still goes into cars: “To achieve the emissions goals,” the New York Times tells its readers, “the entire economy, including transportation, needs to be electrified as much as possible. That might mean cars running on batteries, but it could also mean cars running on hydrogen, created by using nighttime electricity from nuclear reactors or wind turbines to split water molecules. Either way, the implication is that the internal-combustion engine that has powered cars since the nineteenth century is a technological dead end in the twenty-first. So countries like the United States that are spending a lot of effort trying to make gasoline cars more efficient may be going down a blind alley.” Justin Gillis, “A Path for Climate Change, Beyond Paris,” New York Times, December 1, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/01/science/197816081961044065765.embedded.html. See also Justin Gillis, “Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change,” New York Times, November 28, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/28/science/what-is-climate-change.html.
are remarkably oblivious to it: So deemed by the National Academy of Engineering in its “Greatest Engineering Achievements of the Twentieth Century,” www.greatachievements.org.
(its infrastructure for itself): Like Texas, which has preserved an independent electrical infrastructure unlinked to those of its neighbors, Quebec also has an electric grid all its own. Located in the Canadian province most likely to secede, it’s the best in North America.
an American power plant: This statistic is taken from Campbell 2012, as cited in “Economic Benefits of Increasing Grid Resilience to Weather Outages” (Washington, D.C.: Executive Office of the President, August 2013), 7, as well as “Frequently Asked Questions: How Old Are U.S. Nuclear Power Plants and When Was the Last One Built?” U.S. Energy Information Administration, February 20, 2015, https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=228&t=21.
from 15 in 2001 to 78 in 2007 to 307 in 2011: In the first six months of 2014 alone, there were 130 significant outages. Compare this to the previous fourteen years’ worth of outages:
| 174 in 2013 | 123 in 2010 | 78 in 2007 | 93 in 2004 | 15 in 2001 |
| 196 in 2012 | 97 in 2009 | 91 in 2006 | 61 in 2003 | 30 in 2000 |
| 307 in 2011 | 149 in 2008 | 85 in 2005 | 23 in 2002 |
Jordan Wirfs-Brock, “Data: Explore 15 Years of Power Outages,” Inside Energy, August 28, 2014, http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/data-explore-15-years-of-power-outages/. See also Christine Hertzog, “Why Climate Change Will Force a Power Grid Makeover,” GreenBiz, August 23, 2013, http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/08/23/climate-change-power-grid-makeoever.
679 between 2003 and 2012: “Economic Benefits of Increasing Grid Resilience to Weather Outages” (2013).
Germany at 15: Craig Morris, “German Grid Most Reliable in Europe,” Renewables International, July 19, 2011, http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-grid-most-reliable-in-europe/150/407/31462. For Korea and Japan, see Andy Bae, “Blackout in Seoul,” Navigant Research, October 4, 2011, http://www.navigantresearch.com/blog/blackout-in-seoul.
Because the United States doesn’t aggregate its statistics nationally when it comes to annual outage minutes, the estimates vary wildly, from about 1.5 hours (for the Midwest) to 9 hours. Meagan Clark, “Aging U.S. Power Grid Blacks Out More Than Any Other Developed Nation,” International Business Times, July 17, 2014, http://www.ibtimes.com/aging-us-power-grid-blacks-out-more-any-other-developed-nation-1631086; and “Power Blackout Risks: Risk Management Options,” Emerging Risk Initiative—Position Paper (CRO Forum, November 2011), https://www.allianz.com/v_1339677769000/media/responsibility/documents/position_paper_power_blackout_risks.pdf.
it’s less than ten minutes and shrinking: Peter Asmus, “How Microgrids Improve Grid Reliability and City Resilience,” GreenBiz, December 5, 2012, http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/12/05/how-microgrids-build-resiliency-extreme-weather.
“without power for two or more hours”: Massoud Amin, “Why We Need Stronger, Smarter Electrical Grids,” GreenBiz, July 29, 2014, http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/07/30/why-we-need-stronger-smarter-electrical-grids.
squirrels most especially: “Longmont Power & Communications, which serves 35,000 customers north of Denver, says that more than 90 percent of its significant outages are caused by squirrels.” Barbara Carton, “Fried Squirrel Fails to Find Favor With Public Utilities,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2003, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1044309659373124584.
burn and then have no more: “Stock resources are those resources whose ‘total physical quantity does not increase significantly with time … each rate of use diminishes some future rate.’ … Flow resources are those resources where of different units become available for use at different intervals … the present flow does not diminish future flow, and it is possible to maintain use indefinitely provided the flow continues” Maurice Kelso, “The Stock Resource Value of Water,” Journal of Farm Economics 43, no. 5 (December 1961): 1112.
of the power on our grid: 38.5 percent coal, 27.3 percent natural gas, and 0.7 percent petroleum. From “2014 Renewable Energy Data Book” (National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the U.S. Department of Energy, November 2015), http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/64720.pdf, 10. See also “Frequently Asked Questions: What Is U.S. Electricity Generation by Energy Source?” U.S. Energy Information Administration, March 31, 2015, https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3.
solar power are most effectively produced: It is arguable that wind-poor and sun-poor locations closer to where people live and use electricity may well have sufficiently robust (if middlingly) resources to meet demand. Personal conversation with Amory Lovins, May 2016.
to replace the retiring fleet: Karl Mathiesen, “Gas Surges Ahead of Coal in U.S. Power Generation,” Guardian, July 14, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/14/gas-surges-ahead-of-coal-in-us-power-generation.
for the climate than coal: There is some argument over the accuracy of these numbers. According to Michael Obeiter, a senior associate in the World Resources Institute’s climate program. “There’s not a lot of good data for methane leakage nationwide, but it’s probably less than 3.2 percent. The EPA GHG [greenhouse gas] Inventory estimates roughly 1.2 percent or so, but many have taken issue with their methodology.” See also Ramón A. Alvarez et al., “Greater Focus Needed on Methane Leakage from Natural Gas Infrastructure,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 17 (2012): 6435–40. Gal Luft, an adviser to the United States Energy Security Council, points out: “The greenhouse effect of methane is about 17 times that of carbon dioxide. However, we know that if the overflow ratio exceeds 2 percent methane, the greenhouse effect of shale gas mining may be more severe than coal. Current measurements have recorded 2.5 percent, 3 percent and 10 percent. Currently, we are still unclear of the exact measurements; many basic problems of shale gas development have yet to be solved.” Wang Erde Wei Wei, “Nuclear, Not Fracking, Is the Answer to China’s Future Energy Needs,” China Dialogue, July 25, 2013, https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/6228-Nuclear-not-fracking-is-the-answer-to-China-s-future-energy-needs-.
nuclear power development: Wei Wei (2013).
“will need to be replaced by new plants”: James E. Rogers, in his foreword to Peter Fox-Penner’s Smart Power Anniversary Edition: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2014), xv.
twenty times as much solar: These numbers are from an August 2015 speech by Barack Obama introducing his “Clean Power Plan,” the aim of which is to reduce carbon emissions by 2030 to 32 percent lower than they were in 2005. Power plants are responsible for about one third of current carbon emissions nationally, and thus the plan should have a noteworthy impact on plant retirements, upgrades, and choices of replacement technology. Since the plan also addresses methane emissions, a significant portion of which occur during the extraction of natural gas, it will also affect the cost of using natural gas as a replacement for coal or nuclear.
about 7 percent overall: To be precise, nonhydro renewable energy sources amount to 6.76 percent. Wind accounts for 4.42 percent, biomass wood for 1.04 percent, biomass waste for 0.52 percent, geothermal for 0.39 percent, and 0.39 percent is from solar. “How Much U.S. Electricity Is Generated from Renewable Energy?” U.S. Energy Information Administration, June 12, 2015, http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/article/renewable_electricity.cfm.
it’s a stunning 30 percent: “U.S. Wind Energy State Facts,” American Wind Energy Association, accessed September 15, 2015, http://www.awea.org/resources/statefactsheets.aspx?itemnumber=890.
dropped to negative 64¢: Eric Wieser, “ERCOT Sets Wind Generation Output Record Sunday, Real-Time Power Prices Move Negative,” Platts McGraw Hill Financial, September 14, 2015, http://www.platts.com/latest-news/electric-power/washington/ercot-sets-wind-generation-output-record-sunday-26208539.
has more than doubled: It was 3 percent in 2009, according to Dr. Stephen Chu, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist and former U.S. secretary of energy who spoke at Grid Week in Washington, D.C. (see chapter 1).
Maine is aiming for 40 percent: Jocelyn Durkay. “State Renewable Portfolio Standards and Goals” National Conference of State Legislatures. October 14, 2015, http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/renewable-portfolio-standards.aspx.
Hawaii is aiming for 100 percent: Ari Phillips, “Hawaii Aims for 100 Percent Renewable Energy by 2040,” Renew Economy, March 13, 2015, http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/hawaii-aims-for-100-renewable-energy-by-2040.
“month’s worth of purchases”: W. Kempton and L. Montgomery, “Folk Quantification of Energy,” Energy 7(10) 1982: 817–27.
“benefits of their actions”: Kathryn Janda, “Buildings Don’t Use Energy: People Do,” Architectural Science Review 54, 2011: 15–22.
would have happily left behind: We can see this history of uneven development in Vermont, where in 1920 only 10 percent of the farms in that state had electricity; by the start of the Great Depression, the percentage had risen to 1 in 3. In the decade after the passage of the Rural Electrification Act (1936), most of the state’s rural residents had electrical power, in their milking parlors if not yet in their homes. And in 1963—almost a hundred years after America’s first electric light—its final two towns, Granby and Victory, Vermont, got their wires and became a part of our grid. This is just one example, but it’s an important one: electrification was not an all-at-once affair; in some spots its history is far thinner than in others. From a radio commentary by Vic Henningsen on Vermont Public Radio, August 27, 2015, http://digital.vpr.net/post/henningsen-statewide-service.
“works in practice, but not in theory”: Alexandra von Meier, “Electronic Power Systems,” September 17, 2010, Public Lecture i4 Energy Systems, University of California, Berkeley.
America, didn’t know how to change: In part, according to Richard Hirsh, utility hiring practices selected for the risk-averse, noncreative, bottom of the engineering barrel. This led to conservative reactions to new problems. Richard Hirsh, Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
(utility since the Depression): The California blackouts in 2000–2001 were not caused by degraded infrastructure but by a perfect storm of bad legislation, criminal profit-mongering, and poorly designed infrastructure (see chapter 4).
“emissions of greenhouse gasses”: “Economic Benefits of Increasing Grid Resilience to Weather Outages” (2013), 3.
constructing eighty-three new microgrids: “Microgrid Deployment Tracker 4Q15,” Navigant Research, accessed December 15, 2015, https://www.navigantresearch.com/research/microgrid-deployment-tracker-4q15.
power 4.5 million households annually: The Foundation for Water & Energy Education estimates that there is the potential to produce 100,000 MW in the Gorge, though this would require blanketing much of the available space with turbines. “Wind Farms & Northwest Energy Needs,” Foundation for Water & Energy Education, accessed December 1, 2013, http://fwee.org/nw-hydro-tours/how-wind-turbines-generate-electricity/wind-farms-northwest-energy/.
any fuel will do: Dried cow dung, like oil, is a negligible source of electricity production in the United States.
over the sun just as quickly: The problem with solar power, and to a lesser degree wind power, isn’t only these dramatic instances of total cloud cover or breeze-to-stillness, but also that generation is actually very jiggly. Solar panel output shifts five or six times a minute, and a field of solar panels doing this in sync is difficult for the grid’s automation to balance.
a full twenty-four hours to turn either up or down: Eric Hittinger, J. F. Whitacre, and Jay Apt, “Compensating for Wind Variability Using Co-Located Natural Gas Generation and Energy Storage,” Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center Working Paper CEIC-10–01 (December 2010).
can go to Mars: 55.8 million miles in five minutes. Mars’s distance varies from Earth; sometimes it’s closer than this, sometimes farther away. But it wouldn’t be wrong to say that on a good day, under perfect transmission conditions, we could send a current from Indiana to the red planet in about five minutes.
before its sixty seconds are up: The 2003 blackout of the Eastern Seaboard, the third-largest blackout in this history of the planet, essentially happened in thirty of the seconds between 4:11 and 4:12 p.m. There were a lot of problems leading up to these very bad thirty seconds, but the imbalance that tipped over into darkness propagated in about the time it takes to draw in a breath.
meltwater are more than sufficient: On an average blustery day, the wind power in the Gorge produces enough power for three times as many people as live in Oregon.
