In German the word for an addict is not like our own. In English to be an addict is to have a totalizing identity, controlled by a “soul-destroying, mind-numbing obsession that makes normal functioning impossible.” As such, addicts are wholly governed by the fact of addiction, which, to put it mildly, “obscures other important qualities about them.”
Not so in German. The most accurate, if graceless, translation for an “addict” would be something like “seeky.” So that if Americans are addicted to oil, then our own language renders us nothing but. By this definition, all we do, all the time, is suck up oil in ever vaster quantities, at ever-increasing cost, and at the expense of our general well-being. Many people in the United States, as well as citizens of Kuwait, Iraq, and Venezuela, would likely say that this is an apt description of Americans’ behavior in relationship to their oil. Using German logic, however, we might propose instead that Americans are “foreign-oil-seeky,” just as heroin addicts are “heroin-seeky” and those poor souls addicted to Friends reruns are “Friends-seeky.” This allows one to be both fairly obsessed with one thing while simultaneously interested in, and capable of, many others. What is curious about this Germanic way of typifying addiction is how well it captures our everyday relationships to electricity. We are deeply and abidingly electricity-seeky.
You’ve seen it yourself. A woman enters a coffee shop and pauses. She does something that looks rather like sniffing the air, except she is using her eyes, sometimes there is slow stroll involved, until somewhat unexpectedly she plops down into a chair, usually not the best one, and begins removing the contents of her bag. A phone comes out, a little pad of photocopies, a computer, and … a cord. She bends over, nudges an old man with a big coat out of the way, snakes her cord over his head and around the corner of a post, and then plugs it in. She was looking for an outlet. She is not an addict, not exactly, but most certainly she is electricity-seeky.
One sees the same behavior when a well-pressed businessman is found sitting on the sullied carpet of the airport boarding area waiting for his flight to be called while his phone charges from an ill-placed baseboard outlet. Or when, upon entering a cubicle for a meeting with its inhabitant, one finds him beneath his desk, khakied butt in the air, snuffling around like a pig for truffles, trying to figure out what’s gone wrong with his surge protector.
Electricity moves us, if not yet in big ways and over long distances: cars can hardly be said to run on it, and jet planes simply do not. On a smaller scale, however, it is constantly orienting us, inciting in us a daily seeking behavior; we subtly structure our lives around access to outlets, though we see evidence of this fact only when the outlets have been poorly placed. Design failures as much as outright blackouts are what transform our everyday “seeky” into active and obvious seeking.
Even the most professional among us lose decorum as we are about to lose power. The richest maintain members of their staff, and circulate though specially designed architectures, to ensure that such inconveniences never happen to them. They, too, are electricity-seeky, they just outsource responsibility for the addiction to the world around them, making it seem as if the phone of privilege always holds a full charge. This magical relationship of invisible ease, of forgetfulness, of electricity without “seeking,” is in fact what we all long for from our grid. Infrastructure should, according to the design guru Donald Norman, fade into invisibility. It should be made to disappear from sight and equally to disappear from consciousness. It should be quiet, task-specific, and unobtrusive. We shouldn’t notice it, we shouldn’t think about it, and we shouldn’t seek it.
In all of the talk about what will make our current electric grid into a better system, usability rarely enters the discussion. It is easy to forget that there are two ways to look at the grid, from above and from below. What we see when trying to grasp it more globally are the relationships between technology and finance, or between legislation and cultural values; we see the grid for its vastness and complexity. We try to grapple with it as a system the expanse of which, geographically as well as historically, is truly outside the capacity of the human mind. Gaining some measure of purchase on this enormity has been my task here too; I don’t think we can “get” the grid without an intense care for the cultural context and microdramas that are playing out between technologies, people, government policy, and corporate concern for the bottom line all the time.
Be that as it may, this is not how most of us interact with the grid. Most of us are not the Straws, or the U.S. military, or New Jersey Transit. Most of us still don’t have solar panels or an intimate relationship with batteries any larger than those that power our phones. Our grid, the part of it we know and interact with, looks like the cords, plugs, outlets, and switches that link our portable electronics to the wall. This, too, might be thought of as the grid edge, since the moment that we unplug electric power from the big grid and carry it around in our pockets is literally where the grid disaggregates, becoming something different and new. The charger is the final cord, the one we know best, and the smallest dendrite in a world of complexity.
In this, the last chapter, I’d like to turn toward our more intimate and personal interactions with the grid and our desires for these. These interactions, and wants, have a pattern, and this pattern, I suspect, exerts more force over the shape of grid reform than experts, or those with a more global view, give credence to. What we would like ultimately is that our infrastructure move us less and have a less obvious presence in our world—not just visually, not just when it breaks down and emerges forcefully into consciousness, but all the time, and in both little and big ways. No more outlets, cords, or plugs would be nice. No more blackouts, short or long, would be great. So would a return to an earth with a stable climate, a planet that grows neither warmer nor colder because of our attachment to fossil fuels for making power.
In short, we’d like our grid to whisper away, to be less devastating in its effects, and to work without deputizing us to the process. We’ll keep electricity, thank you. In fact, the further we proceed into the age of information the more electricity becomes the base for all that we do, from banking, to reading, to collaborative thinking. The future promises an even more thorough integration of electricity into our lives, more data (which is after all, just electricity), more “smart” things (coming to populate the Internet of Things), and the elimination of fuel from cars, necessary if we’d like to stop global warming before it exceeds the 2-degrees-Celsius disaster line. Most important, we’d like this means of “being electric” to come from nothing, to be transmitted by nothing, to cause no damage, and to work always and wherever.
This abiding cultural attachment to electricity only makes the unwieldy ways in which we have to move in order to access it all the more salient. If only we could dematerialize the infrastructure while simultaneously making power ambient—ever present, never sought—then perhaps we’d have an electricity system better suited to the present and better oriented toward a future that meshes with the data-driven and data-dependent beings we are becoming.
The question is, of course, how to do this. Especially since our everyday desires for the future of electricity have relatively little to do with what the vested interests pursue in their attempts to maintain the technological and fiscal viability of the current system. One of the problems with the grid is that we can’t just shut it off for a couple of years while we come up with something newer and better. We need it to be running all the time. 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.” Systemic reform under these conditions is not easily accomplished: anything we add to the grid must have the capacity to interface effectively with everything that was there before, while everything we subtract from it must not disrupt the flow of power that we are so reliant upon.
Given all this, the best routes forward are those that take the mess of competing interests seriously and design for them. This range of interests should not be limited to investors, visionaries, legislators, utilities, regulators, and all the other folks that have an active interest in the grid; it also needs to include people who don’t care a whit for the business of electricity.
