is “conditioned,” as the ice melts and returns to water (ready to be refrozen the next night) and the edifice to which the unit is attached is kept at a comfortable temperature during even the hottest hours of the hottest days. All of this is accomplished using about the same amount of daytime electricity as a ceiling fan. It’s an icebox and, effectively, also an electricity box—nighttime electricity stored in the form of ice.
Of all the recently introduced means for storing electricity on a small scale, the Ice Bear energy storage system, as it is called, is the only one that has really taken off. Homeowners buy it, subdivision developers invest in it, and manufactories, businesses, and even data centers mount it. This icebox, graceful in thought if familiarly clunky in form, is a winner.
Radical innovation, in wide deploy, ends here. All of the rest of the mainstream dreams, and the biggest investments in realizing these dreams in the twenty-teens, come back to the battery, though it is often quite cleverly disguised as other things. If in 2010, before distributed solar really took off, the storage field was wide open, filled with fantasies of giant flywheels; networked, smart hot water heaters; expandable hydrogen-filled balloons; and hyper-heat-absorbing ceramic tiles, the wonders of this brief early moment of grail dreaming is now radically circumscribed. Batteries were not so very long ago a minor part of a wide-ranging conversation about storage. They were not even in the top tier of not-very-good options because they were too unwieldy and expensive. The chemistry of the best of them was insanely toxic to manufacture and to dispose of, and many depended on rare earth elements found almost exclusively in China. The limited rechargeability of early twenty-first-century batteries and their precursors was simply not sufficient to merit the initial investment. All of this changed with the rise of practicable, affordable lithium-ion batteries, which have since 2010 taken over both the market and the imagination. A conversation about storage today is 85 percent a conversation about present-day and future battery technologies and 15 percent a conversation about weird ideas that somebody made work once, someplace suspect, like Alberta.
An interesting success story is a newly purchased, though not yet built, storage facility just south of L.A., in Long Beach, California, which when complete will house the world’s largest electrochemical battery. Not that any casual passerby will notice, because this megabattery is being built to look almost exactly like an office building. Parts of it will even function like an office building, but for the most part it will just be thousands upon thousands of stacked lithium-ion batteries, capable of generating up to 400 MW of electricity (though it can run at this rate for only four hours). And though it might look like an office building to us, from the grid’s point of view it might as well be a normal gas-fired power station.
This project maintains one of the distinct advantages of batteries over the other kinds of mechanical, or even chemical, storage on the market: namely, it can be scaled up or down by the millisecond, useful for balancing out the power generated by solar and wind being pumped into the grid by all those rooftop panel owners and wind farm conglomerates. It fails, however, on another front. Like a salt cave, or a pumped hydro reservoir, this massive office tower is not a portable storage device. It’s stuck where it is. As such, it fails to capitalize on the other distinct advantage of the battery. It’s not just that they can be scaled, it’s that they can be moved. A battery and a barrel of oil are not, in this regard, so very different. Even less so when they are (each in their own way) inserted under the hood of a car.
Batteries, despite their ability to produce electricity on call, don’t actually have electricity inside them, instead they are full of chemicals. Under the right conditions these chemicals can be coaxed into a reaction that causes chemistry to produce electricity. In order to work, each of a battery’s two “terminals” has to be made from a different kind of metal separated by an electrolyte. Any number of things can serve as an electrolyte, from soda pop or a potato to sulfuric acid or even ceramic, though various kinds of salts and acids generally work best. Regardless of which electrolyte and which metals one chooses, a battery works because positive ions move in one direction through the electrolyte, effectively peeling off infinitesimal bits of the metal from one pole and sticking them to the other. Electrons simultaneously move in the opposite direction. Alessandro Volta, who made the first battery in 1799, used stacked copper and zinc plates as his metals, each separated by paper soaked in brine (the electrolyte). A nickel-cadmium battery uses nickel oxide hydroxide and metallic cadmium as its terminals (metals), and potassium hydroxide serves as its electrolyte. And one kind of lithium ion battery—there are many chemistries in play for this type of battery—uses lithium metal and manganese dioxide separated by lithium salts. What is important is that the whole process is a circle: as ions speed across the electrolyte, electrons travel across a conductor. Without the wire giving the electrons someplace to go, the ions don’t move much, and vice versa.