“Northwest has ever experienced”: Ted Sickinger, “Too Much of a Good Thing: Growth in Wind Power Makes Life Difficult for Grid Managers,” Oregonian, July 17, 2010, http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2010/07/too_much_of_a_good_thing_growt.html.
let the water out through spillways: There is also pumped storage on the Columbia, and excepting years of extreme drought this is all also full in May.
from dinner plates to Grandma’s memory bin: Full disclosure: my father, Bill Bakke, did this (made it illegal for the spillways to operate in the spring). He is not well loved by many in the electricity industry, but we as a nation still eat a lot of Pacific salmon, and without this law the palates of a generation would already be otherwise.
ferocious speeds in the onslaught of wild air: Most newer wind turbines can be turned down via adjustments to pitch and yaw, this was not so much the case in 2010. Such a basic technological improvement is one of the many small things under way that make the integration of variable renewables into our national electricity system increasingly plausible.
care for the grid: In 2013, 42 percent of Spain’s electricity demand was covered by renewables, 21.2 percent wind, 3.1 percent solar photovoltaic, 1.7 percent solar thermoelectric, 2 percent renewable thermal, and 14.2 percent hydroelectric. “Corporate Sustainability Report 2013: 4. Committed to Security of Supply, Efficient Management and Innovation” (Red Eléctrica Corporación, May 7, 2014), http://www.ree.es/sites/default/files/02_NUESTRA_GESTION/Documentos/memoria-2013/English/RC/RC13_07_en.pdf. Despite this centralization, Spain’s grid suffers from similar kinds of problems as Iberdrola faces in Oregon. For example, around Easter 2013, Spain saw “extremely low demand, high production of hydroelectricity with dumping in some basins, and a high producible wind power … Given this scenario, to ensure system security it was necessary to give orders to reduce production to a level not seen to date. These reductions affected, among others, nuclear production an exceptional fact [sic] and unprecedented since 1997.” “Corporate Sustainability Report 2013” (2014), 53.
machines are turned on and running: There were 2,760 turbines in 2011, so three thousand in 2014 is an educated guess. Miriam Raftery, “A Walk Through the Wind Farm with Iberdrola,” East County Magazine, April 2012. http://www.eastcountymagazine.org/walk-through-wind-farm-iberdrola.
electricity these machines make: Some of this has to do with money, but a lot of it has to do with the way the utilities are run and managed. Historically they have been given a form—the so-called “natural monopoly”—that is slow to change, innovate, or cede power to anyone else. This is history and the principal topic of chapters 3 and 4.
line out to the site: The largest wind farm in Texas as of 2015 was the Roscoe Wind Farm, owned and operated by E.ON Climate and Renewables, which began operating in 2009. Eileen O’Grady, “E.ON Completes World’s Largest Wind Farm in Texas,” Reuters, October 1, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/10/01/wind-texas-idUSN3023624320091001#1Oc6qUxRCSELa3Zr.97.
“The turbines installed at the farm range in between 350ft and 415ft tall, and stand 900ft apart. Out of the total number of turbines employed, 209 were the Mitsubishi 1000A model, with a rated output of 1.0MW.” From “Roscoe Wind Farm,” Power Technology, accessed November 8, 2015, http://www.power-technology.com/projects/roscoe-wind-farm/.
1.5 MW GE model: “The widely used GE 1.5-megawatt model, for example, consists of 116-ft blades atop a 212-ft tower for a total height of 328 feet. The blades sweep a vertical airspace of just under an acre. The 1.8-megawatt Vestas V90 from Denmark is also common. Its 148-ft blades (sweeping more than 1.5 acres) are on a 262-ft tower, totaling 410 feet. Another model becoming more common in the U.S. is the 2-megawatt Gamesa G87 from Spain, which sports 143-ft blades (just under 1.5 acres) on a 256-ft tower, totaling 399 feet.” “FAQ: Output from Industrial Wind Power,” National Wind Watch, accessed November 8, 2015, https://www.wind-watch.org/faq-output.php.
“The average nameplate capacity of newly installed wind turbines in the United States in 2014 was 1.9 MW, up 172 percent since 1998–1999.” From “2014 Wind Technologies Market Report” (U.S. Department of Energy, August 2015), http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/2014-Wind-Technologies-Market-Report-8.7.pdf.
“done right it’s a huge opportunity”: These quotes are from the Sickinger (2010) article. Manizer and I mostly talked about domestic hot water heaters and how to make interregional power swaps like the Western Doughnut the norm. These issues are addressed in chapters 8 and 9.
from renewable resources in 2012: A negligibly higher 13 percent in 2014. “How Much U.S. Electricity Is Generated from Renewable Energy?” (2015).
as a whole in 2014 was 6.76 percent: “How Much U.S. Electricity Is Generated from Renewable Energy?” (2015).
Dakotas, Iowa, and West Texas: Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
75 percent of all: “U.S. Wind Energy State Facts,” American Wind Energy Association, accessed September 15, 2015, http://www.awea.org/resources/statefactsheets.aspx?itemnumber=890.
a 3,000 percent increase in a single year: These numbers are from the 2012 Renewable Energy Data Book (National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, October 2013), http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60197.pdf.
“there will be blackouts”: Coral Davenport, “A Challenge from Climate Change Regulations,” New York Times, April 22, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/business/energy-environment/a-challenge-from-climate-change-regulations.html.
“grid designed for the previous century”: Evan Halper, “Power Struggle: Green Energy versus a Grid That’s Not Ready,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/02/nation/la-na-grid-renewables-20131203.
during the previous weeks: I use the term “electrocution” here, but in the early days of electricity. “No standard words had yet been adopted for killing or death by electricity. Ones pondered by the New York Times included electromort, thanelectrize, celectricise, electricide, electropoenize, fulmen, voltacus, and electrocution.” Nicholas Rudduck, “Life and Death by Electricity in 1890: The Transfiguration of William Kemmler,” Journal of American Culture 21, no. 4 (1998): 86, note 8.
without being properly understood: On August 1, 1890, William Kemmler, a convicted murderer and inveterate drunk, was put to the chair and slowly roasted to death over a period of about eight minutes. Despite Edison’s assurances (for he had designed and built the chair) that Kemmler’s would be a swift, humane, and painless death, and despite the fact that the chair had been tested and retested and electricity of varying voltages had been used to efficiently kill all manner of things, from stray dogs to a retired circus elephant, Kemmler did not go out as planned. It was not his size that was the problem; Kemmler was a thin man, petite by today’s standards. Nor was it a lack of sufficient voltage on the coal-fed, steam-powered 1,680-volt dynamo used to power the chair. The problem was that the wire connecting the chair in the Auburn prison to the dynamo in its basement was also being used that day to light thirty-six bulbs strung in parallel, which collectively siphoned off about a thousand volts, leaving a mere trickle of electrical capacity for the chair. What remained was enough to kill Kemmler eventually, but certainly not enough to kill him fast. It was a highly publicized horror that effectively ended Thomas Edison’s career.
its ineffable physics: Gérard Borvon, Histoire de L’électricité: De L’ambre à L’électron (Paris: Vuibert, 2009), 1.
something like an instant: The first working telegraphs appeared in the 1830s, while the 1850s to 1870s saw the advent of intermittently functional transatlantic telegraphy.
displaced a less effective technology: Or as Isaac Asimov once said, “No steam engine or internal combustion engine, however powerful or however perfect, could run a television set (in the absence of electricity) with the direct simplicity electricity makes available to us.” From a funny little pamphlet published by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission: Isaac Asimov, “Electricity and Man” (United States Atomic Energy Commission Office of Information Services, 1972), http://www.osti.gov/includes/opennet/includes/Understanding%20the%20Atom/Electricity%20and%20Man.pdf, 19.
with it remotely fueled electric lighting: The power plant built at Niagara Falls was turned on in 1895, though it did not begin to transmit power to Buffalo until 1896.
always secondary to the story: The first “modern” dynamo for use in industry was invented independently by three different men in 1866; though Faraday gets the true credit in the early 1830s for a machine that makes electricity, his design was not a precursor of the next-generation machines, even though his ideas were essential to these.
by incandescent bulbs: Here Richard Moran was quoting a reporter from the New York Times in his book Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 45.
but it was a grid: James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1997), 170.
3,000-candlepower arc lamps: 3,000 candlepower is a imprecise way to gesture toward the light three thousand candles would emit if they were all in the exact same spot. Though there is no good way to convert from candlepower to the brightness measure we are most used to—that of a 100-watt bulb—as a rough estimate, one 60-watt electric bulb generates the light of approximately a hundred candles. A 3,000-candlepower arc lamp would thus generate the light of something like an 1,800-watt bulb. Jon Henley, “Life Before Artificial Light,” Guardian, October 31, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/31/life-before-artificial-light.
to extraction sites: Williams (1997), 172.
bulbs strung in parallel: The 52 bulbs Edison had turned on in the New York Times editorial office were in addition to the 106 he had strung up in J. P. Morgan’s office on Wall Street. Munson (2005), 18.
“90 percent of his labor”: Munson (2005), 10. Original quote from Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998).
they buzzed disagreeably: Michelle Legro, “The Age of Edison: Radical Invention and the Illuminated World,” Brain Pickings, February 28, 2013, http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/28/the-age-of-edison/. See also Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America (New York: Penguin, 2013).
range of human hearing: Sound researcher R. Murray Schafer discovered that when American and Canadian students were asked, during meditation in a deeply relaxed state, to sing whatever tone seemed to arise most naturally from the center of their beings, the most frequent response was B natural. Students in Germany and other European countries tended to hum G sharp. In America and Canada, our electricity operates on an alternating current of 60 cycles per second. This resonant frequency corresponds to the B natural tone on the musical scale. In Europe, the electrical current is 50 cycles per second, corresponding musically to G sharp. Exposed for a lifetime to the silent noise in our walls, light fixtures, and appliances, we begin to hum right along with our electricity. R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), 99.
subdividing an electric current: William J. Broad, “Subtle Analogies Found at the Core of Edison’s Genius,” New York Times, March 12, 1985, http://www.osti.gov/includes/opennet/includes/Understanding%20the%20Atom/World%20Within%20Worlds%20The%20Story%20of%20Nuclear%20Energy%20Vol.1.pdf.
all pathways are equal: Curiously, this quality of electricity still confounds regular people trying to regulate and legislate the grid. It is very hard for us to wrap our heads around the fact that electricity will take all paths available to it simultaneously, with no preference for what appears logical to us: the shorter, more direct route. As we shall see in chapter 5, this became a real problem during the 2003 blackout.
turned off your TV: Steve Wirt, “The Series Circuit,” Oswego City School District Regents Exam Prep Center, 1998, http://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/physics/phys03/bsercir/default.htm.
other paths remain open: As resistance in a parallel circuit system increases—when, for example, you plug five power strips, each containing five power cords, into one power strip and plug that into a single wall outlet—current actually increases. This can lead to unexpected conflagrations! This is why, when you were eight and attending mandatory fire safety classes, they urged you not to plug too much stuff into a single outlet.
flickered to light in 1882: Technically, his first actual grid was the one he built to light his Menlo Park laboratory, but Pearl Street was the first public installation.
contemporary 15-watt bulb: If you have seen a vintage “Edison” incandescent in a store or hanging in your favorite bar, you know the relative brightness of these bulbs fairly well. They were dim enough that building codes demanding lightwells were not changed until well into the 1940s, when fluorescent bulbs became more readily available. Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).
populated as lower Manhattan: Pearl Street was designed to light a tiny tranche of lower Manhattan—principally Wall Street but also the offices of the New York Times, those of Edison’s primary investor, J. Pierpont Morgan, as well as those of his lawyer and principle advocate.
area around Pearl Street: New York had near to 200,000 horses in the late 1800s, each of which laid down a thick layer (up to 30 pounds per day) of horse shit over every cobble of every street, and the valleys between the buildings were filled with sparrows feasting on the remnant grass seeds in this equine effluvia. The flies were a less poetic accompaniment.
other foreign countries: “The Brush Electric Light” Scientific American 44 (14). April 2, 1881.
into the 1920s: Hughes (1983).
Edison invented his own: Michael B. Schiffer, Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 289.
carbonized bamboo filaments: Maggie Koerth-Baker, Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 18. The electric lightbulb was “invented” by at least twenty-two people before an improved version was successfully commercialized by Thomas Edison in 1879. Henley (2009).
early-autumn rains: Curiously, this is an East Coast and Midwestern problem, where streams have high volumes of water but run over minimal elevation. In the Sierra, where water-powered electricity was very common by the time Appleton got its grid, water runs at low volume but over large shifts in elevation. This, coupled with the gradual melting of snowpack over the spring and summer months, yields a surprisingly even flow of water and thus constant voltage for the lighting systems. Williams (1997), 171.
Wisconsin’s fledgling utility: Freeberg (2013), 155. By 1910 the cost of a bulb had come down to 17 cents.
unit of electrical tension: This unit of electrical tension was named after the Italian polymath Alessandro Volta (1734–1827), who invented the first electric battery (the eponymous Voltaic pile) and in the process proved that electricity could be chemically generated. He attracted the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte, who summoned him to Paris in 1801 to present his work at a séance at the Institute of France. By the time Bonaparte was emperor nine years later, he was so enamored with Volta that he refused his attempts to retire from his professorship at the University of Pavia, stating: “a good general ought to die on the field of honor.” Beset with honors and flattering invitations from all over Europe, the quiet Volta finally got his wish, retiring in Italy in 1819. John Munro, “Alessandro Volta,” in Pioneers of Electricity; or, Short Lives of the Great Electricians (London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1890), 89–102.
pulley system in the place: Eric J. Lerner, “What’s Wrong with the Electric Grid?” Industrial Physicist 9, no. 5 (November 2003).
electric clocks to slow: On Long Island, it’s been a consistent source of jokes that everything is slower there than in the rest of New York State, not because of the leisurely pace of life, but because of the poor quality of their electric power—a New York City second takes something more like 1.005 seconds on Long Island.
sort-of-colorless wash: Freeberg (2013).
either 1,200 or 2,000 volts: Today’s American household appliances like toasters and curling irons run on 110 volts, while anything that charges from a USB port is getting 5 volts, and a modern long-distance power line can run easily at 765 kilovolts (kV) (765,000 volts).
Los Angeles, San Jose: David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.
United States privately owned: The reason that we have private ownership of hot water and of air-conditioning in the United States is because of the very gradual way the two products entered the market. The Soviet Union modernized all at once, and modern laboratory buildings were built on university campuses with a central plant already in place. Time span of development (gradual versus fast) rather than political ideology or a structural bias toward centralization is, in these two cases, the main factor in these systems having been designed differently in different locations.
over municipal sales: If one looks back to the list from Scientific American above, about two thirds of installed arc lighting in the United States in 1881 was private.
up and running: Munson (2005), 44.
