The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

Author:Gretchen Bakke [Bakke, Gretchen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620401248
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-07-25T22:00:00+00:00


NOTABLE PASSINGS

In 2014 the people of Boulder voted to municipalize their electrical infrastructure. They simply bought the wires and all the rest from Xcel and bade their digging, meddling, poorly communicating, investor-owned utility good-bye. Their main complaint: the utility had not given them enough choice; in poorly realizing their SmartGridCity, Xcel had failed to offer customers anything like real control. Mostly the people of Boulder wanted the utility to ensure that more renewables and less coal was being used to generate power for the town. A second sticking point, however, was that if they were going to suffer time-of-day electricity rates, they wanted (as Ski Milburn pointed out above) the real-time information necessary to make informed decisions about both electricity use and its cost.

In the end the people of Boulder, Colorado were essentially guinea pigs. They were used by their utility as part of a PR campaign that was also a research project into grid reform. The SmartGridCity was no more about giving people substantive control over their electricity use than it was about giving them a smart dishwasher or a free electric car. Instead, what Boulder residents got were higher bills, a less reliable electricity system, and effectively no communication save a rain of glossy salvos from the utility.

Xcel survived, even as their SmartGridCity died, as an idea and in fact. Other for-profit utilities, large and small, have not been so lucky. If, from the end of the Depression Era to 1988, no major electric company in the United States filed for bankruptcy protection, then in 1988, as competition crept into the sector, the impossible began to happen: power companies started to fail. First one in New Hampshire, then one in El Paso, a small one in Colorado, and another in Maine, here and there they’d fold and quietly go under. The first really big bankruptcy filing was PG&E in 2001 (since restructured and revived).

Enron’s collapse, also in 2001, pointed to another future for failure. You don’t have to be an electric company to go bankrupt in the electricity business. By 2001 electricity was often controlled by larger energy companies—often investment consortiums—that might own a utility, some power plants, and maybe even some lines. Enron, with $65.5 billion in assets, was the fifth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history; it owned three utilities, only one of which was in the United States (Portland General Electric), and thirty-eight power plants worldwide, including ten wind farms in the United States and eight hydroelectric dams, all in Oregon.

The collapse of the Energy Futures Holding Corporation in 2014, a less well-known industry bomb than Enron, continues this trend. The eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, with $40.9 billion in assets, Energy Futures was only two-thirds the size of Enron, but all of its holdings were in a single state—Texas. Energy Futures Holding was the parent company of North Texas’s retail electric service provider TXU Energy, which has more customers than any other electricity retailer in that state. Energy Futures also owned the state’s largest power company, Luminant Generation Co.



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