Gretchen Bakke

A revelatory look at our national power grid--how it developed, its current flaws, and how it must becompletely reimagined for our fast-approaching energy future.

The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

The Grid

Timeo Williams

This book starts with an explanation of how electricity works, the history of the uses of electricity from Edison's time to now, and finally the present situation we are now in. 
"The grid", refers to the complex electrical system, with its tall transformers and power lines interlocked in all of America. 

So what's the problem? 
Inefficiency, a lack of suppliers, cost and blackouts. The current system, which is governed by utilities, utilizes old coal and nuclear power during peak loads, whenever renewables can't get the job done. 

But the biggest problem, seems to be, the lack of the ability to store energy. When one's solar panels have excess energy, it is unable to store that energy in a usable form, to use later than night. That's when that same person will rely on the grid, running on coal, to get electricity.

Andrew John Kinney

The Grid started strong, and then, in my opinion, lost its way. Gretchen Bakke does a good job explaining how electricity works, but when she starts trying to describe the problems with the US grid, she gets a bit too strident and apocalyptic. One of the problems is that this book was written in 2016, so her data is at least seven years old at this point. Interestingly, she put a negative spin on most projections for the increase in the use of non-fossil fuel power sources and EV's, and as I checked her numbers, she was wrong in every case about how she thought non-carbon-based solutions would grow over time. For instance:

- She spends a paragraph saying the Obama Administration's plans were overly ambitious for increasing renewable energy (the goal was to get to 25% by 2022). At the time the goal was set, 2012, the US was only at 12.4%. In 2022, the US achieved 24% energy from renewables, so not too bad.

- She is somewhat dismissive of solar power, noting that "currently" solar represents only 0.6% of electricity produced. As of 2021, the number was 2.8%, and in 2022 it was 3.64%, and the growth is unabated. At this rate, solar will be easily over 5% in 2024. Even today, in Spring / Summer many months are over 4.3%. So while wind grew faster initially, back in the 2010's, solar is taking off now.

- She is even more dismissive of the idea of rapid growth of electric vehicles as part of the US market, implying it is fanciful to think that "we the people will be buying EV's by the millions in 30 years". Well, the sale of EV's in 2022 was 807,000 vehicles, and the number can be expected to break 1 million in 2023, barring a recession. So Americans will likely be buying "millions" of EV's about ten years from the date of her writing, not thirty.

About the first 120 pages of the book is devoted to the history of the grid, and I found that interesting. I took a year of electrical engineering as an undergraduate engineer, so I have an understanding of the concepts of electricity, and I thought her explanations of the basics were good. Ms. Bakke does not have a STEM degree, so I suspect that having to understand the concepts herself made her a good descriptor of how electricity works.

One of the problems she focuses on extensively is how to store excess energy generated by renewables. Solar and wind, unlike fossil-fuel plants, are a bit harder to "turn down" when the grid does not require the power they are producing, such as when wind gusts cause wind turbine output to spike, or the natural diurnal cycle of solar generation which causes a spike each day and then drops to zero at night. This is a real issue which needs a better solution. But the author presents this problem as if it were an almost unsolvable dilemma - it's not. Decades ago in school, I learned about energy storage via pumped water and gravity batteries, and while she discusses pumped water storage, she doesn't even mention "gravity batteries", except to mock a German engineer who had an admittedly overly ambitious idea in this regard. Gravity batteries are simply a way to store energy by lifting weights (say, a couple of tons) many meters, thereby storing the energy used to lift them. When one needs that energy, the weight is lowered and it turns a turbine / flywheel which is geared to the amount of weight that is being lowered. A recent article noted that there are enough abandoned mineshafts worldwide to store as much energy as the entire world produces in a day. https://www.techspot.com/news/97306-g... By the way, gravity batteries have the enormous advantage of not losing energy over time, unlike chemical batteries, which discharge naturally to some degree.

Some of Ms. Bakke's digressions are interesting, but many are either irrelevant or only peripherally relevant. When she started describing the US military's use of renewables, I thought she was going to describe the excellent initiative by the Obama Administration to promote solar-wind adoption by directing military bases to install them. That was a real stroke of genius that helped develop the skills and supply chain for large scale deployment, particularly of solar. Instead, there was a protracted discussion of how the Army tried to put small scale solar into Afghanistan to reduce the use of diesel generators because fuel trucks tended to get ambushed.....sorry, but what does this have to do with the US grid? Finally, she did discuss the microgrids established at many military installations, but she does not acknowledge the jumpstart those investments gave to solar/wind, along with the Obama-era investments in renewables research.