“almost alone as a central station”: Forrest McDonald, Insull: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utility Tycoon (Washington, D.C.: Beard Books, 2004), 30.
and electronic trading systems 24/7: Antina Von Schnitzler, “Traveling Technologies: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa,” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2013): 670–93.
any inroads at all: Ronald Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
to make a profit from electricity: Tobey (1997).
power necessary to make it run: Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., “The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum” (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987).
technologies of any kind: Fred E. H. Schroeder, “More ‘Small Things Forgotten’: Domestic Electrical Plugs and Receptacles, 1881–1931,” Technology and Culture 27, no. 3 (1986): 525–43.
flowing in a river: To return for a moment to the atomic physics of it, the thing that an electron desires in an atom is communicated by means of a charge. An electron maintains a minute negative charge and will move toward anything that has a positive charge, as this is what betrays the presence of a slot wherein it can nestle. A whole atom is neutral; it has no charge, whereas an atom after having been broken by an electrical generator is positively charged.
a symptom of it: Today in North America almost all the electricity on the grid is polyphase, and it is kept at an even 60 hertz (Hz) or 60 cycles (reversals) per second. In Europe it’s 50 Hz. Japan has both. The number of cycles per second is almost arbitrary. Too low a rate of alternation and incandescent bulbs flicker; you can literally see the packets of energy powering, stopping, and then powering your bulb again as it glows bright, stops, glows bright, stops. With too high a rate of oscillation, motors have a hard time working very well; for the motors’ sake, most grids in industrialized countries run at the lowest rate of alternation practicable, given our lighting needs. Most industrializing countries, however, to the degree that they have a national electrical infrastructure at all, pick their preferred rate of oscillation according to the norm prevailing where they import most of their electronics from (usually this is the country that originally colonized them), because the companies making the lightbulbs, toasters, and washing machines for particular markets build them with the appropriate electrical capacities; they are made to run at either 50 or 60 Hz (oscillations per second) and either 110 or 220 volts (intensity of ardor).
using alternating current: “Tesla Life and Legacy—War of the Currents,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_warcur.html.
competing streetcar lines: According to Munson (2005, p. 32), in 1887 Edison had sold 121 DC central stations, and George Westinghouse, in his first year of business and Edison’s main competitor, was working on 68. A year later, in 1888, Edison had installed a total of 44,000 new bulbs, while Westinghouse had installed more than that number (48,000) in October 1888 alone. By 1889, a mere decade after Edison’s first viewing of electric bulbs strung in parallel at Menlo Park, Westinghouse had generators running more than 350,000 AC-powered bulbs.
125 cycles per second: Hughes (1983), 128.
machines that used it: Munson (2005), 43, and Schroeder (1986), 530–31.
“polyphase and then the reverse”: Hughes (1983), 122. One remarkable thing about Hughes’s account of the early processes of electrification is his care in showing the effects that things, rather than people, have on systems design and infrastructural trajectories, including things like business structures, previous investments, little machines, and materials.
or by manila rope: Harold I. Sharlin, “The First Niagara Falls Power Project,” Business History Review 35, no. 1 (1961): 59–74.
center for the Northeast?: The seeping toxic pit called Love Canal, was one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. It was the result of an early misstep in the history of electrification. A ditch was dug by one Mr. Love in the 1890s to move power between upper and lower Niagara and, even before it was completed it was rendered unnecessary when electricity was chosen as the newest and best means for transmitting power. In the 1920s this half-finished etch into the local landscape was used as an industrial waste dump. Many of the companies that made the products that would allow us to build America into an industrial power house were initially situated near to Niagara, precisely because of the vast quantities of easy-to-access electricity, and their waste went into Love’s canal. In the 1950s the area was redeveloped: the canal was covered over with dirt and some houses were built, as was a school for the kids born and raised there. It worked OK, for a while, but in the mid-1970s a particularly intense rainstorm caused the sludge that was buried beneath—22,000 tones of chemical waste—to begin to leach out and percolate up into the gardens and dug basements of these houses. It stank. And the kids, who can be relied upon to touch anything, found themselves with chemical burns on their hands and faces. More on this in chapter 4. Eckardt C. Beck, “The Love Canal Tragedy,” United States Environmental Protection Agency Journal, January 1979, http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/love-canal-tragedy.
“adoption of alternating current”: Sharlin (1961), 72.
its lines was begun: “Harnessing Niagara Falls: The Adams Power Station—The Most Famous of Early Hydroelectric Power Stations,” Edison Tech Center: The Miracle of Electricity and Engineering, 2013, www.edisontechcenter.org/niagara.htm (5/2015).
soon to follow: “The History of the Aluminium Industry,” Aluminium Leader, accessed November 27, 2015, http://www.aluminiumleader.com/history/industry_history/.
screwed into light sockets: Schroeder (1986), 530–31.
“on the area I was at”: From “Niagara Falls Schoellkopf Power Station Disaster, Thursday, June 7th, 1956: A History,” Niagara Frontier, accessed November 10, 2015, http://www.niagarafrontier.com/schoellkopf.html.
“45 percent of manufactured products”: Richard F. Hirsh, Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 12.
(Warren Buffett is number 39): Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther, The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates; A Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present (New York: Citadel Press, 1996).
absolute control of a market: Hirsh (1999), 16.
and commercial buildings: Munson (2005), 45.
investors to determine: This use of shell corporations, or holding companies, was Enron’s number one tool in attracting investment despite being essentially bankrupt.
the standard of American power: It is said that Edison never made another truly innovative intervention in the burgeoning technical world of the late nineteenth century after the death of his first wife in 1884 (see McDonald, 2004). “In 1884, Thomas Edison’s world was changing rapidly. Financing for his electric light system was drying up and he was planning to cut his losses and get out of the business altogether. And then Mary died, leaving Edison with three young children (ages 8 to 12), no real job, and no clue about what to do next. He had to borrow $500 to bury his wife.” From “Thomas Edison’s First Wife May Have Died of a Morphine Overdose,” Rutgers Today, November 15, 2011, http://news.rutgers.edu/research-news/thomas-edison%E2%80%99s-first-wife-may-have-died-morphine-overdose/20111115#.VfcmIKI_hUx.
the infrastructure that carries it: Batteries don’t change this fact, they just shrink down the size of the “infrastructure” for a drastically delimited period of time. The computer I am typing on needs to be plugged in every twelve hours, rather than every three. The “book” you are likely reading this on needs to be plugged in at least once a month. And even the best e-car out there today needs to be plugged in after it’s been driven.
“customers at any given moment”: Maury Klein, The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 403.
“but its filth and its huge rats”: McDonald (2004), 56.
another five hundred private plants: Klein (2010), 401.
“in the hands of a receiver”: “Central-station electric service; its commercial development and economic significance as set forth in the public addresses (1897–1914) of Samuel Insull,” (Chicago: Privately Printed, 1915), 128. Available at http://archive.org/stream/centralstationel00insurich/centralstationel00insurich_djvu.txt.
users of electric current: Klein (2010), 404.
population of the city: Munson (2005), 46.
“2.5¢ per kilowatt-hour in 1909”: Munson (2005), 46.
the hundreds of thousands: By lowering his rates Insull made the mass adoption of appliances with their guaranteed twenty-four-hour load affordable, while through his fervent, some would say propagandistic, promotion of the modern home he made refrigerators, freezers, and home hot water desirable.
grid-provided electricity: Munson (2005), 48.
“interest on investment”: Klein (2010), 404.
idling for lack of load: Klein writes: “ ‘If your maximum [load] is very high,’ Insull said, ‘and your average consumption very low, heavy interest charges will necessarily follow. The nearer your average to your maximum load the closer you approximate to the most economical conditions of production, and the lower you can afford to sell your current.’ Insull did not arrive at these insights quickly or all at once, but his experience kept reinforcing one central theme: The way to reduce costs was by increasing output, which meant going after more customers and finding a mix of usages that spread the load across the clock. And the way to get more customers was to lower rates” (2010), 405.
“capacity of 68.5 kilowatts”: Munson (2005), 47. Here is Insull’s actual version: “Take, for instance … a block in a residence district of Chicago which has 193 apartments in it. We have in that block 189 customers, and the number of lamps per customer is between ten and eleven. The kilowatt-hours used per year are 33,000. If you take the customer separate maxima amounting to 68.5 kilowatts you will find that the load factor is only 5.5 percent. All of you know full well that if your entire plant is only in use 5.5 percent of the time it is only a question of time when you will be in the hands of a receiver, but if you take the maximum at the transformers you will find that the maxima of the various customers comes at different times of the day, that instead of the load factor being 5.5 percent it’s 10 percent, representing a maximum of 20 kilowatts” (1915).
American electricity industry: Munson (2005), 53.
sport a similar structure: One can imagine that if a gang’s territory was supported by government charter, the negotiations at the edges of this territory would be less bloody. See The Wire, season 3.
between three and five: Klein (2010), 402.
about 50 percent efficiency: A similar law, called the Betz limit, sets the maximum achievable efficiency of a wind turbine at 59 percent. Peak efficiency is 70 to 80 percent of maximum efficiency, or 41 to 47 percent of the energy available in the wind being converted into electricity. This is slightly higher than what a heat engine can reliably provide, but the real difference is not the efficiency, but the mechanics involved in converting fuel to electric current. Wind is just much less costly and far less polluting than coal.
without boiling it: Hirsh (1999), 56.
around 34 percent efficiency: “What Is the Efficiency of Different Types of Power Plants?” U.S. Energy Information Administration, accessed September 1, 2014, http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=107&t=3.
approaching this goal: A better critique, and one discussed at length in chapter 7, is why convert a fuel (wood, coal, gas, etc.) into electricity, transport this electricity vast distances (which involves line loss), and then use it to heat a home, when the same fuel could be used to produce heat without the intervening infrastructure?
in the late 1880s: The second law of thermodynamics was first put to paper in 1824 by Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot in Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. He was a French military engineer and physicist who died of cholera at the age of thirty-six. Because people feared contagion, they buried him with most of his writings; this book is his only surviving work.
business in the late 1950s: Indeed, as Jonathan Koomey has pointed out, forecasting, regardless of how complex the model is, does not appear to ever accurately model future events. Personal conversation, December 12, 2010. See also http://www.koomey.com/.
left well enough alone: “The managers’ view of technological progress may have been influenced by an associated belief in mechanical perfectibility. Trained as engineers, managers had an educational background that stressed solving problems. This background served them well as they integrated new technologies into power production and distribution systems, but it also promulgated the opinion that ‘failure is but an anomaly that can be removed in a future that is more completely controlled by engineers.’ In other words if a problem exists the engineer can fix it using the problem-solving approach and succeed in perpetuating progress.” Hirsh (1989), 125.
America like a sledgehammer: Daniel Barber argues that there was a sense of worry about the imbalance between sites of production (of oil) and sites of use as early as the late 1940s in the United States and that midcentury solar architecture (craftsman) homes are a result of this. Nevertheless the reality of this issue didn’t hit home until 1973. Daniel A. Barber, “The Post-Oil Architectural Imaginary in the 1950s,” public lecture, “Lines and Nodes: Media, Infrastructure, and Aesthetics,” at New York University’s Media, Culture, and Communication symposium, 2014.
investor-owned leviathans: “U.S. Electric Utility Industry Statistics (2015–2016 Annual Directory & Statistical Report),” American Public Power Association, accessed October 26, 2015, http://www.publicpower.org/files/PDFs/USElectricUtilityIndustryStatistics.pdf. American Public Power Association sourced this information from Energy Information Administration Forms EIA-861 and 861S, 2013.
and a single substation: “About Us,” City of Rancho Cucamonga, accessed September 1, 2014, http://www.cityofrc.us/cityhall/engineering/rcmu/aboutus.asp.
wealthy, irate adversary: Any California community was, in 2002, granted the legal right to administer their own electricity as an aggregate by Assembly Bill 117, “An act to amend Sections 218.3, 366, 394, and 394.25 of, and to add Sections 331.1, 366.2, and 381.1 to, the Public Utilities Code, relating to public utilities,” http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/01-02/bill/asm/ab_0101-0150/ab_117_bill_20020924_chaptered.pdf.
“the 3,000,000,000 dollar mark”: “Samuel Insull Is Victim of Heart Attack in Paris,” Berkeley Daily Gazette, July 16, 1938.
had begun to fail: So much so, that an executive from Virginia Light and Power at one point referred to his utility as a “construction company.” Hirsh (1989), 111.
grew too costly to complete: The inordinate expense of building nuclear power plants, each of which was more like a carefully crafted work of art rather than a cookie-cutter prefab job and thus beset by the last-minute modifications and unanticipated delays that come with doing something complex for the first time, made this former truth of the industry’s business model stumble as well.