Figuring out how to design a system for maximum inclusivity is harder than it sounds, in part because it’s difficult for any one player in the giant tangle of our grid to have much comprehension about what motivates the others. As the near meltdown of the Davis-Besse nuclear reactor or the incessant gnawing of squirrels makes abundantly evident, it’s challenging enough for each of them to be masters of their own domain. Yet, when everyone has their eyes pressed tight up against the demands of their own jobs, it’s the people, the payers of bills, who remain relatively easy to ignore. Unless we make trouble, with guns, air conditioners, or home solar systems, we remain a relatively lumpen mass lacking even basic demographic nuances one might expect any twenty-first century business to employ. For example, in all my research into the grid I have never heard a utility customer referred to in the feminine. When speaking of the users of electricity, the (mostly) men who make the system work, and the (mostly) men who push at it and try to invent a way beyond it, imagine a nation of users who are also men. This is necessarily only ever half true. But if the quiet but undeniable fact of gender has not percolated up into the consciousness of those who make, and remake, our grid, what else is being lost? Attentiveness to the details, and not just aggregate data, is critical to the effective reform of an infrastructure so essential to our lives. Yet asking everyone to practice a more nuanced awareness of ecosystems complexity is, I suspect, more than they can bear.
There are thus three problems of different kinds that meet at the grid and get stuck there: How to deal with the combined interests of many different players—which does, and should, include global warming. How to deal with the legacy technology, which is to say the grid we’ve got. And how to deal with the fact that it’s made and run by humans, who are by their nature rather squirrelly and shortsighted. Rather than letting it all go wild, giving everyone a blunderbuss, a dedicated banker, and an agent of the press—the way the grid was won in the late 1880s—a more practicable solution would be to design something radically integrative. To err, at every moment, toward inclusivity and to design for the easy incorporation of as many different interests as possible. This will mean a clear set of obligatory standards that twist the arms of even the most stubborn players toward interoperability. It will probably also require legal and regulatory intervention. Plus we will need to find a way to pay for the most basic elements of the infrastructure, the wires and poles, that few people care about and yet must stay standing and in good condition for all the rest of the grid to work at all. Investors’ money may flow toward newfangled forms of generation these days, and toward private companies, whether inventing microscopic components or repurposing salt caverns, but basic maintenance is still on the back of the utility. We, the users of electricity, pay those bills, until we don’t.
Coming up with a good system for grid-scale storage, with its capacity to unlink generation from consumption, is one way of pushing the grid toward a more open and assimilative attitude, but it’s not the only way. A second, increasingly popular means for translating interests of different kinds into a single system is to rely upon a platform—an integrative computer program rather than a gadget. In order to help ensure that our grid is wrenched out of its current workings, this platform would need to be open to all the strange sorts of things people are dreaming up and building today (from vehicle to grid-enabled self-driving car pods to real live nanogrids) and to the boring old stuff we’re stuck with for the moment (like natural gas combustion plants and old coal or nuclear), and also to the desires and activities of regular people. All without letting the basic structures of the grid get too rotten or out of date.
A platform is an interesting tool to think with in part because it moves us into a domain where computing, or “digital” systems, becomes the means for solving mechanical or “analog” problems. Platforms literally use computers to make messes operable. Uber is a platform. It takes drivers driving around and organizes them into a means for nondrivers to also move around, in the same cars. It brings existing resources together and creates a functionality where once there was only traffic. Facebook and Twitter are platforms for sharing information and opinions across vast social networks. In the process they produce actively intertwined relationships between strangers as well as friends. These ties, unexpectedly, move news more quickly than more traditional media and thus allow for concerted action and organization significant enough (at times) to bring down governments. This pattern of using platforms to organize unrelated and competing interests into new social and economic formations is a comfortable one now, in America. Comfortable enough that some already exist for our grid, and a solid subset of people inside the system are working out how to make these even better at integrating absolutely everything, and even some “nothings,” than they already are.
Within this push for integrative grid reform there has arisen a curious driver—a certain affinity with zero. In weird corners and in mainstream parts of the country one finds people advocating for aggregated nothings, for no fuels, no wires, and no measurable effects. Conservation and efficiency, ascendant in the 1960s and ’70s, were the precursors of a valuation of what wasn’t used and not needed. And the debate that rages today over how one might accurately count a watt saved, or value and remunerate a power plant not built, also began back in the days of President Carter and his Cardigan Path. In the age of wireless communication systems, we can add another vision: How might we make a grid less material rather than more so? Across domains one begins to see an abiding concern for ways of reducing the material impacts of infrastructure and counting every zero we make as if it were something substantive. Even when not conscious of this trend, a good many people, companies, and interest groups are leaving to value what is not there as much as what is.
The greens, to take the obvious example, root sustainability in getting power from nothing and producing no waste in the process. Renewables, once they have been built and put into operation, are not chemically polluting and they involve neither extraction nor waste—nothing is brought up from below ground, nothing is burned, nothing is boiled, and nothing is released to thicken our atmosphere. Engineers, for their part, are in favor of almost any system that can increase the amount of power they can get from a fuel source. Doing away with heat engines, with their inevitable thermodynamic limitations, is for them a big step in the right direction. Large corporations with significant investments in the energy sector like the fact that the cost of fuel can be removed from the power-production spreadsheet of inevitable expenses. For every watt not made from coal or gas or plutonium these zeros are produced, and they add up. It’s simply easier to make a profit if one can reduce to nothing the cost of a necessary ingredient.
These motivations for supporting green energy are believable and defendable in their own right, but they also all uniquely conform to the spirit of the times: renewables use nothing to make electric power just as phones use the Internet and 4G networks to produce information from thin air, just as wireless charging stations for home electronics are now being integrated into the furniture we normally put them on anyway. Indeed, consumers, who have gotten used to getting information, music, and even movies from thin air, and who will soon be maintaining an electric charge in their batteries through similar means, are increasingly reluctant to embrace anything that has the aesthetics of an older, more materially invasive system. And though consumers are not the arbiters of the grid, their predilections do affect it.
The grid’s wires bear the brunt of this discontent with the materiality of infrastructure. Bruce Wollenberg, a power systems engineer at the University of Minnesota, explains the utilities’ frustration in trying to add more high-voltage lines to the nation’s transmission system, saying, “People don’t want power lines—period. They don’t like the way they look, they don’t like a lot of things. It’s universal across the country, and I think across the world. People don’t want more power lines.” Similarly, Caltech’s Nate Lewis, one of many engineers working on artificial photosynthesis, speaks with the same reiterative stutter. His team’s artificial leaf has “no wires. I mean what I say: no wires. Leaves have no wires. In come sunlight, water, and CO2, and out come fuels.” In both cases it almost seems as if the presence of wires or lines in a new product will sink it.