FIG 6 A familiar-looking battery, in which one metal (here, zinc) is used to construct the case and the other (here, graphite) runs through the core of the device. These are separated by an electrolyte and a porous spacer through which positively charged ions can travel with ease. To draw power from a battery it must be wired into a circuit—its positive and negative poles connected by a wire—like those shown in Fig 2. (Loïc Untereiner)
This is why a battery can be made, sit in a package for years (though not indefinitely), and still be useful when popped into your TV remote or hearing aid or electric car. Though it won’t work forever; the electrolyte solution will get tired, and as one of the metals is slowly eaten away while the other grows heavier, the battery lags and then ceases to work at all. A rechargeable battery reverses the direction of flow, using electricity from an outside source to move most (but not all) of the ions and accretions back to the other side, where they will be ready to flow back again when conditions demand.
The components of a battery, both metallic and electrolytic, are quite flexible. Different combinations of elements, however, give different results. Some produce more, or more constant, power, some last longer, some are lighter, others recharge more effectively. Every battery on the market is a compromise between price, toxicity, reactivity, and weight. There are some very effective, very poisonous batteries, and some great not so poisonous batteries that are insanely expensive because one element is rare, and there are some cheap nontoxic batteries that don’t produce much power. A “revolution” in battery technology thus is less about inventing a new way for a battery to work than about tweaking any number of relationships between metals and electrolytes.
Lithium-ion batteries offer a particularly appealing mix of accessible and affordable materials with longevity, the fast, even release of stored power, and lightness. Initially, lithium-ion batteries were used mostly to power small computing devices like smart phones (in the early days, as one might recall, they had a tendency to cause laptops to burst into flame), but as time passed and we got better at making them, they got smaller, lighter, safer, and longer-lasting. Like their brethren, lithium-ion batteries can be bundled, and thus a lot of them can be used to store more electricity than just a few. It is now possible to drive a sports car or even a fancy sedan that runs entirely on lithium-ion batteries.
Newly on the market, and not yet in wide deployment, though it has generated significant buzz, is a home-sized lithium-ion battery storage system made by Tesla Motors that follows the same basic principles as the battery they put under the hoods of their cars. Called the Powerwall, it is both a practical and bizarrely lovely device. As if someone who specialized in 1950s refrigerator design was asked to picture the future of electricity, circa 2015. Very shiny and offered in an array of colors, the Powerwall, like Tesla’s cars, was meant to be a crowd-pleaser. No longer will off-the-grid types need a basement lined with old-style, acid-leaky automotive batteries in order to watch TV in the evenings.
The promise of the Powerwall lies in its ability to change things for those of us on the grid, in two distinct ways. First, an affordable, long-lasting, easy-to-use home-battery system might enable solar power producers to keep their excess daytime electricity for nighttime use, rather than asking the grid, and the utility, to deal with both their over- and underproduction. Second, the utilities are exhibiting true hints of interest for using a mass of deployed, distributed battery systems as grid-scale storage. Vermont’s Green Mountain Power will be offering Powerwalls to customers at a very reasonable price (about forty dollars a month) if the customer agrees to share the battery’s storage capacities with the utility. It will serve as host to both homemade power and grid-made power, for rainy days and long, dark nights.
Many people who care about grid reform don’t see electric cars as cars so much as great big batteries on wheels. Customers, when contemplating the purchase of an electric vehicle, tend to care about its capacity to move them speedily and reliably from one place to another. The grid guys, on the other hand, see an ingenious form of storage that doesn’t rely upon the quirks of geology or climate, that blends seamlessly into its environment, and that can be made to work for tiny grid imbalances as well as big ones. For pumped hydro storage you need hills, for molten salt storage you need some serious sun, and for compressed-air storage you need salt caverns or similarly carved-out features. But a battery doesn’t need to be any place in particular to work. The mobility of batteries, together with their scalability and relative effectiveness, has always been their charm.