“trucking transportation systems”: “Statement of Former U.S. President Carter at Energy Security Hearing Before U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Carter Center, May 12, 2009, http://www.cartercenter.org/news/editorials_speeches/BostonGlobe-energy-security-hearings.html.
decentralized power options: Carter also did a great deal to strengthen America’s reliance on fossil fuels, by encouraging more coal use and the exploitation of domestic oil. His problem was energy security and he was very catholic in his approach to solving it. Williams (1997), 325.
commitment to fundamental change: This process might have been inevitable, for as Buckminster Fuller famously pointed out, “All the technical curves rise in tonnage and volumetric size to reach a giant peak after which miniaturization sets in. After that a more economic art takes over which also goes through the same cycle of doing progressively more with less.” Critical Path (1981).
the project and opted out: Hirsh (1999), 82.
any given billing cycle: The most standard “promotional rate” structure was to charge less the more electricity was used. For example, in 1973 ConEd (New York City’s utility) charged “4.4 cents per kWh for each of the first 50 kWh of use, but only 3.9 cents for the next 60 kWh, 3.4 cents for the subsequent 120 kWh and only 2.8 cents for each unit greater than 240 kWh.” Richard F. Hirsh, “The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act,” Powering the Past: A Look Back, accessed October 1, 2014, http://americanhistory.si.edu/powering/past/history4.htm. (Just as a point of reference, in 2007 the average American home used about 40 kWh per day, or 1,200 kWh per billing cycle, and paid about half as much for the last 1,000 as they did for the first 50). The figure of 40 kWh per day comes from “Average Daily Electricity Usage,” Pennywise Meanderings, October 2, 2007, http://pinchthatpenny.savingadvice.com/2007/10/02/average-daily-electricity-usage_30740/.
mix of generations: Many early electric power stations, including the Pearl Street Station, recycled their waste heat, usually for district heating. Steam ducts, rather than venting into the air, exited power plants underground and ran through nearby neighborhoods, providing hot water vapor to home and office radiators as far as they went. As power plants got bigger and moved farther away from urban centers, thanks in part to the long distance transmission AC enabled, this secondary use of excess heat by electricity generators was lost. There simply weren’t any neighborhoods around and so excess heat was released into the sky.
By 1962 all that had changed: As factories were slowly convinced during the Insull era to buy their electricity instead of making it for themselves, they, too, began to vent waste heat into the atmosphere rather than reusing it. Technically, the steam heated in a cogenerating factory is first used to make electricity and after used for the industrial processes to which the plant is devoted.
all the way down to nothing: Hirsh (1999), 81. Hirsh goes on to state that in 1908, 60 percent of total generation capacity was non-utility, though only some of this was cogeneration. In 1977 that number was slightly over 3 percent and almost all of it was cogeneration.
of their own industrial processes: “Combined Heat and Power: Frequently Asked Questions,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, www.epa.gov/chp/documents/faq.pdf.
power to the local utility: Hirsh (1999), 83.
almost all of it was variable: Williams (1997), 328–40.
“Act for Economists of 1978”: Hirsh (1999), 125.
“fuel or next planned facility”: As quoted in Hirsh (1999), 125.
PURPA era contracts: Randall Swisher and Kevin Porter, “Renewable Policy Lessons from the U.S.: The Need for Consistent and Stable Policies,” in Renewable Energy Policy and Politics: A Handbook for Decision-Making, edited by Karl Mallon (New York: Earthscan, 2006), 188. Swisher is a former executive director of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), 1989–2009; Porter is a former senior analyst for NREL.
promised 1,178 new kWh: This example is taken from Hirsh (1999), 126.
All in 80 MW chunks: Swisher and Porter (2006), 186.
“world’s solar power electricity”: Hirsh (2014).
“or a wind turbine in California”: Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 31.
a tax break of nearly 50 percent: “An incident at Oak Creek Energy systems captures the frenetic pace of the period. Oak Creek, a wind developer near Tehachapi, was making money so fast in the early 1980s that they misplaced a check for $500,000. Auditors eventually found the check—still negotiable—nearly a decade later during bankruptcy proceedings.” Gipe (1995), 31.
without really understanding why: Cashman’s point is that the problem was with the weight and flexibility of the blades—long, flexible blades are not particularly good for harvesting the wind. “All the wind turbines that ever worked, they were built by hippies,” he pointed out. “The ones in America were built by hippies who actually had masters degrees, bachelors and masters degrees in aeronautical engineering. It was the middle of the Vietnam War and it became clear to them that the only jobs they could get was with Sikorski Helicopter or some other defense thing which was going to build stuff for Vietnam and they didn’t want to do that.” “So they were stuck with an expertise and many of them went just back to the land and then they sat there and watched the wind go by and said: ‘I know enough about air: I could build a little thing.’ And they began building these little wind turbines in different places in the country. And then they thought: ‘Well, maybe I should build some for my friends and we should make a little company.’ And so they did that.” Interview with Tyrone Cashman, March 2011.
10 percent of its in-state generation: These numbers come from “U.S. Wind Energy State Facts,” (2015). See also Wieser (2015). “Electric Power Monthly: Table 1.17A. Net Generation from Wind,” U.S. Energy Information Administration, August 28, 2015, www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_17_a. The average American household uses about 1,000 kWh per month; this puts the present wind energy output for California at 1.3 million households and Texas at 3.6 million households.
but that’s not news: Zachary Shahan, “Renewable Energy = 13.4 percent of U.S. Electricity Generation in 2014 (Exclusive),” CleanTechnica, March 10, 2015, http://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/10/renewable-energy-13-4-of-us-electricity-generation-in-2014-exclusive/. See also “2014 Renewable Energy Data Book” (National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, December 2015), http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/64720.pdf
predicted to only grow: Roy L. Hales, “Solar & WIND = 53 percent of New U.S. Electricity Capacity in 2014,” CleanTechnica, February 3, 2015, http://cleantechnica.com/2015/02/03/solar-wind-53-new-us-electricity-capacity-2014/.
power from renewable sources: Dave Levitan, “DOE: U.S. Could Easily Incorporate 80 Percent Renewables in 2050,” June 19, 2012, http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/doe-us-could-easily-incorporate-80-percent-renewables-in-2050.
utilities as natural monopolies: Hirsh (1999), 131, quoting Janice Hamrin’s “The Competitive Cost Advantages of Cogeneration” (1987).
turning down their thermostats?: Hirsh (1989).
would be something like “reregulation”: The term “utility consensus” comes from Hirsh’s Power Loss (1999).
compliance to its terms: James L. Sweeney, The California Electricity Crisis (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002).
“two years to change a rule”: This comes from a personal conversation with Fred Pickel in Los Angeles in 2010. He continued, “whereas if it was allowed to go under a more commercially responsive approach, like the gas industry, when somebody is a bad actor, the rules change. We’re no longer doing that kind of thing.”
“virtual shopping malls”: Bill Keller, “Enron for Dummies,” New York Times, January 26, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/26/opinion/enron-for-dummies.html.
debt, greed, and risk: If some of Enron’s profits were linked to their energy trading, most of their more straightforwardly illegal activity had to do with the exploitation of complex financial tools (derivatives mostly), money laundering, hiding debt in affiliated corporations, and paying government officials to specially manufacture loopholes for them. This, while also allowing individuals within the company, most notably Andy Fastow (the CFO), to maintain huge conflicts of interest in the management of open and hidden assets. Enron was thus first but not foremost an energy company.
“an energy nightmare”: Gov. Davis, State of the State Address, January 8, 2001. Quoted in Sweeney (2002), 278.
during a nuclear disaster: Debbie Van Tassel, “Being a Watchdog of FirstEnergy Corp.,” Nieman Reports, Summer 2004: “The Energy Beat: Complex and Compelling” (June 14, 2004), http://niemanreports.org/articles/being-a-watchdog-of-firstenergy-corp/.
Three Mile Island in 1979: Van Tassel (2004).
20 percent of America’s power: Paul L. Joskow and John E. Parsons, “The Future of Nuclear Power After Fukushima” (MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, February 2012).
stories of this kind: See especially Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey, Nine Mile Point/Unit 1 in New York, and San Onofre (see note below) in California.
doubt that they are old: Davis-Besse began operating in 1978, Vermont Yankee in 1972; San Onofre reactor 1 came online in 1968, and its reactors 2 and 3 (along with the Diablo Canyon reactors) came online in the mid-1980s, making them among the last nuclear power plants in the country to go into operation.
20 percent of its generating capacity: San Onofre—a complex of three nuclear reactors on the rocky California coast between Los Angeles and San Diego—had its number 2 and 3 reactors shuttered in 2012 because of premature wear on over 3,000 newly installed tubes in the replacement steam generators. A year and a half and many attempts to solve the problem later, California decided to shut the plants for good. (Reactor 1 was decommissioned in 1992; it is the most famous of San Onofre’s three because its reactor core was accidentally installed upside down back in 1977 when the station was first built.) Said David Freeman (former head of the California Power Authority) of San Onofre and Diablo Canyon nuclear power plants: they are “disasters waiting to happen: aging, unreliable reactors sitting near earthquake fault zones on the fragile Pacific Coast, with millions or hundreds of thousands of Californians living nearby” (quoted in Eric Wesoff, “PG&E Study: Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant Is Earthquake-Safe Despite Newly Detected Faults,” Greentech Media, September 15, 2014, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/PGE-Diablo-Canyon-Nuclear-Plant-is-Earthquake-Safe-Despite-Newly-Detected). True enough, but with the closure of San Onofre, Southern California lost 20 percent of its electrical generation capacity. Should Diablo Canyon, the last of California’s nuclear reactors, also be closed (it was unfortunately built directly on top of a geologic fault line), California will lose an additional 7 percent of its electrical generating capacity—about 2.2 million homes’ worth.
modern electric company: “U.S. Electric Utility Industry Statistics (2015–2016 Annual Directory & Statistical Report),” (2015).
than by producing it: “The Changing Structure of the Electric Power Industry 2000: An Update” (Washington, DC: Energy Information Administration, Office of Coal, Nuclear, Electric and Alternate Fuels, U.S. Department of Energy, October 2000).
in good working order: Van Tassel (2004).
more growth than is acceptable: See “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): Tree Trimming and Vegetation Management Landowners,” Federal Energy Regulation Commission, accessed May 1, 2015, http://www.ferc.gov/resources/faqs/tree-veget.asp.
and burst into flames: PG&E was allegedly responsible for at least fifty other fires in California, four of which were serious, before the Trauner Fire case was filed. This is according to Tom Nadeau, Showdown at the Bouzy Rouge: People v. PG&E (Grass Valley, CA: Comstock Bonanza Press, 1998), 14. This is an exceptional book that tells the story of the people of Nevada County attempting to hold PG&E responsible for their inactions. The company has more employees than Nevada County has people, and their budget for legal defenses is forty times that of Nevada County. But the county won.
national electric infrastructure: Squirrels form a nasty second in this regard; see chapter 7.
“and we will melt”: John P. Coyne, “Boom Signaled Power-Line Arc in Walton Hills,” The Plain Dealer, August 24, 2003, http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/electric/2003/arc.htm.
very quickly indeed: An electric charge in a vacuum moves at the speed of light; domesticated electricity on earth moves somewhat slower due to the resistance in the wires. Nevertheless, it still moves very fast.
a fork in an outlet: Humans are relatively good conductors, which is why we have built an electrical system that separates us from it by all sorts of poor conductive materials, like the air, rubber, glass, or ceramic. The reason young Adam Muha was warned with such vehemence out of his driveway by a lineman, who knew more about the ways of electricity than the teen, was because when electricity is arcing it will seek to land on a good conductor that’s also ideally a bit pointy, like a tree, or a tall boy, or, in the American West, a cow (hundreds of which are killed by lightning every year).
“not anticipated or controlled”: Lerner (2003), 8.
within which this machine functions: This is true for airplanes as well; there was simply no way to take into account, before 2001, the fact that some people might decide to use airplanes as bombs. This choice by Al Qaeda falls into a different model of organizational disaster: the Black Swan, in which unimaginable things do exist and very often these are the selfsame things that surprise us and destroy the systems we have put into place. The global cultural environment was not initially included in the Swiss cheese model for airline safety. Now it is. And we stand in long security lines and are subject to two entirely new government agencies (TSA and Homeland Security) as a result.
thoroughly man-made: It does seem that in all of this, there was a single criminal act. Somebody, under cover of darkness, stole the top of that very first tree. So when the government task force field team investigating the blackout was sent round to the Muhas’ place, they found the offending tree nicely sawed up and stacked in piles—a task performed by FirstEnergy’s crews as part of the postblackout cleanup. But when these logs were unstacked and measured, they amounted to only 42 feet of tree—the very top was gone! While not exactly accusing anybody of anything, the investigating team noted in the “Final Report on the August 14, 2003 Blackout in the United States and Canada: Causes and Recommendations” (U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, April 2004), p. 60, that “portions of the tree had been removed from the site,” a fact that made it difficult to “determine the exact height of the line contact, the measured height is a minimum and the actual contact was likely three to four feet higher.”
In other words, this missing arboreal crown served a purpose. Without it, it was impossible to prove criminal negligence in FirstEnergy’s admittedly poky approach to tree pruning. The evidence necessary to make such a case had been tampered with. Admitting to nothing, FirstEnergy spokesman Ralph DiNicola retorted: “If something was missing we can surmise someone grabbed some firewood.” And perhaps he is right; somebody might have just carted off that last, critical four-plus feet of treetop to burn in their woodstove. But why not take the rest of the tree? After all, there were another 42 feet of nicely hewn trunk ready to be stacked, to age, and to become heat of their own, one long winter night. Though eyebrows were raised by this seemingly innocuous theft of evidence from the origin point of the blackout, it is almost more remarkable for being the only moment of maleficence in the entire debacle. See Peter Krouse, Teresa Dixon Murray, and John Funk, “Top of tree in blackout investigation is missing remnants found under FirstEnergy line,” Plain Dealer, November 22, 2003: C1.
afternoon the East went dark: It wasn’t the weather that brought down the grid; it wasn’t the wind, and it wasn’t even raining. And though it was hot, in the high 80s across most of the blacked-out region, none of the first three lines were overloaded—they were not being asked to carry more electricity than they could bear. Air conditioners may have been sucking up electrons and churning out cool air everywhere in the East, and this demand for electricity certainly meant the system was operating under stress, but they were not deemed causal.
“use their own tunes”: Lerner (2003), 10.
40 tons of chlorine bleach for free: Joe Taffe, personal conversation, May 10, 2011.
like pork bellies or pig iron: From the point of view of the consumer, electrons still bear little resemblance to pork bellies and pig iron. This is one of the problems discussed in chapter 6.
homes in Columbus, Ohio: This is using the crude measure of twenty-five 100-watt lightbulbs per household. The example is also from Lerner (2003).