If consumers are unwilling to allow utilities to build wires across private as well as public lands—as Not-In-My-Backyardism rises to greet the grid—they are happy to pay more for a night table with a wireless power charger built in, like those Ikea is currently rolling out. And, somewhat surprisingly, it is not just about the scale of the thing one is paying for. The utilities have been quick to recognize the fact that people who are normally quite stingy with their electric company, including those actively opposed to new high-voltage wires, will voluntarily pay a surcharge on their bill for renewable power. This surcharge is usually offered as a “percentage of total consumption” with deals like 85 percent wind or 100 percent renewable (wind, solar, hydro).
When Xcel, the maligned former utility of Boulder, Colorado, offered this deal to its Minnesota customers, one friend of a friend on Facebook raved: “If you are a homeowner, there is no reason on earth not to do this … it will cost me $4/month and my energy from here on out will be 100 percent wind powered. What a great feeling! Plus, the energy that supplies Windsource will be purchased entirely from wind farms in Minnesota and will go above and beyond government mandates.”
What matters here is the emotional force behind the idea for a certain kind of customer. No one connected to the grid, even if they pay the surcharge, is getting 100 percent of their electricity from “immaterial” fuels. Nor is their power, on a grid that spans half a continent, guaranteed to be more local. The same terms may be used to laud an environmentally friendly, locally produced electron as an organic, locally grown tomato, but the two entities are impossibly different. Both a customer who has checked the renewable fuels surcharge box and her neighbor get the same electricity. The principal difference is that the electric bill of the “Windsourse® for Residences” customer runs her four dollars more every month.
This paying more for locally sourced green electricity is not a utility scam. The surcharge does usually factor into a utility’s budget for the immediate purchase and longer-term investment in renewable power. You may not get to use 100 percent wind power, but you do subsidize the increase of this means of making electricity for everyone on the grid over the long haul. The fact that this choice is available allows individuals to take a measure of fiscal responsibility onto their own shoulders as a means of committing to immaterial fuel sources that make sense to them.
The argument, then, that our grid wouldn’t be in such a dire state if only people were willing to pay more for their electricity is largely moot. People are willing to pay more, but only for certain things. The less solid these things, the less visible, and the more thoroughly integrated into the built environment they are, the more likely individuals and companies are to volunteer their money for the cause. The ways in which these immaterial power sources also fit into the rising tide of concern for “green” energy makes the utilities’ job easier. If renewables will help raise revenue, then renewables will show up on the bill.
As big wasteful things give way to their smaller less wasteful brethren—as coal plants have given way to wind turbines in Minnesota—it won’t just be the fuel that’s whispering away from our grid. The incandescent bulb, already illegal in much of the world because of its incomparable wastefulness, uses only 5 percent of the power it consumes to make light; the other 95 percent comes out as heat. This familiar and beloved bulb has been largely replaced, first by the compact fluorescent bulb, which pretty much everybody hates, and more recently by LEDs—small, intensely efficient, long-lasting diodes. Or take the refrigerator, the household’s second-greediest device (after the air conditioner). It has been the object of intensive R&D since the late 1970s. Today’s fridges use about a quarter of the power they did in 1975. This increased efficiency is true of all refrigerators, but for a wee bit more you can get one with an Energy Star rating—a truly good fridge, in both senses of the word. Just like today’s refrigerators, our dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers, lighting systems, even newer generations of computers are designed to function equally well with much less of a draw. All of these machines look like and work just as well as their precursors. They just use a lot less electricity (and water) to do the same job.
And while some people, mostly those older than forty, still primarily approach problem solving in terms of buying better things, the nonbuyers of things, a characteristic the millennials have become famous for, take it one step further: Why buy a bulb at all? Why a fridge at all? What might we do to render the bulb and the fridge obsolete entirely? Might not a room be lit by a wall woven of fiber optic cabling controlled from the phone? Might not the fridge be reduced to a ceramic container and a shelf with a cold spot built in?
One can continue in this vein: Might not a solar panel be made as a window or as a roofing tile or a bit of roadway or a tree? Might not outlets be replaced with radiant electricity? The shower with a vapor stall that wets the user just as well with 30 percent of the water? And so on. These are not idle queries, nor should they be easily dismissed. This generation is already in the process of embracing technologies that render obsolete the light switch, the door lock, the car ignition (and its key), and the credit card. Why not the fridge, the outlet, the light socket, the showerhead, and the ineffable, uncontrollable, proliferation of chargers and their cords? The Clapper might still be the means for remote-controlling the lights with the most significant market penetration, but this is unlikely to be the case for long.
All of these changes—to appliances, light, and heating and cooling systems—are happening in the home, our most intimate space for thinking about and using power. We heat where we live and we cool it; we eat and cook, wash and dry, cruise the Internet, play videogames, watch TV, and listen to music there. On good days we even remember to charge our portable electronics before we leave for the day. In the aggregate, what we choose to do in and with our homes matters to the grid. This much we have learned from the home solar movement, but conservation and efficiency—ways of causing power not to be made—matter just as much, if not more, to the future well-being of our energy system.
If one steps back, it becomes clear that changes to the domestic sphere are but a small, if necessary, element of a systemic transformation. Offices, factories, and other workplaces also need to be retrofitted and outfitted, and so do the places where we shop, socialize, and eat out. These are slower to transform, largely because of the cost. Putting solar panels on the roofs of all the nation’s Walmarts (this is happening) is not the same as putting solar panels on top of one’s garage. Nor is the difference just a matter of scale.
Every suburb and semirural outpost where big-box stores cluster has its own culture of wires, its own utility, balancing authority, and regulatory apparatus that must prepare for (and often upgrade existing infrastructure to accept) every new source of power. When we consider the grid in this way it becomes even more evident that some sort of hub capable of translating across all the competing interests and integrating all the structural intransigencies will be essential to the success of an infrastructural upgrade that is national in scale.
In proposing better means for making and delivering electricity, we need to ask ourselves: Does this path, the one we labor to produce, the one we legislate, the business plan we follow, cut off a whole set of options, or does it allow these to wrangle on in there with the rest? Ease of governance needs to cede way to a means of organizing a diversity of interests around a single vision. This is difficult even when the vision is fundamentally about implementing systems diversity. In the high-stakes, low-sex-appeal battle to ramp up the interoperability of the grid’s thousands upon thousands of subsystems, the most boring, if heated, conversations behind the scenes focus on standardization. A platform is not just a software problem. We actually need the technologies that currently constitute our grid to be able to work with, and communicate with, newer components and newer ways of doing things.
