The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future Paperback – Illustrated, July 11, 2017

Review of Bakke’s "The grid" by Paul F. RossGretchen Bakke presents a very interesting, very readable look at the history of electric power in the United States from Thomas Edison until now in order to assist us, the readers, in understanding and helping shape the still uncertain details affecting the future of electric power. The ubiquity of electric power in human affairs is certain. Just how that power will be provided, its fuel sources, and its____________________________________________________________________________________Bakke, Gretchen "The grid: The fraying wires between Americans and our energy future" 2016, Bloomsbury, New York NY, xxx + 353 pages____________________________________________________________________________________distribution methods are far from certain although they have been finding their unguided way to the present throughout the last century. The stunning contribution of Bakke, not an electrical engineer, is that she has the freedom to see what history, new technology, new uses, social expectations, and legal and economic structures have done to shape what we have and determine what we will have in the future. The 22 July 2016 issue of Science arrived in my US mailbox, I saw Cymene Howe’s review of Bakke’s book (p 355), and I went to my computer immediately to order the book from Amazon.com.Edison, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, invented and put in place direct current generators of electric power and distributed that power over local grids (to customers less than a mile from the generator) to produce light in electric light bulbs, also his invention. This method for lighting became a competitor to lamps that were being fueled by whale oil ("Moby Dick") and kerosene (John D. Rockefeller). By 1910, electricity and electric light became available to the urban and the rich. But line losses at low voltage (100v or less) and high current are large (watts = current-in-amps-squared times volts … notice that term showing the current is squared), power being given up as heat as the current pushes through the line’s resistance, so electric power of this kind cannot be shipped very far (thus the early proliferation of power generating plants in an urban area like New York or Chicago). Then George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla invented alternating current and its generation. Instead of flowing just one direction as with direct current, alternating current flows back and forth in an electric line (conductor). That changing direction, and the growth and collapse of magnetic fields around the changing current, make transformers possible … two coils of wire, a primary and a secondary. Feed current from the generator into the primary winding and, although the primary is insulated from the secondary, electrical current flows (back and forth) in the secondary and in the loads (light bulbs, electric motors) the secondary is feeding. The magic feature of transformers is that by feeding 100v into a primary with 100 turns in its coil, one can get 400v or even 50,000v from the secondary winding if you put enough turns into the coil of the secondary. The power transfer from primary to secondary is very efficient. The important new circumstance is that lots of power, measured in watts, can be moved along the 50,000v lines as alternating current using very little current … and thus experiencing very little line loss to heat. When the power gets to its destination, perhaps 200 miles or even 1,000 miles from its generating plant, another transformer can be used to step the voltage back down from 50,000v to much lower voltage (110v for use in our house lighting circuits) and electricity becomes relatively safe to use when untrained-in-the-ways-of-electricity human beings are nearby. This technological flip-flop was so quick that alternating current was in widespread use by the 1920s. Shipping alternating-current electric power over long distances made it possible for one power plant to serve a very large area and so society began to think of electric power as a “natural monopoly,” power companies as serving a large area, and the leaders of power companies as needing government oversight so they did not take advantage of their monopoly power.Electricity has another characteristic that is important. It must be used as soon as it is produced. So far, there are no easy and available methods for storing it for later use. Therefore demand and production must always be equal. Power plants have the characteristics of machinery … they work most of the time but sometimes must be shut down for maintenance or simply break down. Demand from people and businesses has its own ups and downs … we all like to sleep at night and work in the daytime … we go to work and return home at approximately the same times for five days out of seven … we call for air conditioning in the summertime and heat in the winter. Thus power production must vary with demand. The electric utilities have the task of “balancing” their production and distribution to meet demands that go up and down during every 24-hour cycle and sometimes take unexpected leaps or collapses.In recent decades the desire to minimize atmospheric pollution has caused us to try to downsize on coal and oil use, accept new supplies of natural gas with appreciation, continue to use hydro power where it is available, escape nuclear power generation when we can, and add power generation from solar energy and from wind. Suddenly (as measured by social and economic timelines) power is being generated in variable ways and in varying amounts (clouds go by, night arrives, the wind stops) in many different places. With these dispersed power producers in place (my neighbor’s home’s rooftop), we’ve asked, through governments, that the power companies accept all these power inputs and keep the grid balanced. Can it be done?Bakke sees the history, explains it to us so that we can understand it, includes the economic and societal and government and technological change elements in “the system,” and presents us with the challenge. She lets us know why our actions and our attitudes influence the solutions. “The grid” is not “something in an out-of-sight place to which we need pay no attention until the lights are out at our house.” She lets us see how reliability of the supply chain for coal or diesel oil is just as important to the reliability of “the grid” as is the risk that a tree will fall across a power line and interrupt power to our house. She helps us understand that it takes almost as much diesel fuel to deliver a gallon of diesel oil for use in an electric generator at an isolated military location in Afghanistan as the delivered-fuel itself. She lets us understand that our attitudes, our political actions, the operation of our governments are as important to delivering least-costly, uninterrupted electrical power to our future homes and offices as are the technological steps toward shipping electric power without wires and balancing the grid using smart metering, controllable loads (we may have to give the grid the power to turn down our air conditioning in order to balance production capacity and demand), and batteries of unimaginable properties to our electrical futures. Through her eyes we can glimpse some of the future that may emerge, but the important lesson she teaches is that we have to be a part of the planning in the same way that we are a part of the system’s performance.I glanced at a review of her book posted on Amazon.com and the reviewer was wondering how a cultural anthropologist (and a woman, to boot) is qualified to write about the electric power grid. We need Bakke’s insights very much since her behavioral science perspective brings a vital viewpoint to the task of shaping the future … a viewpoint that the reviewer I was reading is not able to bring to the work.Copyright © 2016 by Paul F. Ross All rights reserved.Bellevue, Washington28 August 2016