25 percent of all energy trading: “Electricity 101: Frequently Asked Questions,” Office of Electricity Delivery & Energy Reliability, accessed September 23, 2015, http://energy.gov/oe/information-center/educational-resources/electricity-101#ppl1.
care or recipient of cash: Hertzog (2013).
buoyed up and smoothed out: For another version of this same story, one that blames the blackout almost entirely on a lack of reactive power (VARS) on the grid, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 24–28.
in the summer of 1996: Robert Peltier, “How to Make VARs—and a Buck,” Power Magazine, June 15, 2007, http://www.powermag.com/how-to-make-varsand-a-buck/?pagenum=1.
station after the event: Charlie Wells, “Houston Woman Thelma Taormina Pulls Gun on Electric Company Worker for Trying to Install ‘Smart Meter,’ ” New York Daily News, July 19, 2012, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/houston-woman-thelma-taormina-pulls-gun-electric-company-worker-install-smart-meter-article-1.1118051.
which were watching Shrek 2: “Researchers Claim Smart Meters Can Reveal TV Viewing Habits,” Metering.com, September 21, 2011, http://www.metering.com/researchers-claim-smart-meters-can-reveal-tv-viewing-habits/. For the research conducted at the University of Washington, see Antonio Regalado, “Rage Against the Smart Meter,” MIT Technology Review, April 26, 2012, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/427497/rage-against-the-smart-meter/. And for readers of German: Prof. Dr.-Ing U. Greveler, Dr. B. Justus, and D. Löhr, “Hintergrund und Experimentelle Ergebnisse Zum Thema ‘Smart Meter und Datenschutz’ ” (Fachhochschule Münster University of Applied Sciences, September 20, 2011), https://web.archive.org/web/20121117073419/http://www.its.fh-muenster.de/greveler/pubs/smartmeter_sep11_v06.pdf.
other in any substantial way: On the utility side the claims sounded like this: “The accuracy of Smart Meters, both in development and practice, has been confirmed to improve on the older electro-mechanical meter technology. All meters, regardless of technology and design, are required to meet national standards such as ANSI C12 for meter accuracy and operation before being installed.” “Smart Meters and Smart Meter Systems: A Metering Industry Perspective” (Edison Electric Institute, Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, Utilities Telecom Council, March 2011), http://www.eei.org/issuesandpolicy/grid-enhancements/documents/smartmeters.pdf.
Nevertheless, a great many people noticed that their bills after the new meters were higher. Tom Zeller Jr., “ ‘Smart’ Electric Meters Draw Complaints of Inaccuracy,” New York Times, November 12, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/business/13meter.html. See also Katherine Tweed, “Are Traditional Electricity Meters Accurate?” Greentech Media, March 30, 2010, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/are-traditional-elecricity-meters-accurate.
will rise again anytime soon: “Energy and Technology: Let There Be Light,” Economist, January 17, 2015, 11.
meters as of 2014: “Frequently Asked Questions: How Many Smart Meters Are Installed in the United States, and Who Has Them?” U.S. Energy Information Administration, accessed November 1, 2014, http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=108&t=3.
electricity use at the same time: Martin LaMonica, “GreenBiz 101: What Do You Need to Know About Demand Response?” GreenBiz, April 29, 2014, http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/04/29/greenbiz-101-what-do-you-need-know-about-demand-response.
to right about 2 percent: “A typical coal-fired electrical plant might be 38 percent efficient, so a little more than one-third of the chemical energy content of the fuel is ultimately converted to usable electricity. In other words, as much as 62 percent of the original energy fails to find its way to the electrical grid. Once electricity leaves the plant, further losses occur during delivery. Finally, it reaches an incandescent lightbulb where it heats a thin wire filament until the metal glows, wasting still more energy as heat. The resulting light contains only about 2 percent of the energy content of the coal used to produce it. Swap that bulb for a compact fluorescent and the efficiency rises to around 5 percent—better, but still a small fraction of the original.” This comes from “What You Need to Know About Energy: Sources and Uses,” The National Academies Press, http://www.nap.edu/reports/energy/sources.html. Also, though his math is wrong, Rob Rhinehart has a delightful article on the same subject. “How I Gave Up Alternating Current,” Mostly Harmless, August 3, 2015, http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331&utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=445526e8ef-dailylabemail3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d68264fd5e-445526e8ef-364971681.
to deal with every day: “In spite of the increasing number of pubs with large-screen televisions, 71 per cent of football fans would watch a final involving England at home or at a friend’s house, a survey … found. This would lead to a massive surge in electricity during half time intervals and after the final whistle is blown, as people head to the fridge for a beer or the kettle for a cup of tea. The phenomenon, known as a TV pickup, occurs most days during popular programmes, but big football matches result in a heavier demand. The expected increase in electricity usage for England v USA will be 1,200 megawatts at half time and around 1,100 megawatts at the final whistle. The predicted surge if England gets to the final and the game goes to penalties would beat the previous record for a TV programme, set after England lost on spot kicks to West Germany in the 1990 World Cup when a 2,800 MW demand was imposed by the ending of the penalty shootout in the England v West Germany FIFA World Cup semi-final.” “National Grid Anticipates Power Surges during World Cup,” Telegraph, June 11, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/7819443/National-Grid-anticipates-power-surges-during-World-Cup.html. See also Mark Raby, “Tea Time in Britain Causes Predictable, Massive Surge in Electricity Demand,” Geek, January 7, 2013, http://www.geek.com/news/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predictable-massive-surge-in-electricity-demand-1535023/.
a moment of peak revenue: The bad news about peak shaving is that now that utilities have finally found a way to make money off peak demand with smart meters, eliminating peak demand now means taking a hit at their bottom line. Charging for the most expensive power at the most expensive time of day was an economic win for them. Bill McKibben, “Power to the People,” New Yorker, June 29, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/power-to-the-people. See also John Farrell, “Utilities Cry ‘Fowl’ Over Duck Chart And Distributed Solar Power,” CleanTechnica, July 21, 2014, http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/21/utilities-cry-fowl-over-duck-chart-and-distributed-solar-powercrying-fowl-or-crying-wolf-open-season-on-the-utilitys-solar-duck-chart/. And Katie Fehrenbacher, “This Startup Just Scored a Deal to Install a Massive Number of Tesla Grid Batteries,” Fortune, June 4, 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/advanced-microgrid-solutions/.
“Effect Hits Santa Cruz”: Gary L. Hunt, “The Bakersfield Effect Hits Santa Cruz,” Tech & Creative Labs, August 29, 2010, http://www.tclabz.com/2010/08/29/the-bakersfield-effect-hits-santa-cruz/.
like a cash grab: Jack Danahy, “Smart Grid Fallout: Lessons to Learn from PG&E’s Smart Meter Lawsuit,” Smart Grid News, November 13, 2009, http://www.smartgridnews.com/story/smart-grid-fallout-lessons-learn-pge-s-smart-meter-lawsuit/2009-11-13, for individual customer complaints see: https://sites.google.com/site/nocelltowerinourneighborhood/home/wireless-smart-meter-concerns/smart-meter-consumers-anger-grows-over-higher-utility-bills.
digital smart meters: Jesse Wray-McCann, “Householders Shielding Homes from Smart Meter Radiation,” Herald Sun, April 9, 2012, http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad/householders-shielding-homes-from-smart-meter-radiation/story-fn6bfm6w-1226321653862.
commissioners’ residences: Anjeanette Damon, “Smart Meters Spawn Conspiracy Talk: They Know What You’re Watching on TV!,” Las Vegas Sun, March 8, 2012, http://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2012/mar/08/smart-meters-spawn-conspiracy-theories-they-know-w/.
“other ball-shaped organs”: “Assessment of Radiofrequency Microwave Radiation Emissions from Smart Meters” (Santa Barbara, CA: Sage Associates, January 1, 2011), http://sagereports.com/smart-meter-rf/?page_id=196.
efficient appliances: Margaret Taylor et al., “An Exploration of Innovation and Energy Efficiency in an Appliance Industry” (Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, March 29, 2012), http://eetd.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/an_exploration_of_innovation_and_energy_efficiency_in_an_appliance_industry_lbnl-5689e.pdf.
policies in place: Jocelyn Durkay, “Net Metering: Policy Overview and State Legislative Updates,” National Conference of State Legislatures, September 26, 2014, http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/net-metering-policy-overview-and-state-legislative-updates.aspx.3.
the initial shattering: Jeffrey Sparshott, “More People Say Goodbye to Their Landlines,” Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323893004579057402031104502.
$21 million: Glenn Fleishman, “Stick a Fork in It: A Broadband over Powerline Post Mortem,” Ars Technica, October 23, 2008, http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/10/stick-a-fork-in-it-a-broadband-over-powerline-post-mortem/. “Data signals are blocked from the high- and medium-voltage lines over which BPL works by the transformers that step that voltage down for household or business use. To install smart meters, a bypass has to be put in place that sucks the data from the higher-voltage lines and feeds it out on the wire that heads into the home, using home powerline technology. Some companies tried to do this with WiFi on the pole; others put in relatively inexpensive shunts. But it’s extremely labor-intensive; more akin—but far less work—to putting in fiber optic to a home than in overlaying data onto cable or telephone wires.”
would not use again: Mark Jaffe, “Xcel’s SmartGridCity Plan Fails to Connect with Boulder,” The Denver Post, October 28, 2012, http://www.denverpost.com/ci_21871552/xcels-smartgridcity-plan-fails-connect-boulder.
“Give me a blinking break”: April Nowicki, “Boulder’s Smart Grid Leaves Citizens in the Dark,” Greentech Media, March 18, 2013, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Boulders-Smart-Grid-Leaves-Citizens-in-the-Dark.
“ ‘Stupid Customer’ pilot”: Jesse Berst, “SmartGridCity Meltdown: How Bad Is It?” Smart Grid News, August 8, 2010, http://www.smartgridnews.com/story/smartgridcity-meltdown-how-bad-it/2010-08-03.
positions on the matter: Randy Houson, business technology executive for Xcel Energy, public speech, Washington, D.C., September 22, 2009.
“very hot outside”: Stephen Fairfax wrote this online comment in response to Jesse Berst’s “SmartGridCity Meltdown: How Bad Is It?” (2010).
never signed up for: Apparently, the day before the public announcement of the selection of Boulder as the site of the SmartGridCity project, city council members had no idea the project was being undertaken. There had been some serious discussion about municipalizing the utility before their being chosen to get a smart grid, and at least one Boulder resident supposes that part of the reason they were picked was to keep them from defecting. In the end, though, municipalizing the grid is precisely what the city did do. In the words of Steve VanderMeer: “The city of Boulder has been unhappy with Xcel for years and has been contemplating municipalizing their system during much of that time … By coincidence, I had lunch with a high Boulder official the week of the SmartGridCity announcement. Turns out the city of Boulder had no idea this was coming until the day before the announcement! There was no prior planning, no collaboration. When I asked this official to speculate on the motives of Xcel’s announcement, this person wondered out loud whether SmartGridCity was a bone that Xcel was throwing at Boulder in an effort to dissuade further discussions about parting ways with them. Based on current discussions within the city to not renew the franchise agreement, it appears that if this was a motive of Xcel’s, it didn’t work.” Berst (2010).
customers with the undertaking: Mark Jaffe, “PUC Reduces Amount Xcel Can Charge for SmartGrid Project,” Denver Post, January 5, 2011.
permanent and total: Lewis Milford, “The End of the Electric Utilities? The Industry Thinks So Too,” The Huffington Post, September 25, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-milford/electric-utilities-future_b_3660311.html.
bill us on the other side: Michael Kanellos, “Another Way to Look at the Utility Death Spiral,” Forbes, September 29, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2014/09/29/another-way-to-look-at-the-utility-death-spiral/. Nicholas Brown, “Will Renewable Energy Cause a Utility ‘Death Spiral’? No Need for That,” CleanTechnica, June 24, 2014, http://cleantechnica.com/2014/06/24/will-renewable-energy-cause-utility-death-spiral/. Martin LaMonica, “Efficiency Group Says ‘Utility Death Spiral’ Talk Is Overblown,” Greentech Media, June 13, 2014, https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/utility-death-spiral-talk-overblown-says-efficiency-group. Zachary Shahan, “Warren Buffett: Utility Death Spiral Is Bull S*&^,” CleanTechnica, March 25, 2014, http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/25/warren-buffett-utility-death-spiral-bs/.
their power from: The Santa Clara County Jail (“the green prison”) and the University of California, San Diego campus are two examples of this sort of islandable institutional microgrid.
via the Internet: “Vision vs. Reality,” Denver Post, accessed December 1, 2014, http://www.denverpost.com/portlet/article/html/imageDisplay.jsp?contentItemRelationshipId=4738191.
all work together: Berst (2010).
“energy, or coal-fired”: This is impossible since biofuels for airplanes, while in development especially in Brazil and while theoretically sustainable, are barely renewable. Airplanes never run on coal.
largest bankruptcy in U.S. history: Paul Starr, “The Great Telecom Implosion,” American Prospect, September 8, 2002, https://www.princeton.edu/~starr/articles/articles02/Starr-TelecomImplosion-9-02.htm.
“environmental savings”: Fleishman (2008).
the polar vortex: Andrea Thompson and Climate Central, “2015 May Just Be Hottest Year on Record,” Scientific American, August 20, 2015, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2015-may-just-be-hottest-year-on-record/.
soothe their woes: “In 1970, two thirds of new home owners kept cool without central air-conditioning: today, central air-conditioning is a standard feature in 90 percent of new homes, even in temperate climates,” Janda (2011), 18.