The list of standards necessary to make cross-generational interoperability even possible is dizzying. These include items like CEA-852.1:2009 “Enhanced tunneling device area network protocols over Internet protocol channels” or C37.118.1 “Standard for synchrophasor measurements for power systems” or IEEE 1588 “Standard for time management and clock synchronization across the Smart Grid for equipment needing consistent time management.” Gone are the days when a simple armature could bring all the disparate devices functioning on our grid into a new resolution. Achieving a “universal system,” the final form of which we can neither imagine nor plan for at present, is going to take a great deal of legwork of this kind.
While teams of career bureaucrats struggle to devise standards that will make a heavily networked grid functional, other folks in other places take steps to ensure that these won’t ever be needed. The wise grid, as this option is known, has a thousand opponents, each arming itself in whatever ways it can. Effective systems change can be derailed by any of these. If everyone with a stake in the game chooses to limit, rather than work with, the chaos of the present, we will end up with a balkanized system built of roadblocks and blind alleys. Any action, no matter how small, against interoperability creates new hurdles for anyone hoping for a future grid grounded in flexibility and reliability via diversity.
Even forward-thinking California has proved boneheaded on this point. Late in 2015 the legislature in that state passed an extraordinary new renewable energy standard into law, which (among other things) obliges California to make 50 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030. As remarkable as it sounds, at the core of this piece of legislation lurks an unexpectedly retrograde logic. The only renewable electricity that will count toward the 50 percent is that produced by central stations. Rooftop solar will not be counted. This despite the fact that growth in homemade solar power has been exponential over the past half decade: 45 percent of the nation’s total residential solar power is now in California, 82 percent of which has been installed since 2010. At present, rooftop solar is producing three times more electricity in California than are central station solar plants, despite seven of these massive power generators having come online in that state in the past three years. As this legislated reluctance makes clear, the utilities, which have a strong lobby in that state, would prefer to ignore small, distributed power producers; homeowners are too complicated for them to control (or even to bargain with), and homemade electricity is almost impossible for them to profit from. This particular set of players was also hoping that home installations would plummet after 2016, when the renewable energy tax credit was scheduled to expire, since this incentive has refunded 30 percent of the cost of installing rooftop systems since it was put in place in 2005. It didn’t expire, but that matters not in California, since the legislation was already in place.
A conservative eye toward the future might see in this a landscape of power production slipping backward. If homeowners lose the direct financial incentive to contribute to public power, then perhaps central stations might remain “central” to the business of making money from supplying electricity. Turning an institutional blind eye to dispersed renewables—by refusing to let their power count—in favor of big wind farms and sunpower factories is a first step in a process of marginalizing the means of making electricity that many regular people obviously prefer. In this way the new California law has given utilities free reign not to work out how all the various means for generating, saving, and storing electricity might come profitably together. They have effectively limited systems diversity in favor of securing, more tightly, their own interests. The central stations may have changed their fuel source, but the California legislature has opted to leave them and the twentieth-century logics they embody at the heart of that state’s grid.
The explicit goal of the legislation, of course, is to motivate the utilities to invest more heavily in large-scale renewable power installations. A sentiment difficult to fault, and yet, in failing to require the utilities to take full advantage of all the renewable power resources available to them, California’s legislature has virtually assured that grid reform in that state will fall far short of its potential. That this blindness is directed at a technology with an evident appeal to the people makes it downright nefarious. Here, then, we can see how a good decision, in almost all terms, is also a bad one when considering the future-possible for our grid—largely because it excludes the desires of regular folks who are choosing to take their business to smaller, more innovative companies. The utilities are masters of ignoring what people want. And they are practiced in running competitors out of business by controlling the market. California’s lawmakers, in this case, have given them a free hand to continue to do both. The right path was the more difficult one—to ask the utilities to work out a system whereby all renewable power was counted and integrated in the 2030 goal.
The problem of keeping the grid’s wires alive, at least those we can’t get rid of, will never be solved by sweeping the persistent problems under the rug. If Tesla Motors or some other smart start-up can create a battery pack that is sufficiently cheap and sufficiently reliable, people with the means to make their own electricity will start dropping off the grid. This might seem to solve a short-term problem for the utility, but it would significantly undermine a larger, national project of providing the same quality of electric power, at a fair price, to all America’s people. For this we will need a grid capable of bringing together different value systems as much as different mechanical systems into a functional whole. Among the many things we must figure out in order to help make this happen is a way to allow utilities to make money off home solar systems, but even this possibility was curtailed by the California legislature’s groundbreaking renewable energy bill.
Way back in the 1970s, Amory and Hunter Lovins’s argument for the integration of renewables was grounded precisely on this means of effecting an infrastructural transformation worth its while. Yes, renewables are green, and on a polluted and warming planet that is clearly a good thing. More important to the Lovinses, however, was that these technologies, when connected to our existing grid, force it to work differently. It would become a more secure system because grappling with distributed and variable generation is such a mechanical and fiscal stress to the central station model. This potential for a better, more robust, more secure grid grounded in technologies we both use and like is made possible by letting people find ways to make and store electricity at the smallest scale without excluding them, structurally or legally, from our common system.
The grid, as should be clear by now, is not a technological system. It is also a legal one, a business one, a political one, a cultural one, and a weather-driven one, and the ebbs and flows in each domain affect the very possibility of success of any plan for its improvement. If the integration of systems across domains, especially the irritating bits, cannot be made to flourish, the problem will be not with the machinery we use or the technology we govern, but with us.
At issue is that as poor as the utilities are at accepting small reforms by small players, Americans, in general, are not especially practiced at ascribing a value to what is not-used, especially when the count is of something as abstract as a watt. And yet conservation and efficiency measures that reduce our need for electricity are as important to reforming our energy system as is the mainstreaming of renewable ways of making that electricity—large and small. Two different sorts of things, then, need to be integrated into our accounting. First, all the electricity made, no matter who is making it. And second, all the electricity not used, no matter who is saving it. If we can work out how to do this, systemically, it will start to matter when a couple of big-box stores, a cement factory, or a subdivision or two are energy-efficient enough that a utility, or anyone else, can avoid building a new power plant. The owners of these enterprises, just like any homeowner who’s invested in a smart thermostat or a host of compact fluorescent bulbs, naturally want credit for what they are saving. Current rate structures, which charge different amounts for watts depending on when in a billing cycle (or when in a day) they were used, however, don’t translate efforts at conserving power very well into the charges on the bill. The problem becomes, given that all these various customers are still on the grid, how the electricity they don’t use—their so-called “negawatts”—might be counted, paid for, and deployed.