She spends a lot of time on a couple in California who installed solar and small-scale wind to protect themselves from black-outs, and on a woman who threatened to shoot an electric company employee who was trying to install a wireless meter on her house. The woman with the gun believed the utility company was going to use the wireless meter to spy on her and possibly turn off her air conditioning to reduce peak energy use in the summer. And Ms. Bakke seems to give oxygen to that conspiracy theory, so that was about the point I stopped taking her very seriously. However, she does hit on a real factor in the deployment of renewables and EVs - the desire of many people to be independent, to make their own energy which powers their house and their car, and also the desire of many people to help the environment by transition to renewables and EVs. That's a real factor, and has helped drive the movement toward sustainable energy and transportation in the US. A generational difference she identifies is the tendency of younger people to buy less junk, and more longer-lasting, high-quality goods as compared to older consumers. This results, according to Ms. Bakke, in fewer appliances, and less consumption in general, and hence lower levels of electricity use. It is true that electricity consumption in the US peaked about 2010 and has been on a plateau ever since, but if EV's become a large portion of total vehicles, might this change? We'll see.

Ultimately, Ms. Bakke has a bit of the attitude that frustrates me with some non-STEM commenters on STEM-related issues; there seems to be a belief that technology got us into the mess we are in, and therefore we should be suspicious of technological solutions. The engineer's view of this is that technology has to be a part of the solution, though of course, people have to actually want a solution and government has to work to facilitate that solution. If you read a book like Drawdown (a comprehensive text on how to decarbonize, written by engineers and scientists), it presents an array of technical solutions to technical problems; some are quite simple, like changing the type of refrigerant used in air conditioners, and some are complex and difficult, like the transition to a smart grid. We have to forge ahead with additional solar and wind, and we have to fix the grid. Will we break things and make mistakes while doing that? Sure we will, and then we'll correct our errors and move forward. Because we have to, in order to avoid a climate catastrophe.

I wish this had been a better book about the grid, and about the opportunities to improve it, but ultimately I was disappointed. Maybe a good science writer like Elizabeth Kolbert will tackle this subject someday. That said, if non-technical people read this book, and are alerted to the basic issues we face with regard to modernizing the grid, and become better voters because of that knowledge, so much the better. A basic understanding of the issues is better than no knowledge that they exist. I'm sorry if that sounds like faint praise, but it's the best I can offer The Grid.

Update - 1/25/2023: I just pre-ordered No Miracles Needed (available Feb 2nd) by Mark Jacobson. I think that may turn out to be the right book to explain how to integrate renewables to the grid.
Update - 7/14/2023: Jacobson's book was as good as I had hoped, putting aside a rather pedantic writing style. I recommend it for those wanting an engineer's view of the many viable solutions available to decarbonize the grid.

Matthew Royal

Lays out a brief history of the US power grid and why it's so disconnected, brittle, and quirky. There's a lot of added complexity when we start adding small household solar producers into a power ecosystem that is used to monolithic power stations, predictable production and consumption, and insulation from market forces. Bakke makes a compelling case for why the future could never come from the existing power utility companies.

She presents the problems with the current infrastructure, outlines a lot of the perverse incentives forcing the country into massive, state-sanctioned monopolies, but also warns against the increasing Balkanization resulting from the accelerating trends of individual production and disconnection. 

No easy solutions are given, but she points to the ultimate dream of fusion power providing cheap, endless, clean power and wireless charging of devices so that we don't have to think about. It's ultimately the services of hot showers, fresh coffee, and comfortable homes that consumers want to pay for; not electricity. It's a good introduction to the issues, and a good start on learning to think about power generation issues and options.

Andrew Louis

Lots of interesting anecdotes but 288 pages later and I still can't tell you basic answers to questions like how the modern electrical grid came about or how it's managed. The book is more of a collection of vignettes, some way too in the weeds, and some way too general and vague.

The Grid The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

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