“grids will likely prosper”: Fleishman (2008).
“highways to free up bottlenecks”: Massoud Amin, “System-of-Systems Approach,” in Intelligent Monitory, Control, and Security of Critical Infrastructure Systems, edited by Elias Kyriakides and Marios Polycarpou (New York: Springer, 2015), 337.
“is currently [2008] at 10 to 15 percent.”: Amin (2015), 337.
“demand is highest”: Chris King, “How Smart Meters Help Fight Power Outages,” Gigaom, July 5, 2012, https://gigaom.com/2012/07/05/how-smart-meters-help-fight-power-outages/. See also “Energy Wise Rewards: Frequently Asked Questions,” Pepco, accessed September 24, 2015, https://energywiserewards.pepco.com/md/faq/index.php.
power companies started to fail: “Memorandum: General Information on Utility Bankruptcy” (Montana Public Service Commission, July 9, 2003), http://psc.mt.gov/consumers/energy/pdf/BroganUtilityBankruptcy.pdf.
maybe even some lines: Morgan Stanley and Citigroup are major holders of electricity assets at present, including generation. Lerner (2003), 12.
including Dallas–Fort Worth: “Explaining Oncor Electricity,” Bounce Energy, accessed November 13, 2015, https://www.bounceenergy.com/articles/texas-electricity/oncor-electricity.
works in this way: “The Energy Cloud,” Navigant Research, June 3, 2014, www.navigantresearch.com/webinar/the-energy-cloud-1.
took to acquire it: NATO dropped special “blackout” nets on the city during the bombing; these fall from planes and catch on electric wires, shorting them all out and ideally propagating a blackout from the point of contact through the grid as a whole.
fully coupled to the jet stream: Jeff Halverson, “Superstorm Sandy: Unraveling the Mystery of a Meteorological Oddity,” Washington Post, October 29, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/10/29/superstorm-sandy-unraveling-the-mystery-of-a-meteorological-oddity/.
miles in the nation: The area called the Northeast megalopolis stretches across less than 2 percent of the U.S. land mass but contains 17 percent of the country’s population. John Rennie Short, Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast (New York: Routledge, 2007), 23.
stranded, they were immobilized: “Two-thirds of those living in the affected region reported that they lost power. Forty percent of those who lost power report outages of a week or more. The storm left 44 percent in the hardest hit regions without heat and nearly half those, 49 percent, were without heat for more than a week. Thirteen percent in these areas lost water with 36 percent having lost water for more than a week … half of affected Americans say they had trouble accessing fuel.” Trevor Tompson et al., “Resilience in the Wake of Superstorm Sandy” (Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, June 2013), 3.
when the grid breaks: “Economic Benefits of Increasing Grid Resilience to Weather Outages” (2013).
military and police forces: Ted Koppel, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath (New York: Crown Publishing, 2015).
“imposed on ourselves”: Lovins and Lovins (1982), 1.
“our whole way of life”: Lovins and Lovins (1982), 1.
a single cable failed: Thomas Gaist, “The Detroit Blackout,” World Socialist, December 4, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/12/04/pers-d04.html.
“diversity over homogeneity”: Lovins and Lovins (1982), 184.
reports, and pontificating pundits: Many academics and even some bloggers are turning against resilience as an approach to maintaining systems (including individual human psychology), as it presupposes a world in crisis. To be resilient you have to accept that things are going to be broken in the first place, so the question becomes what sort of life we have constructed for ourselves that we can’t manage the basics of security and have to just build and plan with the assumption of inevitable catastrophe undergirding everything we do. See especially Sandy Zelmer and Lance Gunderson, “Why Resilience May Not Always Be a Good Thing: Lessons in Ecosystem Restoration from Glen Canyon and the Everglades,” Nebraska Law Review 87, no. 4: 2008.
“Weather Outages”: “Economic Benefits of Increasing Grid Resilience to Weather Outages” (2013).
“high- and low-tech solutions”: “Economic Benefits of Increasing Grid Resilience to Weather Outages” (2013), pages 17, 12, and 5, respectively.
by the surrounding area: “In the Aftermath of Superstorm Sandy: Message from President Stanley,” Stony Brook University, accessed December 1, 2014, http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/sandy/.
devastated Japan in 2011: Asmus (2012).
pumps, and power on: The quote is from Peter Asmus, Alexander Lauderbaugh, and Mackinnon Lawrence, “Executive Summary: Market Data: Microgrids” (Navigant Research, 2013), http://www.navigantresearch.com/wp-assets/uploads/2013/03/MD-MICRO-13-Executive-Summary.pdf, 2. See also Silvio Marcacci, “Over 400 Microgrid Projects Underway En Route to $40 Billion Market,” CleanTechnica, April 3, 2013, http://cleantechnica.com/2013/04/03/over-400-microgrid-projects-underway-en-route-to-40-billion-market/.
air conditioners or clothes dryers: “About Microgrids,” Microgrids at Berkeley Lab, U.S. Department of Energy, accessed September 28, 2015, https://building-microgrid.lbl.gov//about-microgrids.
$8 million a year in electricity bills: “Energy and Technology: Let There Be Light” (2015), 11.
“strain on military budgets”: Pew Trusts, “Military Clean Energy Innovation: Pew,” 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiOvfdYsQEE.”
“but more importantly in blood.”: Peter Byck, Carbon Nation, 2010.
eight gallons a day to four: Jenkins (2011).
batteries needed to run them: Roy H. Adams III, Martin F. Lindsey, and Anthony Marro, “Battlefield Renewable Energy: A Key Joint Force Enabler,” Joint Force Quarterly, no. 57, 2nd Quarter: Stability and Security Operations (2010), 45. These devices include “computer displays, infrared sights, global positioning systems, night vision, and a variety of other sensor technologies.” Theodore Motyka, “Hydrogen Storage Solutions in Support of DoD Warfighter Portable Power Applications,” WSTIAC Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2009), 83.
third of this weight: Phillip Jenkins, “Lightweight, Flexible Photovoltaics for Mobile Solar Power,” Ninth International Energy Conversion Conference, San Diego, CA, July 31–August 3, 2011.
disposable batteries: Motyka (2009), 83.
“a cost of $700,000”: Adams III et al. (2010), 45. These batteries are called “primary” because they’re not rechargeable, but are thrown away. This article is from 2010, and it’s citing an article from 2009, which is citing a report from 2007, so it’s possible that a brigade is no longer throwing out 7 tons of batteries for a 72-hour mission.
“wrong with this picture”: Carbon Nation (2010).
“relative to sustained outages”: LaCommare and Eto (2005), as quoted in “Economic Benefits of Increasing Grid Resilience to Weather Outages” (August 2013), 18.8.
electricity to work: “More than ever our operating forces rely on the use [of] electric power to support critical command and control functions; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets.” Adams III et al. (2010), 43–44.
added twenty-one microgrids: “The DoD’s interest in improving energy security through microgrid technology stems from its heavy reliance upon all forms of fossil fuels,” says Peter Asmus, principal research analyst with Navigant Research. “In addition, the DoD has reexamined the existing electricity service delivery model in the United States, and has concluded that the best way to bolster its ability to secure power may well be through microgrid technology it can often own and control.” “Microgrids for Military Bases to Surpass $377 Million in Annual Market Value by 2018,” Navigant Research, May 10, 2013, http://www.navigantresearch.com/newsroom/microgrids-for-military-bases-to-surpass-377-million-in-annual-market-value-by-2018.
already operate in the United States: “New Jersey Becomes Latest State to Invest in Microgrids,” GreenBiz, (September 6, 2013), http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/09/06/new-jersey-becomes-latest-state-invest-microgrids. According to a 2013 report from Navigant Research, there are now more than fifty U.S. military bases that are operating, planning, or testing microgrids. See also Koch (2013).
to 578 megawatts: Marcacci (2013).
ventilation by 40 to 75 percent: William M. Solis, “Defense Management: DoD Needs to Increase Attention on Fuel Demand Management at Forward-Deployed Locations” (United States Government Accountability Office, February 2009), http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09300.pdf. “By foaming tents, we go from a 50-ton cooling unit down to an 8-ton cooling unit, which reduces our power consumption tremendously. We figured that within approximately 10 months we will pay for everything. So we are actually saving soldiers’ lives, giving them a more comfortable place to stay and saving money and saving the environment all in one fell swoop.”
“the security environment”: Adams III et al. (2010), 43–49.
too hot, or rigid: Jenkins (2011). This is similar to the problem of black smoke produced by coal burners on ships before World War I, which allowed enemies to spot them before they crossed the horizon. Technology has gotten better across the board and the fuels in use need to adapt to this. This links to the desire for a solar panel that isn’t square, isn’t shiny, and isn’t black. There is a desire for camouflage, for invisibility that extends now into the IR range. Heat signatures are a sort of visibility given our new technological vision.
“system’s control unit”: Adams III et al. (2010), 46.
any piece of it: A couple of the Straws’ neighbors to the south, the Yoxulls, have been off the grid since they built their house eighteen years ago because they didn’t want to pay the utility $20,000 to extend the existing system of lines to a new pole.
“of a typical tactical operations center”: Adams III et al. (2010), 46.
“meet power requirements”: According to Adams III et al., “[the] inherent advantage of [renewables for deployed off-grid operations] over conventional petroleum-fueled systems is that combined with demand reduction, they greatly reduce and even eliminate the need to provide fuel logistic to remote sites, saving manpower, funds, and most importantly decreasing the risk to forces delivering supplies over contested lines of communication.” They go on: “In addition, solar-PV and wind technologies offer significant inherent security features in that they are quiet and have low thermal signatures” (2010), 44–45.
“such as biomass conversion”: THEPS is the name of a system made by the Arlington-based SkyBuilt that more recently has been working with Lockheed Martin on the Integrated Smart-BEAR Power System (BEAR is the name for the base grid), the point being that the names and specifics of these things change, but for ten years at least, the basic principles have remained the same. See this great article: “Frontline Commanders Requesting Renewable Power Options,” Defense Industry Daily, January 24, 2012, http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/commanders-in-iraq-urgently-request-renewable-power-options-02548/.
power the cookstoves: A biorefinery the size of a semi can “process the daily waste of 500 soldiers and generate 60 kW.” Adams III et al. (2010), 46.
and $850,000 developing: Adams III et al. (2010), 46, and Solis (2009). More recently, see also Franklin H. Holcomb, “Waste-to-Energy Projects at Army Installations” (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, January 13, 2011), http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/03/f11/waste_holcomb.pdf, “U.S. Military Waste to Energy & Fuel Gasification Prototype V2.0,” December 7, 2012, http://www.waste-management-world.com/articles/2012/12/u-s-military-waste-to-energy-fuel-gasification-prototype-v2-0.html, and Don Kennedy, “Garbage to Fuel: Trash-to-Fuel Generator, Battle-Tested in Iraq, Shows Long-Term Potential,” Army AL&T Magazine, April–June 2013, 138–141.
transporting other gasoline around: Carbon Nation (2010).
extractive technologies: Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2011).
substation’s large transformers: Rebecca Smith, “PG&E Silicon Valley Substation Is Breached Again,” Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-es-metcalf-substation-target-of-construction-equipment-theft-1409243813.
computerized infrastructure: “Electric Disturbance Events (OE-417),” Office of Electricity Delivery & Energy Reliability, accessed September 30, 2015, http://www.oe.netl.doe.gov/oe417.aspx. The count is mine.
in just three months: Jon Mooallem, “Squirrel Power!” New York Times, August 31, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/opinion/sunday/squirrel-power.html?_r=0. The litany continues: “Squirrels cut power to a regional airport in Virginia, a Veterans Affairs medical center in Tennessee, a university in Montana and a Trader Joe’s in South Carolina. Five days after the Trader Joe’s went down, another squirrel cut power to 7,200 customers in Rock Hill, S.C., on the opposite end of the state. Rock Hill city officials assured the public that power outages caused by squirrels were ‘very rare’ and that the grid was ‘still a reliable system.’ Nine days later, 3,800 more South Carolinians lost power after a squirrel blew up a circuit breaker in the town of Summerville.”
“In Portland, Ore., squirrels got 9,200 customers on July 1; 3,140 customers on July 23; and 7,400 customers on July 26. (‘I sound like a broken record,’ a spokesman for the utility said, briefing the press for the third time.) In Kentucky, more than ten thousand people lost power in two separate P.O.C.B.S. [power outages caused by squirrels] a few days apart. The town of Lynchburg, Virginia, suffered large-scale P.O.C.B.S. on two consecutive Thursdays in June. Downtown went dark. At Lynchburg’s Academy of Fine Arts, patrons were left to wave their lighted iPhone screens at the art on the walls, like torch-carrying Victorian explorers groping through a tomb.”
“One June 9, a squirrel blacked out 2,000 customers in Kalamazoo, Mich., then 921 customers outside Kalamazoo a week later. A local politician visited the blown transformer with her children to take a look at the culprit; another witness told a reporter, ‘There was no fur left on it. It looked like something from C.S.I.’ She posted a photo of the incinerated animal to her Facebook page.”
“causing frequent power outages”: Mooallem (2013).
to install solar panels: CoEvolution Quarterly (1974–1985), an offshoot of The Whole Earth Catalog (a counterculture golden-era mainstay) awarded this sun-challenged distinction to Forks in the late 1970s.
from thirty years to ten: “A Big Bet on Small,” Economist Technology Quarterly, December 6, 2014, 7.
so has it always been: Back in 1973, with fusion but thirty years away, there was another grail search under way, though not yet for storage. Unlike fusion, the goal of those Nixon era innovators we are hardly conscious of today because, in a rather unspectacular way, we found it. According to the papers of Southern California Edison the energy technology that fueled dreams in the early 1970s was a device that could directly convert “heat into electricity,” eliminating “the need for shafts, turbines, and other rotating parts.”