This is the real story behind contemporary grid reform: not just valuing electrons made by unusual producers, but valuing electrons that we never needed to make at all—the saved power that we shouldn’t even notice has gone missing.
In 2011 I joined a green energy tour group of engineers and industry insiders traveling around San Diego looking at the various projects under way there. San Diego Gas & Electric is a notoriously forward-thinking utility. One result is that the city has some pretty interesting grid-related things going on. We saw some of these. An office complex with a solar panel on every available bit of roof, including the parking lot; a training facility for journeymen electricians with two empty car-charging stations conspicuously placed at the front. And, much to everyone’s surprise, a suburban Albertsons grocery store powered by a boxcar-sized fuel cell out back by the Dumpsters. It’s unusual to see a fuel cell, and the box drew plenty of oohs and aahs from our group. From the store manager’s point of view, however, it clearly paled in comparison to the energy-efficient, understated refrigeration they’d had installed. He tried, unsuccessfully if repeatedly, to draw our attention to his coolers and freezers, his windows and electric fans, his recycling system for cardboard boxes. These designs, machines, and systems all worked to lower the absolute amount of electricity needed by the facility. They were what made the fuel cell out back a viable technology for power production in the first place. It was not an Albertsons off-the-grid, but its draw from public power systems was close to zero most of the time.
An installation like this, at long last, brings the point home: if the experts and insiders on the tour were excited by how the watts that ran this Albertsons were being made, the store’s manager was excited by all the ways in which these watts were no longer needed. What he saw when he looked at his grocery store was not a power plant but a machine for making negawatts; it was that machine that all of the rest of us had trouble seeing precisely because it looked, and worked, exactly like a grocery store. The lighting was perhaps marginally more pleasant, but otherwise, what had been accomplished was praiseworthy less in relationship to how the power for this store was generated and more in terms of the various ways that the whole thing had been redesigned not to need it. Or, as Amory Lovins (who coined the term “negawatt” way back in 1990) said, “Customers don’t want kilowatt-hours; they want services such as hot showers, cold beer, lit rooms,” and this can “come more cheaply from using less electricity more efficiently.”
This way of thinking—of lowering consumption while minimizing the need for grid-provided electricity, does not simply conform to the spirit of the times. It helps to further it. The power of nothing is expanded, by undertakings like these, to include lighting from the sun, cooling from fan-made breezes rather than chemical air-conditioning, and wattage not used because it isn’t needed. These saved-watts or negawatts are the electric power a machine or a building or a lighting system or a factory doesn’t use. Though a negawatt is a theoretical, rather than a real, unit of non-power, it serves the purpose of allowing us to measure and quantify avoided consumption.
Given this, the store manager’s point is well taken: Why not do the same with less? In this we can see the remnants of the Cardigan Path. It is there in part. We can use less. In fact, we do use less. Electricity consumption in the United States ceased its increase in 2007 and is predicted to remain flat until 2040, despite infinitely more electronics and significantly more people. As important, however, are the changing presumptions that surround a life of modest energy consumption.
We needn’t suffer privation as a result of using less. This is the message that Albertson’s Corporation has built into this single store. It is equally the message of the shift to LEDs, home solar panels, and ideally to electric cars. In the twenty-first century, the Cardigan Path has been remade more simply into the Path. These days, not even Jimmy Carter needs to wear a sweater.
The Path means less energy consumption without turning down the thermostat, wearing a fleece, or lighting a fire. It means long hot showers, cold beers, and well-lit rooms. There will be no privation in the new world of less. (Not “less-is-more,” mind you, but “the same with less.”) At least, this is the goal of those committed to an accounting of negawatts and equally of the man who manages the most energy-efficient Albertsons in the United States.
Even ten years ago, the answer to this desire for “the same with less” was that saving kilowatt-hours was expensive precisely because retrofitting inefficient buildings with more efficient technologies is the least cost-effective way to achieve the goal. Negawatts simply cost too much to be worth their while. This is the reason why there is only one Albertsons with a fuel cell and a remarkable cooling and lighting system and there are literally thousands of Albertsons that rely on grid-provided power to run wasteful coolers and poorly designed lighting and HVAC systems. Retrofitting is expensive in ways that don’t quite seem to pay off.
A case in point. I live in a very cold place, very cold, and one corner of our house was never insulated; it happens to be the corner that our bathtub drain runs through and so every year the drain freezes and we have no tub for six to eight weeks. Our solution to this would make Amory Lovins blanch. We just run the water in the tub all winter to keep the drain from freezing. We don’t pay for water, it’s not metered, so like much of the rest of our winter city of 2 million the taps trickle for months on end. Despite the evident ridiculousness of this fix, we won’t be taking out 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. We don’t want to invest the necessary money and, even more, we don’t want to deal with the mess and bother.
This is precisely why, as long as investment in retrofitting remains the main means of bringing about a negawatt revolution (or, in our case, a negagallon one), it won’t happen. The efficiency and conservation measures necessary to insure a drastic community-wide drop in power consumption either need to be built in from the start or they need to be “plug-and-play,” like Energy Star appliances.
This is half the secret, then: to design and to build places, things, and machines in ways that effortlessly and invisibly—from the end user’s point of view—reduce consumption. In some cases this might best be accomplished by reconceiving entirely the thing being built: to take the fridge out of refrigeration, the air conditioner out of air-conditioning, the light out of the lightbulb. In other cases, it might mean producing an identical thing, like a laptop that runs equally well on a quarter of the electricity as the same model three years earlier or a building that so seamlessly integrates power-saving systems that even its most constant users would be shocked to know that they are moving through a massive negawatt machine.
The other half of the secret is to get the grid to do most of the work in this direction for us. We need to enforce a system that takes the messes of the present and orients them not just around a different kind of generation or a different kind of distribution but also around countable nothings. Efficiency, not just for the sake of it, but as a structured means of generating less power to begin with. We don’t use what isn’t made, and (this is the new bit) this non-use will get factored into our financial thinking about the grid, and its reform. If it can be given a stable price, a negawatt will matter as much to how actors big and small choose to reform our grid as a tax cut, a subsidy, or a guaranteed low-interest loan does now.