With electric car batteries, if there were enough of them and if they were designed to both give to and take from the power grid (a capacity called V2G, for “vehicle-to-grid-enabled”) peak load could be smoothed out to a gentle rise at the workday’s end and variable generation might be balanced easily and thoroughly. Balancing solar in particular, which tends to export jitter to the grid every time a cloud passes overhead, tends to be an energy neutral process. Even in areas with a high penetration of rooftop solar over the course of a day the grid needs about as much energy in as it is capable of providing (out). As a result, a car’s charge will stay about the same. With car batteries backing up the grid, we could have more green power, fewer polluting backup power plants, and no robocalls asking us to switch off the AC on the summer’s hottest days. Rooftop solar could make all the power for desert and tropical metropolises without sinking the utility, overwhelming the grid, or causing the dreaded “solar duck conundrum” (more on which in a moment). These cars with their often-idle battery packs can be engineered to support and stabilize the grid by making their electric charge available whenever they are parked and plugged in. Even better, in only ten to fifteen years, expert predicters now forecast, most of us will be riding around in cars that drive themselves. These, too, it seems, will be electric.
Big “peak demand” shortages are not, however, energy neutral processes. In order to absorb the bump in demand that comes at the workday’s end, without firing up any new power plants, all the cars—and there would need to be a lot of them—would be drained a lot. Not all the way, obviously, because then you wouldn’t be able to drive home. And, with enough cars, no one battery would bear anything like the brunt of the drain. This solution to peak demand sounds a little like Marxism. Each car, never exploited, gives to the grid according to its ability while remaining available to the grid to take from according to its need. Together, all our cars keep our common electrical system strong. And the grid, with their help, can at long last balance itself. Upgrades, maintenance, and necessary investments to keep it smart will still need to be done, but the cars, as integrated, dispersed, deployable storage, would go a long way toward increasing both the reliability and the efficiency of the infrastructure as a whole.
Like any good vision for a more perfect future this one is not without solid grounding in the facts of the matter. A normal car, Dr. Gorguinpour, Director of Transformational Innovation to the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisitions, explains, is a “very poorly used asset,” functioning for maybe 3 to 5 percent of its useful life. If you have a vehicle that is plugged into the grid and provides energy back to the grid whenever it’s not in use, “now suddenly your asset utilization is 95 to 97 percent. It’s basically not being used as either an energy resource or a mobility resource when you are getting it fixed.”
Better still, cars are used the least at night. The mass adoption of electric vehicles would thus help to provide a significant nighttime load that could be discharged during daytime hours when these same vehicles are sitting in parking lots. In addition to helping establish nighttime load, peak shaving, and helping control jitter—those tiny second-to-second shifts in quantity and quality of electricity on the grid—the widespread deployment of car batteries would allow us to integrate as many renewables as we wanted: the cars would hold the excess energy these systems make until it was needed, at which point the grid would automatically suck that power back out.
This would be a boon most especially in places with a significant penetration of rooftop solar and where there also happen to be a lot of cars. Every solar-powered city in the desert suffers from a particular problem—the inevitability of dusk. From the moment the sun rises, its rays shine down hot, powerful, and as productive as can be. The solar panels that, from above, in some places seem to have painted the city in glass make efficient, clean electricity by the megawatt. The city runs. All is well. Until dusk.
This moment has always been difficult for the utilities because it’s when “everything is on.” Some people are still at work and lots of people are already home. Now add to this jump in demand a radical fall in supply. The sun is going down and with it a precipitous fall in generation just as demand is rising with equal ferocity. This evening peak is much harder for a utility to deal with when the sun is powering more than about 25 percent of the grid.