Given these conditions for success, solar panels and fuel cells, both extant but poor technologies at the time, were winning the optimists’ race, for these two seemed best capable of charting a path around Carnot’s theorem. Limits on the thermal efficiency of heat engines was by the late 1960s and early ’70s crippling the long-solid electricity industry, so any means of making power without first burning fuel to heat water to make steam to turn a turbine was, effectively, a jewel-encrusted grail worthy of pursuit. At that time both solar cells and fuel cells were prohibitively expensive, barely viable technologies. But money and creativity and hope went, if sporadically, toward each. The half million American households that today have solar panels on their roofs are the beneficiaries of this once-ascendant vision of a more perfect energy source.
Even more noteworthy is that by 2014, machines designed to make power without steam had come to rule the market: 96.1 percent of all electrical power generation built in the United States that year was either natural gas, wind, or solar (53.3 percent wind and solar, 42.8 percent natural gas). Fuel cells, despite still being the object of flurries of activity and occasional press releases proclaiming success, still lag far behind their running mates in the “no steam for power” race to the top. This doesn’t make them any less the repositories of hope, however, as K. R. Sridhar, the founder and driving force behind the Bloom Box, a recent addition to the struggling fuel cell market, makes clear. “We only wanted to solve the difficult problems, we didn’t want to find the easy answer, we didn’t want to find the first little thing that could work. We knew what we were after, we were after the holy grail and if we didn’t get that we didn’t care. That’s the only thing we wanted and we went after it.” K. R. Sridhar, “Boombox Energy Phenomenon.” Interview available on YouTube.
as mercurial as a wind turbine: Balancing variable generation with other forms of variable generation can be disastrous because shifts in the sun and wind tend to be diurnal, which is to say, surface winds, which are driven by surface temperatures, have the unhelpful habit of slacking off at dusk. F. M. Mulder, “Implications of Diurnal and Seasonal Variations in Renewable Energy Generation for Large Scale Energy Storage,” Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy 6, no. 3 (2014): 033105.
“the ensemble continuously produces beautiful music”: Clay Stranger is a colleague of Amory Lovins. This a quote Lovins uses often to explain how storage might become part of a secure energy system that is always in motion. Not everyone agrees with him, but it is a compelling notion nevertheless. See especially Amory Lovins, “There Are Cheaper Ways to Keep the Lights on than Vast Electrical Storage,” Financial Times, April, 13 2016. The comments section is also revealing. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a437955e-0098-11e6-99cb-83242733f755.html#axzz48YT31YG7.
fuels 98 percent of the local power plants: This statistic comes from an advertisement I saw at Ronald Reagan International Airport in January 2012 (it was produced by Friends of Coal, http://www.friendsofcoal.org/).
duration of the blackout: Edmund Conway, “World’s Biggest Battery Switched on in Alaska,” Telegraph, August 27, 2003, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3312118/Worlds-biggest-battery-switched-on-in-Alaska.html.
our national generating capacity: In 2013, data gathered from the DOE Global Energy Storage Database, accessed January 15, 2015, http://www.energystorageexchange.org.
regenerate an electric current: In Alabama, this is done with a natural gas combustion turbine.
there are effectively, none: The capacity is 336 MW in Colorado and 260 MW in Oklahoma, out of a total capacity of 18,341 MW nationally. “Licensed Pumped Storage Projects,” Federal Energy Regulation Commission, April 1, 2015, http://www.ferc.gov/industries/hydropower/gen-info/licensing/pump-storage/licensed-projects.pdf.
in McIntosh, Alabama does: CAES stands for Compressed Air Energy Storage. There are only two storage facilities like this in the world: the McIntosh, Alabama plant, and one in Germany. Utah, Ohio, and Idaho also rest in part upon similar geologic structures, which are being considered for development now that effective storage has grown so critical to the good, future functioning of our grid.
almost twenty years of rechargeability: Flow batteries are a little bit like a regular battery turned inside out. Imagine the electrolyte being outside the terminals rather than surrounding them. As the electrolyte circulates it generates an electric charge across a membrane that separates the terminals. As it is depleted it can be topped off, rather like getting refills on one’s coffee at a diner. For the moment the electron flow these batteries produce is not quite lustful enough to run much, and the very best chemistries involve using platinum (expensive) or vanadium (a rare earth chemical, found only in China, Russia, and South Africa and thus risky). Because of their potential for a long life—about 10,000 cycles or twenty years—these batteries nevertheless offer much promise. Specifics can be found at “BU-210b: How Does the Flow Battery Work?” Battery University, http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/bu_210b_flow_battery.
topography rather than technology: “So far, when Energy storage systems (ESSs) are integrated into conventional electric grids, special designed topologies and/or control for almost each particular case is required. This means costly design and debugging time of each individual component/control system every time the utility decides to add an energy storage system.” Alaa Mohd et al., “Challenges in Integrating Distributed Energy Storage Systems into Future Smart Grid,” in IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics (IEEE, 2008), 1627–32.
0.8 percent of that states power: Alabama has the potential to produce 20 percent of its electricity from solar power; however, this is not being taken advantage of, in part because Alabama is only one of four states where homemade solar power is not purchased by the utility for redistribution. Their current fuel mix is coal 70.53 percent, nuclear 17.99 percent, gas & oil 9.55 percent, hydro 1.93 percent. Larry Clark, “Alabama Power, a Southern Company,” at Grid Boot Camp, September 21, 2009.
“coal- and gas-fired power plants”: Gillis (2015c).
“extend patterns in the present”: Akhil Gupta, “An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South,” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 4 (2015): 555–68.
doubled every year since 2005: Roxanne Palmer, “Solar Power Growing Pains: How Will Hawaii and Germany Cope with the Boom in Alternative Energy?” International Business Times, December 23, 2013, http://www.ibtimes.com/solar-power-growing-pains-how-will-hawaii-germany-cope-boom-alternative-energy-1518702.
in the country (after Arizona): Christian Roselund, “Arizona, Hawaii Lead the U.S. in Per-Capita Solar,” PV Magazine, September 1, 2014, http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/arizona--hawaii-lead-the-us-in-per-capita-solar_100016279/.
on the investment anywhere: “Top 10 States for Residential Solar—Fall 2014,” Solar Reviews, accessed December 14, 2015, http://www.solarreviews.com/solar-power/top-states-for-solar-fall-2014-facts/.
makes its electricity from oil: So does Puerto Rico. Oil for electricity generation is a constant for island nations, island states, and island demistates.
times the national average: “U.S. Solar Market Trends 2013” (2014), 21.
solar power production: “Sunshine and Clouds,” Economist Technology Quarterly, September 3, 2015.
produced from aggregate statistics: Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Idaho are dead last in the 2015 solar power rankings (New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Oregon take the first four spots). This list does not rank based upon installed solar power—California and Arizona don’t even make the top ten—rather, it looks at how felicitous the regulatory environment is, at what the state and utilities are doing to make it affordable and easy to build solar, big and small, and link this back into the grid. “2015 United States Solar Power Ratings” http://www.solarpowerrocks.com/2015-solar-power-state-rankings/.
back into the public grid: “U.S. Solar Market Trends 2013” (IREC: Interstate Renewable Energy Council, July 2014), 15.
or on tropical islands: “Q2 2015 Solar Market Insight Fact Sheet,” Solar Energy Industries Association, December 17, 2014, http://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/Q2%202015%20SMI%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf.
wannabe solar power producers: David Giles, “Blackout Insurance: Solar City Rooftops,” City Limits, July 2, 2007, http://citylimits.org/2007/07/02/blackout-insurance-solar-city-rooftops/.
Nevada and Utah markets: “Currently, Arizona is home to more than 20,000 residential solar customers, of which approximately 85 percent are solar lease households.” Ian Clover, “Arizona to Impose New Tax on Solar Lease Customers,” PV Magazine, May 7, 2014, http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/arizona-to-impose-new-tax-on-solar-lease-customers-_100015000/.
“In 2007, only 10 percent of California homeowners were going solar through a solar panel leasing arrangement. The shift to over 75 percent solar leasing in 2012 is clearly significant.” Zachary Shahan, “Solar Leasing Explosion In California (Chart),” CleanTechnica, December 9, 2013, http://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/09/solar-leasing-explosion-california-chart/. One company, SolarCity, accounts for 32.5 percent of the market share residential solar installations in Arizona in 2012, and 17.2 percent in California. Andrew Krulewitz, “The Numbers Behind SolarCity’s Success,” Greentech Media, March 18, 2013, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/The-Numbers-Behind-SolarCitys-Success.
a whopping 307 in 2011: Lacey (2014).
underfunded distribution networks: Hertzog (2013).
“is not addressed in this way”: Hertzog (2013)
“opposite of the traditional model”: “All Change,” Economist, January 17, 2015, 9.
in Western Europe it is already begun: Every European country is idiosyncratic. France, for example, is all about nuclear; this is part of the reason why France is working on fusion while Germany, which outlawed nuclear after Fukushima, is going toward renewables.
investing in a near future defection: Stephen Lacey, “This Is What the Utility Death Spiral Looks Like,” Greentech Media, March 4, 2014, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-is-what-the-utility-death-spiral-looks-like.
“with a bunch of stranded assets”: Lacey (2014).
they are largely inactive: According to Thomas Kuhn from the Edison Electric Institute, in the United States in 2010, many of our largest power plants were running at 10 to 15 percent of their potential; public presentation, Washington, D. C., September 23, 2009.
ways of generating revenue: For the two sides of the story see: Barbara Hollingsworth, “Report: Danger of Government-Created Solar Bubble Bursting When Subsidies Expire in 2016,” CNS News, August 13, 2015, http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/report-danger-government-created-solar-bubble-bursting-when; and Jeff McMahon, “Solar’s Future: Boom, Bust, Boom,” Forbes, November 4, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2015/11/04/solars-future-boom-bust-boom/.
“pumped” hydro storage: Eduard R. Heindl, “Energy Storage for the Age of Renewables,” TEDxStuttgart, March 11, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF7mbEsEP04&index=9&list=PL9Xg-mFq2790Ok5edfcraCLAMs5v4a-BI.
enough to make use of it: Energy Storage for Renewables Integration: Challenges and Successes Developing Solutions for Wind & Solar Assets, Navigant Research Webinar, January 13, 2015. http://www.navigantresearch.com/webinar/energy-storage-for-renewables-integration-3.
our common landscape: Richard F. Hirsh and Benjamin K. Sovacool, “Wind Turbines and Invisible Technology: Unarticulated Reasons for Local Opposition to Wind Energy,” Technology and Culture 54, no. 4 (2013): 705–34.
almost exclusively in China: These elements are not for the most part rare, despite the appellation; they are difficult to depend on because of tariffs, and national borders, and unpredictable swings in currency rates. Tim Maughan, “The Dystopian Lake Filled by the World’s Tech Lust,” BBC Future, April 2, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth.
both the market and the imagination: Sebastian Anthony, “At Long Last, New Lithium Battery Tech Actually Arrives on the Market (and Might Already Be in Your Smartphone),” ExtremeTech, January 10, 2014, http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/174477-at-long-last-new-lithium-battery-tech-actually-arrives-on-the-market-and-might-already-be-in-your-smartphone. See also “Battery Statistics,” Battery University, accessed November 15, 2015, http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/battery_statistics.
someplace suspect, like Alberta: “About DLSC,” Drake Landing Solar Community, accessed November 15, 2015, http://www.dlsc.ca/about.htm.
acid or even ceramic: While difficult to explain, batteries are quite simple to make. You will need a can of soda (any brand will do)—this is your electrolyte; a plastic, Styrofoam, or paper cup, which contains the process, like the wrapping on a battery; and a strip of copper that is slightly taller than the cup. Pour the soda in (drink what is left in the can), cut out a strip of the can that’s roughly the same size as the copper strip, and stick each piece of metal in the cup, but don’t let them touch. Voilà, a battery. If you connect the electrodes (the copper and aluminum strips) with a wire, about three quarters of a volt will stream between them. You could run a three-quarter-volt lightbulb with the thing, if such a bulb existed. This description is taken from “How to Make a Homemade Battery,” wikiHow, accessed December 17, 2015, www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Homemade-Battery.
safer, and longer lasting: “Why Lithium Batteries Keep Catching Fire,” Economist, January 27, 2014, http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/01/economist-explains-19.
rainy days and long dark nights: Jake Richardson, “Tesla Powerwall Offered To Vermont Utility Customers … $0 Down,” CleanTechnica, December 9, 2015, https://cleantechnica.com/2015/12/09/tesla-powerwall-offered-to-vermont-utility-customers-for-free/.
has always been their charm: Though somewhat scalable and somewhat portable, fuel cells suffer from being expensive and from the fact that they do need constant exposure to their fuel (they need to be plugged into natural gas pipelines, for example).
it seems, will be electric: Zack Kanter, “Autonomous Cars Will Destroy Millions of Jobs and Reshape U.S. Economy by 2025,” Quartz, May 14, 2015, http://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2015/05/autonomous-cars-will-destroy-millions-jobs-and-reshape-us-economy-2025/112762/.
It sounds a little like Marxism: Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008 [1875]).
“when you are getting it fixed”: quoted in Ryan Koronowski, “Why the U.S. Military Is Pursuing Energy Efficiency, Renewables and Net-Zero Energy Initiatives,” ThinkProgress, April 4, 2013, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/04/1749741/why-the-us-military-is-pursuing-energy-efficiency-renewables-and-net-zero-energy-initiatives/.