The grid, in the Albertsons case, would seem to be little more than a neutral conduit between power plants and refrigeration devices. Even a decade ago this impression would have been fairly accurate. As it turns out, however, all those smart meters shooting out wireless streams of data 24/7 are good for more than just helping the utility know that they should dispatch a lineman to your neighborhood before you call them up and tell them to. Within five years of the rollout, the data produced by smart meters was proving essential to the creation of predictive models of electricity use, minute by minute, as well as providing occasional real-time data about peaks and troughs in variable and distributed electricity production. And they were enabling real-time “demand-response,” which is to say that they gave the utility the capacity to ask big electricity consumers to ramp down consumption as a means of balancing the grid. Rather than going offline and using diesel generators to provide backup power for a bit while the utility straightened things out, smart meters can be linked to efficient buildings that automatically deploy grid-scale conservation. At times this is accomplished by something as simple as dimming the lights. Negawatts, in other words, can now be ordered up by the utility and delivered by an Albertsons. Network enough of these power-savers into a flexible, smart piece of software, and you have your platform.
This demand-response capacity, called DR in the business, not only brings energy saved into the mix of resources available to grid operators by literally making conservation count, but it is another non-thing slowly taking grid governance by storm. And it doesn’t stand alone. With computerization demand-response can be linked to other machines for making or saving power that we are currently building, willy-nilly, into the grid. Most of these are paid for by a mix of interested parties including investors, utility companies (which is to say, rate-payers), and state and federal subsidies. When enough of these scattered but existing resources are networked together it is possible to create what is called a virtual power plant. Not a plant for making virtual power, but a platform that connects everything available to it and gets it all to work like a power plant.
A virtual power plant can link, for example, a big coal-burning plant to a local military base’s microgrid to three cogeneration plants to seven smaller natural gas combustion turbines to thirty-five hundred rooftop solar installations (three hundred of which also have deployable battery storage) to fourteen reliable, flexible, medium-scale negawatt producers to thirty thousand electric cars. It can then use the resources of each—generation, deployable efficiency, storage—to balance out demand with production capacity throughout the system by the millisecond.
Such interconnections between resources allows us to keep the idea of a power plant without our necessarily needing the power plant itself. A virtual power plant is thus primarily an organizational tool that uses information about electricity transmitted by electricity (digital smart meters most especially) to respond to the ebb and flow of power on the grid with a degree of timeliness and nuance that a human simply cannot match. We have always been too slow for electricity, but with smart meters, thousands upon thousands of distributed microsensors and the right computer programs, we can at long last do something about it.
The main issue with virtual power plants isn’t bringing them to pass; they already exist. There are small versions running all over the place. The problem is getting all the necessary components into the mainstream (the cars most notably are still lacking, but smart appliances would make a big difference too), getting them all to speak the same language, and figuring out how to move through regulatory regimes and ownership blockades still in place from the twentieth century’s far more proprietary and centralized grid.
Our first vision for a possible future of our grid, outlined in the last chapter, was of a material system unimaginable to us, yet being dreamed, tinkered, and built despite our incapacity to see exactly where it might all be going. Virtual power plants allow us a peek at a vision for the future of electrical infrastructure nearer at hand—a grid so jam-packed with computerization that it sparkles. This grid, however, would not look futuristic. Much like that suburban Albertsons, it would appear to the untrained eye to be identical to the grid we have. The revolution would not be one of form but of function.
The technology for this largely already exists, and the processes that might bring it to pass are already being put into place. In October 2015, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that pitted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, the folks charged with managing our grid nationally) against the Electric Power Supply Association (ERSA, which advocates for competition among power providers). At issue was precisely the question of whether a watt saved would be compensated at the same rate as a watt made. Unlike the California case, where the legislature narrowed the state’s possibilities for grid reform by excluding the most troublesome elements of their current grid from their accounting, this case is being adjudicated in full view of the nation. And the stakes for how we make, use, and value electric power are also much higher.
If the capacity to integrate energy efficiency is to become central to the way public power is managed in this country and if virtual power plants are going to be among the means we use to network our resources—those that produce power as well as those that negate or reduce consumption—then a negawatt will need a stable value. It will need to become a currency whose worth everyone can agree upon so that it might be transacted without unreasonable risk.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the only regulatory body with a mandate to govern our electrical system, felt that a “commitment to reduce demand” should “be compensated the same amount as an equivalent commitment by generators to increase supply.” This was not just about fairness, but also a means of making the grid a more integrative machine. Or, in their words, “paying demand response providers the full value of their contribution to the market would help overcome preexisting barriers to demand-response participation and increase the reliability and competitiveness of wholesale markets.” Legislation can be used to wrench open rather than delimit who participates in our grid, whether as producers of power or of savings. FERC selected the more difficult path, but the one that will force an inclusivity—a technological as well as a financial problem—into the substrate of our grid.
The utilities, who are once again the ones struggling to maintain something like a viable revenue stream, begged to differ and sued FERC for jurisdictional imprudence. They argue “that real energy generated by real power plants should attract a higher price, in order to stimulate much-needed investment.” Here again the battle’s lines take a familiar form. Some people value stuff, real existing stuff, more than non-stuff, nothings, and zeros that can be added, counted, and made manifest. Others think that negative 1 should be seen as the equal and opposite of 1 and that we have a strong enough mathematical system already in place to account for, measure, and value what isn’t there every bit as much as what is. The stakes for the grid of this argument is whether all the various people producing, saving, balancing, counting, and making a profit off of power will be tied into a common system or if only the big guys with their big power plants will matter. Regardless of what the court decides (as this book goes to press they are in deliberation), even a minor shift in price or mandate will produce major ripples through a near future system for making and distributing electric power.
If, in all of this, nothings can be given an agreed upon, transactional value then virtual power plants might help us integrate all the resources at our disposal, material and immaterial, legislative and corporate, collective and individual—such that the whole system runs more efficiently. In this way we might radically diminish how much power we are making and equally radically increase how much of this power will come from renewable sources. These are the first necessary, if small steps, toward engineering a changed energy landscape.
In this version of the future, we get to keep the big grid for a while longer and most everything familiar from it—wires, substations, long-distance AC and electricity markets. We probably even keep the utility companies by figuring out how to pay them for something other than how much power we consume. We could pay them for gadgets perhaps, or a basic line fee per connected meter, or as consultants to newly aggregating towns and newly organizing microgrids, or as innovators in the still turgid waters of our energy future. The only thing we lose with this new version of our grid is our reliance on central stations.
Big generation might stick around (big wind farms and big solar plants are proof of that) but it needn’t. Computing has given us the capacity to tear the heart right out of the center of our grid. It doesn’t need a heart. It can work with a million hearts, or a hundred million, scattered to the four winds and brought into balance by reactive, sensitive, ubiquitous software. Virtual power plants and their kin, the Energy Cloud, do something that microgrids and nanogrids threaten to undo. They keep the grid and its generic power for the people. All of us, together.