“For an illustration look at Hawaii,” writes the Economist. “On a typical sunny day the panels on consumers’ rooftops produce so much electricity that the grid does not need to buy any power from the oil fired generators that have long supplied the American State. But in the morning and the evening those same consumers turn to the grid for extra electricity. The result is a demand profile that looks like a duck’s back, rising at the tail and neck and dipping in the middle.”
It is no longer the owl of Minerva that flies at dusk, but the solar duck which rears its ugly head as the sun fades away into darkness.
To solve this new kind of curve, the utility doesn’t need twenty-four or even twelve hours of storage capacity; they need about six hours’ worth to get them from four P.M. to ten P.M., when people start slowly trickling off to bed. Southern California Edison is hedging even this six-hour storage window a bit with its four hours of battery-in-an-office-tower storage. Most new solar trough plants also often include a modest level of molten salt storage, about six hours’ worth, precisely because this is all you need to lop the tail off the duck.
The cars, however, would equally calm this curve. Forty-one percent of the electricity we use in the United States is used by buildings. If an electric car, which is essentially a big battery on wheels, were to make itself available to whatever building it happens to be adjacent to, be it a home or an office building, the owners of this structure would not need to invest in their own storage, nor would the owners of the grid. Demand shifts with people, so that as individuals leave work and drive home they take their electricity box with them. They are now using no power in the office (because they aren’t there anymore) but lots of power at the house. That’s fine, because the car is plugged in exactly where it is needed. As the battery runs dry in the late evening, household demand is also dropping as everyone is turning off their machines before trundling off to bed. Simultaneously electricity prices are dropping at which point the car begins to charge itself back up for the morning commute.
Notice that though electricity in this scenario is still public, storage has been thoroughly privatized. The utilities don’t own the storage. Because you bought the car, you do. Electric cars thus also help solve the problem of who will pay for stabilizing our grid. People who own cars will. In the United States the proposed means for dealing with this oddity of privately owned, modular infrastructure is the “money for nothing” scheme. Utilities will credit you time-of-day rates for the wattage they suck from your car during the day and you will pay, theoretically lower, time-of-day rates when you recharge it, usually at night or during moments of over generation of renewables at whatever time of day. In this way, owning an electric car becomes like owning a little money factory. All you have to do is make sure it’s always plugged in and the algorithms do the rest. At the end of the month you get a check in the mail. This admittedly has a certain appeal. It’s also largely the same system that led to the rampant adoption of rooftop solar. You make electricity and either pay nothing or get a tiny check every so often from the utility that is buying it from you. It’s a good investment. And, up till now, it doesn’t work.
Denmark, which currently has 53.4 percent renewable energy on its grid, with a goal of 100 percent wind power by 2050, is also looking hard for a storage solution. Initially they bet heavily on the cars. The incentives were different, though equally well matched to the cultural and economic particularities of the place. First, if you bought an electric car you paid no taxes on the purchase. Normally, the Danes tax a new car at 100 percent, so buying electric was essentially the same as getting your new car at half price. But people still balked at the prospect. They complained, wisely, that if the battery is being drained and filled all day, every day, it isn’t likely to last very long. In response the state instituted a battery swap system, so that whenever a car battery ceased performing up to spec, any Danish electric car owner could have their old battery pulled out and a new one dropped in for free at a filling station. In this way the battery is good for the life of the car.
Like the American scheme, this was also a good idea and it also didn’t work, in part because neither the cars nor the batteries were good enough yet. According to the Danish climate minister (yes, they have one of these), the cars themselves are not ready: “We need longer range and lower prices before this becomes a good option,” he said. “Technology needs to save us.” Even at half the price, the Danes didn’t want to buy a crappy car with a short range and a long charge time—imagine, you stop on the interstate to refill your car battery and it takes six hours. And, given how tiny Denmark is, what assurance is there that when their car battery dies in neighboring Germany or Sweden, gas stations there will be obliged to perform the required swap as quickly and at the same (zero) cost? Technology may be one problem, but so are borders beyond the bounds of which different laws apply and different incentives hold sway. This is as true of California as it is of Denmark. People don’t want a car that forces them to stick close to home, no matter how good that car might be for the environment, the grid, or their pocketbook.