This book describes the history of the US power grid and how technology, regulation, politics and demand shaped it into what it is today. In general, the book is well researched and informative. The author, a cultural anthropologist, gives a much broader view of a subject that others treat as merely a technological or industrial topic. The grid shapes and is shaped by many social, cultural, economic, political and technical forces, and Bakke does a good job of explaining how these forces interact.My only knock against the book is that the last two chapters, which attempt to look forward at how the grid may evolve in coming years, didn’t really hold my interest. This was due in part because I’ve already researched on my own much of what Bakke covered, so none of what she said was new to me. It may be good info for other readers though, those who don’t read energy tech news in their spare time and would just like a good overview of high-level trends.One other issue with those final chapters is that much of what Bakke sees in the future has already come to pass in the eight years since this book was published. The movement toward renewables and locally generated power has accelerated faster than most people could have predicted, for the exact reasons Bakke lays out: people don’t want to rely on an increasingly fragile and expensive grid, and technologies like rooftop solar keep getting cheaper.

This is a great, very readable update on the electricity piece of the energy transition from fossil fuels to clean/renewable energy. The old, stable system of electric utility monopolies providing electricity through the grid from central coal-burning and nuclear power plants in the U.S. is in the process of changing to something else, but it is not clear what that will be.Gretchen Bakke makes clear on the first page that the context is the need to make the transition to "green, clean, sustainable energy." Bakke is a University of Chicago-trained cultural anthropologist, but there is very little anthropology in the book -- it is rather solid journalism. When she uses the term "culture" she mainly means either cultural inertia, or political economy. Bakke does a great job of interweaving the technology, economics, and politics of electricity. She briefly recounts the history of the grid, including Edison and Tesla, but more importantly Samuel Insull, who was singularly responsible for creating the grid, based on the system of utilities that we all know so well.A key turning point in the breakup of that system was the 1978 PURPA -- Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act -- which forced utilities to buy power from independent producers. This had little immediate impact, but eventually led to today's turbulent uncertainty. By the time of the book's writing, renewables comprised only 13% of installed electricity generation in the U.S., but as of 2014 over 53% of new generation installed in the U.S. was wind or solar, and that is expected to grow. Some of this is utility produced, and some is produced by homeowners, businesses, and increasingly microgrids not controlled by the utilities, including military bases. (Bakke seems to be confused on the concept of monopsony -- sole consumer, as opposed to monopoly, or sole producer. If utilities are forced to purchase electricity from independent producers, it is their monopoly that is being broken up, not their monopsony.)Bakke interviewed many experts and industry insiders, and she takes their perspective into account. The transition that is underway will not be easy. Problems include the age of much of the infrastructure, leading to increasing power outages, as well as the problems of intermittent production of solar and wind energy and the problem of storage of intermittent energy. Another problem she addresses is the lack of standards for interoperability. But change is inevitable -- fossil fuels are on the way out, and so is the old system of central power plants.The 1970s dream of Amory and Hunter Lovins, of a green, decentralized electricity system that would be more secure as well as more environmentally sound is still possible, and this book gives us a visionary snapshot of the promise and the obstacles that we face as of 2017.*** *** ***It is quite annoying that so many reviewers seem to think this should have been a technical manual. It's journalism, not an engineering textbook! Good grief, get a clue -- it's published by Bloomsbury in its general non-fiction line, aimed at a general audience, not a technical audience.