With good battery systems, which are just now reaching the level of ease and affordability that make them interesting to residential customers, Americans could, like the Germans, decide to defect entirely. And yet we aren’t doing this. We may be happy to starve the system of cash by paying our money to some company that is not a utility, but even so we stay plugged in to the grid. I suspect this isn’t just because of a communitarian spirit, though there is a bit of that in the mix. Rather, it is largely because “alternative energy” has been sold in America as a money-making scheme that renders each home solar installation a tiny factory for producing watts that are guaranteed by law to be purchased at market price. The seller—you or I—doesn’t have to do a thing to insure this. No marketing, no sales pitches, no advertising campaigns, no haggling over the price. Going off the grid would mean losing this income, and it would also necessarily involve investing a lot more money in home storage systems and other small-power solutions for balancing the unwieldy electrical demands of a single customer. Getting off the grid would, in other words, be costly and complicated, just as it has always been. Insull sold Chicago on central station power to begin with, way back at the turn of the last century, on precisely these same terms. Sharing, when it comes to electricity, is simpler and more cost effective, than doing it for oneself.
The pragmatics of this simple truth are the elementary bond that keeps us together, but it’s a weak bond rather than a strong one. It is only going to get easier to get off the grid, especially if a customer base funnels its frustrations with the current state of the grid toward technological, and business, developments that facilitate defection. It’s complicated and expensive to get off the grid today, but in five years? In ten? If we want to keep America woven into one nation of equal opportunity then the grid, its technologies, and its wardens will need to pay more attention to what individuals expect of their infrastructure. This isn’t always straightforward, since Americans in general don’t see the grid for the enabling technology that it is, but symptomatically, our actions can be read and responded to.
One thing we certainly do want is a way to yank the cords out of our everyday experience of electricity. There are two developments on this front that will soon enter the mainstream. The first is to integrate wireless charging into most flat things, like shelves, countertops, tables, and lamp bases. This won’t get rid of the outlet, as we’ll still have to plug in the shelf, but it will render the plugs on most electric devices irrelevant. There is nothing radical about wireless charging: electric toothbrushes have been using this technology since the 1990s, and many of the forklifts in America spend their nights on flat pads that charge them wirelessly while their operators sleep. Within a couple of years we won’t be plugging in any of our portable electronics though we will still likely have to toss, or park, them in the right spot.
In 2015, for example, Ikea rolled out a series of side tables, nightstands, and lamps with wireless charging pads so thoroughly integrated into them that they “simply blend in.” Though these are not yet optimized—they won’t charge Apple products, for example, leaving the world’s 7 million iPhone users stuck with their ports, plugs, and outlets for a little while longer—they do clearly point toward a future in which outlets move us less and cords, adapters, and power strips are reduced, at long last, to nothing.
The second, and slightly more anxiety-producing, possibility for those worried about the effects of ambient electromagnetic radiation on their ball-shaped organs is the wireless distribution of electricity. The desire for wireless transmission is as old as the grid itself, and the capacity to effect this transfer of power through thin air over short distances has been viable for just as long. Nikola Tesla, the quirky Serbian-born inventor who brought us alternating current in the 1880s, also, in 1893, lit three bulbs wirelessly from a hundred feet away as a part of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago—a World’s Fair devoted to electric lighting in all its multitudinous, miraculous variations.
Though the claim that Tesla lit even more bulbs (rumor says a hundred) even more spectacularly from the ambient electricity produced by lightning strikes up to twenty-five miles away appears to be spurious (invented, apparently, by his biographer), what is sure is that Tesla could, just as we can today, move a viable electric current across a modest slice of air. He was equally devoted, later in his life, to the prospect of long-distance remote power projects that used the earth “literally alive with electric vibrations” as a giant conductor and tethered balloons, thirty thousand feet up in the atmosphere, to transmit electricity at billions of volts around the world. His hope was to make possible both universal wireless illumination and instantaneous, wireless communication between places as far distant as London and New York. He is quoted as saying, in support of this undertaking:
“It will soon be possible, for instance, for a business man in New York to dictate instructions and have them appear instantly in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber in the world. It will only be necessary to carry an inexpensive instrument not bigger than a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles. One may listen or transmit speech or song to the uttermost parts of the world.”
This was 1909. A century later we could do all these things. The only thing we couldn’t do was wirelessly transmitting the electric power necessary to keep this “device not bigger than a watch” running. The telecommunications revolution that Tesla understood to be part and parcel of the mass, wireless, electrification of all the world grew to be a dream split in two. Everyone has cell phones, even in places with nothing like a reliable electric grid. But very little of the world has the wireless communication of electricity to power them.
Be that as it may, Tesla’s dream still seethes below the surface of our wished-for way of interacting with electrical infrastructure, even more so now that wirelessesness has become so commonplace in so many other domains of daily life.
Long-distance wireless transmission of electricity remains something of a fantasy, Tesla’s own efforts were neither better nor worse than anyone else’s on this front. It turns out, however, that short-distance transmission is a relatively straightforward project, according to Croatian-born Martin Soljačič, a professor at MIT.
Soljačič has figured out a system that, though fairly different in its physics from Tesla’s, has much the same effect—the wireless transmission of enough electricity across empty air to light a bulb. Soljačič even put a wooden board between his bulb and the transmitter and it still emitted a lovely glow. What is remarkable about Soljačič’s system is that it doesn’t fill the air with electromagnetic radiation, as Tesla’s system did, but rather uses magnetic resonance, which essentially only allows the electricity sent to power a device specially “tuned” to receive it. This use of magnetic fields targeting appropriately chipped electronics helps these devices to sidestep known problems with wireless transmission via electric fields, which have a long range but poor aim, enveloping everything in a thick, invisible haze of electromagnetic radiation.
Since Soljačič worked out the basic physics of point-to-point wireless transmission in 2007, the start-up market has exploded with products, marketing alliances, and live demos. Competitors are merging or eating each other as the struggle to bring a viable wireless charger to market heats up. We don’t see much of this yet, as the winners and losers are still being worked out behind the scenes, but we will soon. Says Brian Krzanich, the CEO of Intel (which is pushing this technology hard): “Imagine a world where you can charge your devices wherever you are. That’s the world I want to live in.” This is a pretty safe thing for him to say after a massive survey conducted by Intel across forty-five countries revealed that four of the most common complaints people had about their computing devices had to do with the cords. Given that we can already transmit power wirelessly across about three feet of thin air with 90 percent efficiency, in time we will.
Taken together it can be said with some certainty that we’d like the grid to move us less, to be less polluting, more adaptive, and more reliable. We’d like systems change to be more about responding to the powers to come and less committed to maintaining the powers that be. We’d like some control over how our power is made and also some legible way to understand how it is used. Despite all of this we’d also prefer a grid—an electrical system—in common.
