Summary
The US grid has been referred to as the world’s most complicated machine, and Bakke thinks this machine is at risk of breaking down. Bakke starts by describing the way that power moves through the grid into our homes and businesses. Once the basics are established, she gives a brief history of electricity’s early commercial use and the first versions of the grid that emerged as a result. The first grids were largely makeshift affairs, made to service single houses or a few blocks at a time. The technology was so new that there wasn’t a standard way of doing things. This created a lot of headaches and made electricity expensive and fragile. It was the monopolist Samuel Insull who would bring order to the chaos in the industry. By buying up hundreds of these independent electricity producers, he turned electricity into a standardized product that the masses could afford. This was the beginning of the modern grid as we know it.
Demand for energy continued to grow as more and more uses for it were found industrially and domestically. This increase in demand bankrolled additions to the grid as its tendrils reached into more and more places. This virtuous cycle continued up through the ’70s, when, for the first time in electricity’s history, demand plateaued. Utility companies suddenly had to switch into maintenance mode. This marked the beginning of a decline in the profitability of being a utility company. At the same time, the grid was at its most complex and in need of the most careful maintenance.
This trendline continues through today and has actually been made worse by the rise of renewables. Bakke emphasizes that the grid requires balance at all times. Imbalance requires robust safety mechanisms, ones that are harder to come by when the electrical infrastructure is crumbling. Renewables are variable by their nature: the sun shines on some days and not others, and the wind blows harder during certain seasons than others. The grid must contend with that reality. The fact that grid-scale storage is still limited relative to the size of the problem makes these swings in production harder to handle.
Bakke uses the end of the book to cover various nationwide blackouts, the expenses they incurred, and the hardship they produced, making the larger point that grid failure is not something that should be ignored or wished away. It isn’t going to get better on its own and should be a near-term policy priority for the US.
Thoughts
Two things that I did not know before reading this book, which were fascinating:
- The electricity that you use when plugging in an appliance was generated moments earlier by a power plant. Supply and demand must always be balanced. I had not realized how immediate this process was; I had assumed that there’d be some buffers somewhere between my house and the power plant.
- There were more wires in big cities during the late 1880s than now because there were so many different suppliers who all needed to run their own wires.
Bakke does a good job of painting the history and mechanics of the grid. It was not something that I had spent a lot of time thinking about before, usually focusing more on energy production apart from its transmission. I usually don’t comment on the writing in these types of books, but I do have to say the writing was a problem for me. It felt like she would switch between voices while writing, sometimes attempting to use flowery language with poor execution which ended up being a distraction. There were also large sections of this book that could likely have been cut or heavily edited. There were several stories that didn’t seem to earn the amount of time that was spent on them. One example would be the episode she covers where a group of people are stranded without power and run out of diesel for their generators. The story, while mildly interesting, seemed hardly necessary to dwell on for the length of time she did.
I did enjoy the book as a whole though. The first half was worth the price of admission.