“dipping in the middle”: Economist (January 17, 2015), 10.
out of the center at our grid: “How Much Energy Is Consumed in Residential and Commercial Buildings in the United States?” U.S. Energy Information Administration, accessed November 15, 2015, http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=86&t=1.
incentives were different: Justin Gillis, “A Tricky Transition from Fossil Fuel: Denmark Aims for 100 Percent Renewable Energy,” New York Times, November 10, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/science/earth/denmark-aims-for-100-percent-renewable-energy.html.
“Technology needs to save us”: Gillis 2014.
(wealth of batteries to the grid’s benefit): The popularity of electric and hybrid vehicles in Norway is largely the result of efficient, if often deemed excessive, subsidies and other benefits (like being able to use the HOV lane, even if you are driving alone or take ferries for free). Steve Hanley, “Electric Car Sales Surge in Norway during 2015,” January 21, 2016, http://gas2.org/2016/01/21/electric-car-sales-surge-in-norway-during-2015/.
municipal government—are electric: “Electric Vehicles and the Grid,” Navigant Research, February 10, 2015, https://www.navigantresearch.com/webinar/electric-vehicles-and-the-grid.
just outside Hanover: The air force plans to expand the V2G demonstration to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey. The service will also continue to look for additional capabilities, such as utilizing used batteries as a form of on-base energy storage. “Air Force Tests First All-Electric Vehicle Fleet in California,” U.S. Department of Energy, December 17, 2014, http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/news/news_detail.cfm/news_id=21787.
designed in from the start: Michael d’Estries, “Operation Sustainability: U.S. Military Sets Ambitious Environmental Goals—Ecomagination,” Ecomagination, January 30, 2012, http://www.ecomagination.com/operation-sustainability-us-military-sets-ambitious-environmental-goals.
“V2G demonstration in the world”: “AF Tests First All-Electric Vehicle Fleet in California,” U.S. Air Force, November 14, 2014, http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/554343/af-tests-first-all-electric-vehicle-fleet-in-california.aspx.
of our collective demand: Of the ten fastest-growing cities in the United States, nine are firmly in the AC zone (including five in Texas). “In Photos: The Fastest-Growing Cities In The U.S.,” Forbes, accessed November 16, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/pictures/edgl45emig/no-1-raleigh-nc-metropolitan-statistical-area/.
“when there is no clear answer”: Amelia Taylor-Hochberg, “Zoom In, Zoom Out: Hashim Sarkis, Dean of MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning, on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #5,” Archinect, accessed December 12, 2015, http://archinect.com/news/article/142833231/zoom-in-zoom-out-hashim-sarkis-dean-of-mit-s-school-of-architecture-planning-on-archinect-sessions-one-to-one-5.
“important qualities about them”: A blogger going by the username “enkidu” notes that “seeky” is a linguistic alternative to the all-encompassing, “soul-destroying” definition of addiction advanced by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. “Seeky,” everything2, March 30, 2001, http://everything2.com/title/seeky.
something like “seeky”: “Suppose you have a roof with a hole in it,” the novelist Neal Stephenson explains, “that means it’s a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment.” Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon Books, 1999), 373–74.
jet planes simply do not: In a widely publicized competition in July 2015, Airbus spent £14 million ($22 million) just to ensure the success of a single crossing of its electric plane over the English Channel. David Szondy, “Electric Aircraft Makes First English Channel Crossing,” Gizmag, July 12, 2015, http://www.gizmag.com/first-electric-aircraft-cross-english-channel-airbus-cri-cri/38410/.
task-specific, and unobtrusive: Donald A. Norman, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), viii–ix.
fossil fuels for making power: Mitchell (2011) and Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).
“filled with passengers”: Fox-Penner (2014), xiii.
to bring down governments: Most famously, ordinary Egyptians and Tunisians used Facebook and Twitter to help coordinate their respective versions of the Arab Spring in 2011.
“don’t want power lines.”: Chris Kahn and Eric Tucker, “Easy Fix Eludes Power Outage Problems in U.S.,” Yahoo! Finance, July 4, 2012, http://finance.yahoo.com/news/easy-fix-eludes-power-outage-problems-us-220940392.html.
“and out come fuels”: David Rotman, “Praying for an Energy Miracle,” MIT Technology Review, February 22, 2011, http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/422836/praying-for-an-energy-miracle/.
rises to greet the grid: Hirsh and Sovacool (2013).
their bill for renewable power: Though for the most part, when it comes to the electric bill, very few people (about 10 percent) are willing to pay more than about 5 percent for “green” electricity. Michael Valocchi, IBM. Public presentation, September 22, 2009.
“beyond government mandates”: She continues: “For those of you wondering where your energy comes from now via Excel [sic], here is a breakdown: The 2014 average mix of resources supplying Northern States Power customers includes coal (38.5%), nuclear (29.2%), natural gas (7.7%), wind (13.8%), hydro (7.7%), biomass (3.0%) and other (0.1%).” From Facebook, October 2015.
money for the cause: In keeping with this trend of feeling more comfortable with the less material something is, liquefied natural gas is often protested while natural gas in its gaseous form rarely is.
of the power they did in 1975: Roland Risser, “The Proof Is in the Pudding: How Refrigerator Standards Have Saved Consumers $Billions,” Energy.gov, July 11, 2011, http://www.energy.gov/articles/proof-pudding-how-refrigerator-standards-have-saved-consumers-billions.
one with an Energy Star rating: Energy Star appliances allow one to save money on the electric bill over the life of the appliance, offsetting the higher purchase price, and they are a critical part of falling U.S. electricity consumption overall. Individuals, households, and appliances all use less electricity than they used to. So do manufactories, data centers, and large HVAC systems, because almost everything that relies on electricity has been redesigned, often numerous times, since the 1970s to use less of it.
take it one step further: The middle-aged still buy cars and houses, and still make choices about how to power those cars and houses, but the twentysomethings give every appearance of leaving even basic American materialism behind. They are undoubtedly the most wireless generation, but they also don’t buy big stuff. The bigger the stuff, the less they buy of it. This is not only because they don’t have the money for big-ticket items, but also because they are fundamentally uninterested in using the money they do have in ways that tie them to permanent debt or immobile assets. What to their parents looked like security (home ownership, car ownership, refrigerator ownership) to them feels like unjustifiable risk.
a cold spot built in?: Ikea already has a prototype for the non-fridge; the woven wall came from a conversation with a nineteen-year-old fiber arts student I know, who thinks bulbs are dumb and expensive.
“consistent time management”: “NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, Release 2.0” (National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce, February 2012), http://www.nist.gov/smartgrid/upload/NIST_Framework_Release_2-0_corr.pdf, pp. 79, 84, and 87, respectively.
One set of standards that most Americans likely assume are well enough in place have to do with cybersecurity. The more computerized the grid becomes the more vulnerable it becomes to hackers. It may be squirrels and tree branches today that do the most harm, but that’s largely because the networks that will remake our grid over into a thinking machine are not yet well in place. See Koppel (2015). In 2001, a student in China wrote a research paper arguing that the entire Western Interconnection could be taken down by destroying just three substations. But just because hackers can take down our grid doesn’t mean they want to. In response to a 2012 accusation by the Daily Mail that the hacking group Anonymous now had the capacity to “shut down the entire U.S. power grid” they said, “that’s right, we’re definitely taking down the power grid. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when all the equipment we use to mount our campaign is rendered completely useless”(Gabriella Coleman, personal conversation, 2012). See also William Pentland, “Push Back: Utility Coalition Fights Federal Cyber Security Standards,” FierceEnergy, September 24, 2015, http://www.fierceenergy.com/story/push-back-utility-coalition-fights-federal-cyber-security-standards/2015-09-24.
from renewables by 2030: Senate Bill 350, Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015.
has been installed since 2010: “U.S. Solar Market Trends 2013” (2014), 7 and 15.
in the past three years: According to IREC’s “U.S. Solar Market Trends 2013,” this number will change fast as more big solar comes online between 2015 and 2020. The California Valley Solar Ranch became operational in 2013 with generating capacity of 250 MW, while in 2014 alone, the Mojave Desert’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (with a gross capacity of 392 MW), the Abengoa Mojave Solar Project (280 MW), and the Genesis Energy Solar Project (280 MW) were brought online. In 2015, Solar Star (579 MW) in Rosamund, Topaz Solar Farm (550 MW) in San Luis Obispo County, and the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm (550 MW) in the Mojave were each commissioned. Three more large-scale projects are either in the complaint phase or undergoing construction and are expected to be operational by 2020.
might come profitably together: Julia Pyper, “The Solar Industry Stands Divided Over California’s 50 Percent Renewable Energy Target,” Greentech Media, July 17, 2015, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-solar-industry-stands-divided-over-californias-future-renewable-energy. See also Beth Gardiner, “California Leads a Quiet Revolution,” New York Times, October 5, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/business/energy-environment/california-leads-a-quiet-revolution.html, and Chris Megerian and Javier Panzar, “Gov. Brown Signs Climate Change Bill to Spur Renewable Energy, Efficiency Standards,” Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-jerry-brown-climate-change-renewable-energy-20151007-story.html.
“using less electricity more efficiently”: Amory Lovins, “The Negawatt Revolution” in Across the Board XXVII vol. 9, September 1990, 21–22.
significantly more people: From Katherine Tweed, “U.S. Electricity Demand Flat Since 2007,” IEEE Spectrum, February 6, 2015, http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/environment/us-electricity-demand-flat-since-2007 and Quadrennial Energy Review 2015, DOE from a presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center in D.C. on May 7, 2015. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering “that the end-to-end infrastructure it takes to keep up with our Tweeting habit is responsible for more than 2,500 MWh per week of demand on the grid that simply did not exist before the application’s advent.” Massoud Amin, “Living in the Dark: Why the U.S. Needs to Upgrade the Grid,” Forbes, July 11, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/07/11/living-in-the-dark-why-the-u-s-needs-to-upgrade-the-grid/.
and well-lit rooms: “Nebia Shower—Better Experience, 70 Percent Less Water” (2015).
simple as dimming the lights: Chris Mooney, “The Electricity Innovation so Controversial That It’s Now before the Supreme Court,” Washington Post, October 20, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/20/the-electricity-innovation-so-controversial-that-its-now-before-the-supreme-court/.
running all over the place: “Several recent trends are creating an environment conducive to VPPs. These include the increasing penetration of smart meters and other smart grid technologies, growth in variable renewable generation, and emerging markets for ancillary services. However, challenges to commercial rollouts of VPPs remain, including the lack of reliance upon dynamic, real-time pricing and consumer pushback against the smart grid. The end goal for this market is the mixed asset VPP segment, as it brings distributed generation (DG) and demand response (DR) together to provide a synergistic sharing of grid resources.” From “Virtual Power Plants” (Navigant Research, 2014), https://www.navigantresearch.com/research/virtual-power-plants.
where it might all be going: There was a recent essay in the Atlantic about how we mess up future predictions by focusing on the wrong things: how we get to work, for example, rather than what work is like. Thus, in the future as imagined in the 1950s, we all took jet packs to the office, but when we got there, there still weren’t any women. Rose Eveleth, “Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?” Atlantic, July 31, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/futurism-sexism-men/400097/.
at the same rate as a watt made: Brett Feldman, “All’s Quiet on the DR Front, but a Storm Is Brewing,” Navigant Research Blog, October 7, 2015, http://www.navigantresearch.com/blog/alls-quiet-on-the-dr-front-but-a-storm-is-brewing. See also Katherine Hamilton, “SPEER Releases Report on Benefits of Demand Response,” Advanced Energy Management Alliance, October 29, 2015, http://aem-alliance.org/speer-releases-report-on-benefits-of-demand-response/.
“generators to increase supply”: Mooney (2015). He goes on: “In particular, the objection before the Supreme Court is that this scheme of compensation gets FERC into regulating retail electricity markets, the ones that you and I are familiar with, because that’s where we buy our own electricity from power providers. And FERC doesn’t govern those—state public utility commissions do. What’s complicated is that while demand response companies participate and bid into the wholesale markets—governed by FERC—their own clients are companies buying electricity on the retail markets, just like you and me (but generally on a much larger scale). In effect, demand-response blurs this distinction between the markets. And thus, before the Supreme Court, this has been framed as a battle over federalism, and whether FERC is going too far and getting into state territory.”
“stimulate much-needed investment”: “Selling It by the Negawatt,” Economist, December 2, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21635404-demand-response-industry-consolidating-selling-electricity-negawatt.
irregularities are highlighted: Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007).
or a puddle of tar: Jacob Von Uexküll distinguishes between plants, which are immediately embedded in their habitat, and animals, which occupy a milieu (Umwelt). Perhaps von Uexküll’s best-known example of this concept is the tick, whose milieu is constituted by a very limited number of factors. The tick climbs to the top of a branch or stalk and drops onto a passing animal, whose blood it then sucks. The tick has no eyes, the general sensitivity of its skin to sunlight alone orienting it in its upward climb. Its olfactory sense perceives a single odor: butyric acid, a secretion given off by the sebaceous follicles of all mammals. “When it senses a warm object below, it drops on its prey and searches out a patch of hair. It then pierces the host’s soft skin and sucks its blood. The tick’s milieu is made up of those elements that have meaning for it: sunlight, the smell of butyric acid, the tactile sense of mammalian heat, hair and soft skin, and the taste of blood. Its milieu is a closed world of elements, outside of which nothing else exists. Although it seems that animals all inhabit the same universe, each lives in a different, subjectively determined milieu” (58–59). In his discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s “animal music,” as set forth in their “Of the Refrain” section of A Thousand Plateaus, Ronald Bogue reiterates the story of the tick, citing its source in “Uexküll’s 1940 study Bedeutungslehre (Theory of Meaning).” Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003).
I’ll wonder if this is us too: Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Penguin Books, 2001).