Who Turned Out the Lights?: Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis by Scott Bittle & Jean Johnson

Author:Scott Bittle & Jean Johnson [Bittle, Scott & Johnson, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Science, Environmental Science, Political Science, Energy Policy, Environmental Policy, General
ISBN: 9780061960062
Google: CIxHrDDN7PkC
Goodreads: 8232695
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

So what’s wrong with the grid we have? Nothing, really, other than it was designed for a different era, and we haven’t been willing to spend the money to keep up.

The basic structure of the grid was set up in the 1920s, an era where electric power was a purely local business, and a monopoly as well. Huge regional utility companies generated the power, sent it through their own transmission network to your house, and sent you a bill. Demand was pretty predictable and so was supply, so coping with plant outages or surges in demand was fairly straightforward. The service was pretty good, but if you didn’t like it, tough (although these companies were and are heavily regulated by state governments). Those companies are still around, and still big players. The so-called vertically integrated utilities account for about 75 percent of the electric generation and customers in the United States.50

Over time, the utilities started sharing power with each other to meet demand and cover for each other during outages. That’s still a regional phenomenon, though. Utilities in Oregon and Washington, for example, can share power, but they can’t send or get any from the East Coast.

Even though it’s still regional, the U.S. transmission network is huge by any standard, with more than 220,000 miles of high-voltage power lines (the big metal towers) and another 5 million miles of distribution lines (the wooden poles outside your house).51 We’re going to have to start replacing it anyway (30 percent or more of the grid is forty to fifty years old). It isn’t just a question of buying new stuff, either. As we’ve mentioned before, energy demand is increasing worldwide, which means China, India, and everybody else is in the market for new grid technology too. Some experts are predicting a global backlog for electrical equipment, which will make upgrading more difficult.52

So what kind of grid do we need? Partly, we need to physically put in new wires and transformers. Right now an enormous amount of electricity evaporates in transmission—what the industry calls “line loss.” Upgrading transformers and power lines could save 6 percent of all the electricity generated in the United States. Most experts are touting the idea of a two-way “smart grid,” one that uses information technology to monitor use at both the utility’s end and the customer’s end as well.

Think of it as combining the communications power of the Internet with the brute force capacity of the transmission network. For example, right now the utility knows how much power you’re using, but not necessarily why you’re using it. A smart grid would allow the utility to know much more precisely what was causing a surge in demand, and shift resources to meet it. And technology at your business or home would know the grid was approaching capacity and be able to make its own adjustments, cutting back on the electricity you could afford to give up (say, adjusting your thermostat) while keeping the essential stuff. Another plus is that

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