Add to this that if the vehicle-to-grid system is going to work as promised, all electric cars would have to be plugged in whenever parked. This makes for a massive investment in infrastructural rebuilding. How do you get a charging station into every spot of a cement parking structure without tearing the thing down and rebuilding it? What about on-street parking? Or private garages? If it’s hard to persuade citizens to bear the brunt of the cost of buying these cars for the good of the grid, it’s even more impossible to imagine convincing a city like Los Angeles to pay to wire itself up such that the grid is remade into a capillary-like system that permeates every place that any of their 8 million cars might come to rest. Wireless charging pads (or a similar device built into a nearby wall) might bring down the cost and increase the feasibility, but this technology too, while extant, is not yet ready for the mass market. Nor is it interoperable with the cars.
The expense and disruption of such an undertaking, given the current state of technology, would be epic. Even where most earnestly imagined, vehicle-to-grid storage systems aren’t being realized. In part because we aren’t buying the cars. (Norway being the exception, with almost 30 percent of 2015 sales being electric; even they are not yet deploying their wealth of batteries to the grid’s benefit.) In America to date, only 1 percent of the cars are plug-in electric vehicles (a whopping 3 percent in California). Of these, almost none are vehicle-to-grid-enabled. And the numbers shrink where they should rise: only about 0.5 percent of fleet vehicles—such as those run by the postal service, UPS, or any municipal government—are electric. The easiest way to begin operationalizing “V2G” technologies is to do it with fleets, all of which park together in the evenings, lessoning infrastructure costs for the installation of two-directional smart charging and also vastly simplifying the economics of figuring out how to pay a utility customer residing in one service area for the power she supplies to the grid, or takes from it, while parked in a different utility’s service area. Fleets should be the first adopters and yet, they aren’t.
If we are talking about the big grid, electric cars for storage remain every bit as much a dream as room temperature fusion for power production, or the air as a conduit for the long-distance, wireless electricity transmission. The world would be a better place if all these things did work. But, for the moment they don’t, at least not at the scale, or according to the terms we want them to.
Nevertheless, every concrete plan for the adoption of variable generation at a rate higher than 30 percent is premised in part upon the “fact” that we the people will be buying electric cars by the millions “in 30 years.” Perhaps we will be and perhaps we’ll be charging them with fusion, but for now we aren’t and we don’t. This holy grail retains its mass only in the minds of those struggling to build the better future in which we hope one day to reside.
As appealing and impossible as this vehicle-to-grid scenario seems for the big grid, it is turning out to be a lot more feasible for smaller ones. Not the greater Los Angeles Light and Power District, but the microgrid that is the Los Angeles Air Force Base; not Washington, D.C., but the microgrid that is Joint Base Andrews in nearby Maryland; not all of New Jersey, but the microgrid that is Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, just outside Hanover. The next time something like Superstorm Sandy hits the East Coast, Hanover will lose power, just as it always has, but the military is banking on the base, the town’s nearest neighbor, remaining fully, resiliently operational through a mix of microgrid technologies including solar panels, fuel cells, diesel generators, backup battery systems, and a small fleet of electric cars.
The military is in a unique position, for as it converts its U.S. bases and foreign forward command units into an archipelago of microgrids it comes to be not only the sole owner of all the electrical infrastructure in its domains, but also the sole owner of almost all the vehicles. In the field, converting all nontactical vehicles to battery power further reduces the supply chains for liquid fuel; at home this same transition makes their microgrids even more robust—in everyday use and in times of crisis. 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.