There is no reason to believe that the spirit of the time, orienting all of us toward things which do not exist, will abate in the near future. The odds rather predict the inverse. More wireless, more renewable, more portable, more integrated, and thus more invisible technologies that we move, rather than that move (or worse, root) us. Neither is there reason to believe that despite a strong cultural preference for the invisible, the immaterial, and the hidden that we will abandon the idea of a grid in common. What remains to be seen is the precise shape this infrastructure will take once these two biases have been twisted into one. My vote is for 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.
Much has been made of errors and faults as signs of beauty in Japanese aesthetics. In contrast to Western notions of beauty that have everything to do with symmetry, balance, and perfection, in Japan flaws and irregularities are highlighted. And where they might otherwise be overlooked—a cracked pot perfectly repaired—they are brought deliberately to the fore and made to catch the eye. In the case of the broken pot, for example, gold or bright red lacquer might be rubbed into the seams when it is mended. So rude is this interruption to the form of the thing that one hardly sees the original pot anymore. The trace—a sparkling vein; a rivulet in bloodred—these outshine the fact that the object has regained integrity. The fact of having been broken is what matters. The history of a thing—its difficult life—is made to be a part of its attraction.
In the United States, that same pot, clumsily dropped and shattered into shards, might be carefully repaired, the owner (epoxy in hand) taking great care to find all the bits and to reunite them into a seamless, usable whole. More likely, though, the broken ceramic would be blithely swept up and deposited without ceremony in the trash can, and another bowl would be bought on the morrow, or perhaps even ordered online for next-day delivery.
Americans don’t like dealing with remnants or with imperfect things. We don’t want to see that what now serves us perfectly well was once broken or damaged. We want youth and vigor, not old age and a storied life. Repair is not a cultural value. Replacement is.
And yet, if we are to maintain a grid with a national, or even half-national, span, we will need to change our minds about what constitutes a “good” thing. A good thing might very well be an old thing with veins of gold pressed into all the cracks. It might be a mended thing with the mends themselves constituting the most precious element of the whole.
If we want to keep a grid for all, we might be wise to mend our grid like a Japanese pot. The most valuable bits, the golden threads, the tiny machines, we rub into all the seams—the glue would matter most. In the case of the grid, this glue isn’t real gold but rather millions of tiny machines—microprocessors—that when working together have the reactive capacity to make decisions. The system as a whole would be given the approximate intelligence of a tick, which has only four or five basic capacities: to climb, to smell food, to drop, to seek warmth, to eat. As Ronald Bogue points out, “The tick’s milieu is a closed world of elements, outside of which nothing else exists”; nevertheless it’s still a whole lot smarter, more capable, and more flexible than a hunk of rebar or a puddle of tar. This tick-bright grid would react and communicate well enough that its complexity might become its strength. And because it will have a microprocessor pushed into every crack it will be able to take anything we can throw at it—variable generation, distributed generation, small power, big power, negawatts, nanogrids, mobile storage, weird weather—and integrate these into a self-balancing, highly reliable system. Such a grid would be something like a national (or half-national, or regional, or whatever size we choose to make it) computer in which all that is old, rusty, and broken is healed, and held together, by the densest network of intelligent agents anywhere on the planet.
Not for long, of course, as ubiquitous computing is coming to, well … everywhere.
The grid that virtual power plants, and their ilk, imagine making possible, the grid their promoters are trying to build with elbow grease, a golden tongue, and difficult-to-extract handshakes across the front lines of old battlefields, might well be the first step toward a larger, more ambitious project: a self-healing, processor-dense, “intelligent” grid. One that heralds a sort of immersive technology our children’s children will take for granted in much the same way that Edison’s first mile of wires and bulbs laid into the muck-thick streets of Manhattan a century and a half ago heralded the present age of “ubiquitous” electricity.
In order for this new grid to come to pass, its architects, its dreamers, its schemers, its malcontents, and its make-a-buck quicksters will all need to find their way into this vision of future technology, not as an ideal to be realized but as a pragmatic route to the best possible end. Wealth, of course. Growth, of course. Excess, of course. But also a chance for something more than these standard business goals of standardized businesses.
It’s not hard to have a less polluting, less irritating, and more reliable electrical system than the one we have. What is hard is figuring out how to bring big dreams, smart inventions, and popular will together with the entrenched interests of the powers that currently govern, own, and make a profit from our grid. The easiest way to do this is to force upon them, at every possible opportunity, a radical openness to variety—to avoid California’s path, with its eyes closed to small power producers; to avoid England’s path, where a shift away from big coal-burning plants has resulted in a grid-scale reliance on diesel generators; and to avoid Germany’s path, where the exploited (in their case, the companies) have walked away from public power, taking their poolable resources with them.
The future we want is one in which difficult things are integrated, even when this is a more troublesome route than excluding them. Let’s take them all, every variation on the theme of “grid”; let’s consider them all, every form of belief about how electric power should be made and used (or not made and not used); and let’s integrate them all in a way that does the least planetary damage over the long term.
A wise grid is not just a smart grid ramped up a little bit. Wisdom is not the product of added computational power (though that helps). It’s a mode of systems reform capable of hearing what people say, noticing what they do, and premising thoughtful action upon both. Wisdom, when speaking of the grid now, is about helping people accomplish well what they have already begun. It is about following vectors of desire and modes of action forward and then building these in at the level of the infrastructure itself.
I don’t know what America’s grid will look like in thirty years. Nobody does, precisely because in America today grid reform is a groundswell, it is barely organized; it has no single valance and no political party touting a particular path. There are crusaders, but they are the sort that go door to door and ask their neighbors to join in a solar co-op. There are warriors, but they are the sort who petition their local government to allow anyone to opt out of a smart meter. There are visionaries, but they are thinking about how the seven homes that share a transformer might organize themselves into a collective of diverse enough generation and significant enough storage to keep the lights on the next time the big grid blacks out. There are inventors, but odds are that they’re going to tell you a story about self-inflating hydrogen balloons in the desert. The future is a crapshoot. If we are smart enough, it might also be a chance to capture the cutting edge of technological innovation and cultural imagination and concretize it in the grid itself. All the visions of ubiquitous technology, sentient cities, chips everywhere could well take their alpha form in the electric grid. It is, after all, as Nicola Tesla pointed out, not only a system for powering the world but also essential to the lines of communication that weave our economies, our labor, and our imaginations together. If we are going to bring the Internet of Things into our daily lives, then why not start with the biggest thing of all? The grid, tick-bright and aglow with promise.