To date, only the Los Angeles Air Force Base has turned these ideas into workable technologies—though the same transition is planned for the other bases mentioned. So far in L.A. they have forty-two vehicles, some cars, some trucks, and a big van. Six of these are hybrids, but the other thirty-six “have the capability to direct power both to and from the electrical grid when they’re not being driven.” As such, it is, according to the air force’s Dr. Gorguinpour, “the largest operational V2G demonstration in the world.” Even these few vehicles can, in a pinch, provide more than 700 kilowatts of power to the grid (about 150 houses’ worth). Less dramatic is the underlying motivation for the project: “The vehicles enhance the power grid’s reliability and security by balancing demand against supply without having to use reserves or standby generators.”
The power grid here is both the air force’s power grid and our own. When islanded in times of crisis, it’s just their microgrid that will benefit directly from the balancing capacities of an electric vehicle fleet and the “unique” charging stations that allow these to feed into and draw down from the grid. Most of the time, however, their grid is indistinguishable from our own; technically speaking they are one in the same. The electricity they generate does not stay on the base; rather, it flows into the common power supply. And the balancing done by those thirty-six vehicles the 95 percent of the time that nobody is driving them is being done for the grid as a whole: Los Angeles benefits from the thirty-six, California benefits, the desert states of the Southwest benefit, and the sodden states of the Pacific Northwest benefit. The whole of the Western Interconnection is one system with many potential islands—more with each day that passes—and most days, none are islanded. The underlying texture of the macrogrid is changing, but in practice this has only minimal effects on its everyday operations. Most of the effects it does have, however, increase the reliability of this larger system rather than decreasing it.
Batteries, especially V2G-enabled car batteries, may not turn out to be the answer, despite the constancy of their hold over the minds of today’s dreamers. That we are looking hard for a grail, sketching out and even prototyping a lot of different ideas, is itself an acknowledgment that we stand at the edge of something. Not the end of an infrastructure, though it could go that far, but certainly at the beginning of a new century’s imagination of how that infrastructure might be adapted to suit us better.
Regardless of how one looks back at the twentieth century there is no way to imagine it without the gradual and complete adoption of electricity. There are other infrastructures, equally important, but as we slip from the industrial age into the age of information electricity’s place at the heart of our life and culture only increases. It is money, it is data, it is computing, it is algorithms so complex they begin to border on intelligence. Electricity powers this world, but it is also the means by which information constitutes it. The infrastructure we need to hold our present in place and allow for its increase is not the same grid that provided the twentieth century’s national uplift and union.
It is right, then, that we now live in the era of infrastructural dreaming and that these dreams would be centered around finding ways to unplug electricity from the system of wires and power plants leftover to us from the past. Storage, whatever forms it will take in the end, is not the holy grail because it helps to balance the grid we have (though this is the story we like to tell ourselves). It’s the holy grail because it allows us to build an electric world that functions otherwise, that has the flexibility to move and change with whatever the twenty-first century will throw at us. Or, more correctly, whatever remarkable, impossible things we will build into our own near future.
It may sound odd to advocate for giant hydroelectric storage pistons on German plains, but why not dream big? And dream diversely? Dreams, even ones sketched and prototyped, are the way of the future, the grail is its driver, and today’s entrepreneurs, and kooks, are not so unlike the inventors who, at the end of the 1800s, reached out and invited that future into the nation’s living rooms and offices, with some successes and many failures.
Batteries have their place in all of this, but it would an error to imagine that their centrality in our imaginations over the last five years will necessarily place them at the center of our twenty-first century grid. They might be. But then again, it—the grid itself—might not be. In all of this, it is only important to keep one’s eye on the grail. What are its parameters? What do we dream of ? What do we seek? And how will this thing, should we invent our way to it, change everything about the circumstances that gave rise to the dream to begin with? “The challenge right now,” architect John Keates enjoins us to consider, is that given that we don’t know the answer to what comes next, to also ask: “what are the ethics that we set for ourselves? And to be aware that when we venture out into untrodden territory, that we are able to ask that question and dare to act when there is no clear answer.” The dreamers and builders and kickstarters of electrical storage campaigns and components are doing an admirable job of this.