The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

I work for one of the mid-sized utilities in America and I can say for certain that this book occasionally dabbles in facts and truths, but really is just a few hundred pages of the author reinforcing her own partisan beliefs on the system being broken and how she thinks it should be repaired. We raise customer's rates on projects that we don't need to do based on her thought process that aging infrastructure absolutely must be replaced with new, better equipment. Smart Grid applications have been installed for 20 years, so it's not some bright future that she's alluding to. The book deals in fallacies and is not as well researched as you'd hope, based on her background.I'd much more strongly reccomend 'Living on the Grid' which is written by a Grid Operator and does a much better job of explaining electricity, the process to generate it and how to toss it on transmission lines into your homes. It's much less politicized and has a much more accurate depiction of the system as it stands now.We keep this book on display at work as a laughing stock.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke“The Grid” is an insightful yet verbose book on America’s grid technology; it’s history together with the laws, people and logic that brought it into existence. Author Gretchen Bakke holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and is currently a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada brings us this seldom told story of the evolution of an essential infrastructure. This interesting 364-page book includes the following nine chapters: 1. The Way of the Wind, 2. How the Grid Got Its Wires, 3. The Consolidation of Power, 4. The Cardigan Path, 5. Things Fall Apart, 6. Two Birds, One Stone, 7. A Tale of Two Storms, 8. In Search of the Holy Grail, and 9. American Zeitgeist.Positives:1. A well-researched, accessible book.2. The seldom-told story of our electrical-grid infrastructure.3. Does a good job of describing the grid and its problems. “America has the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation—coming in at about six hours per year, not including blackouts caused by extreme weather or other “acts of God,” of which there were 679 between 2003 and 2012. Compare this with Korea at 16 outage minutes a year, Italy at 51 minutes, Germany at 15, and Japan at 11.” Bonus, “This is our grid in a nutshell: it is a complex just-in-time system for making, and almost instantaneously delivering, a standardized electrical current everywhere at once.”4. Explains the most common causes of power outages. “Overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.”5. Shares interesting findings. “National security was threatened more by the “brittleness” of America’s electrical grid than by possible future disruptions in the flow of imported oil.”6. One of the most interesting topics covered has to do with the problems of integrating renewables into the existing grid. This is a recurring topic in the book. “The problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century.”7. Key discoveries behind the grid. “This subtle-seeming transition in the structure of circuitry, from serial to parallel, was the grid’s first revolution. Though we tend to give Thomas Alva Edison the credit for having invented the lightbulb (he did not), he did devise something just as remarkable—the parallel circuit, one of his greatest if least lauded contributions to technological underpinnings of our modern world.”8. The key steps to big grids. “The first step toward a big grid, one that would make it possible to universalize access to electric power, was the invention and successful manufacture of alternating current (AC) electrical systems in 1887.”9. Discusses the history of big electrical business. “By 1925 almost nobody in the electricity business could even imagine a system for making, transmitting, distributing, or managing electric power other than as a monopoly enterprise.”10. An interesting look at electrical efficiency. “By the mid-1960s it had become clear to utility men that a plant run at just over 30 percent efficiency was both the most reliable and the most cost-effective way to make electricity.”11. A look at President Carter’s impact on energy. “This turn toward conservation and energy efficiency was the first crisis, of three, that would shock the electric utilities during the Carter era.”12. A look at the wind industry. “The combination of federal and California incentives and innovative state regulations launched the wind industry in the U.S.”13. Blackouts and their causes. “A case in point: On August 14, 2003, eighteen months after Davis-Besse was shut down for repair, the largest blackout in our nation’s history, and the third-largest ever in the world, swept across the eastern half of the United States and parts of Canada, blacking out eight states and 50 million people for two days. So thorough and so vast was this cascading blackout that it shows as a visible dip on America’s GDP for that year. The blackout, which covered 93,000 square miles, accounted for $6 billion of lost business revenue. If ever it was in doubt, the 2003 blackout proved that at its core America’s economy is inexorably, indubitably electric.” Bonus, “In the case of the 2003 blackout the error on the grid took the form of overgrown trees and the error on the computers took the form of a line of code that disallowed simultaneous incoming data reports.”14. Financial challenges of the electric industry. “Historically, utilities made money when people used electricity; the more we used the more money they made. Now they don’t. Today’s utilities make money by transporting power and by trading it as a commodity.”15. A look at “smart grids”. “The “smart” grid uses computers to alleviate the abiding problem of peak load.”16. Find out the impact of climate change to the grid.17. A look at the impact of major storms to the grid. “After Superstorm Sandy, the Northeast began to witness the return of the tiny grid. These new constructions bear a lot in common with Edison-era private plants, which generated customized electricity for a single owner on-site. Unlike Edison’s private plants, these modern microgrids can connect and unconnect as needed to the big grid (which is now increasingly known as the “macrogrid”). And, unlike any system since the consolidation of power in the early twentieth century, these microgrids work perfectly well in “island” mode.”18. Military applications. “Anything that can be done to eliminate the necessity of diesel generators, and reduce the amount of oil necessary to feed them on the field of battle, strengthens—adds resiliency, flexibility, and mobility to—the war effort. Mobile, matte, lightweight, and diversified systems for keeping the lights on, the data safe, and the troops cool are critical to mission success. For while some of this fuel is poured into gas tanks, a lot of it is used to make electricity.” Bonus, “As a result, the DoD, which operates a fleet of 200,000 nontactical vehicles, is working to convert them all to electricity with vehicle-to-grid technologies designed in from the start.”19. The “holy grail” of electricity, storage. “Today the grail is less a new way to make power than it is to find a really good way to store it.”20. The future of the grid. In the final chapter, the author discusses the consumers’ personal interactions with power that may shape the grid of the future.21. Plenty of links in the notes section.Negatives:1. Verbose. It could and probably should have been a hundred pages fewer.2. Lack of supplementary visual material that could have done wonders to complement the narrative. The general public knows very little about how electricity works and this kind of book begs for diagrams and visual material, yet there is very little here.3. Not only does the book lack visual material it lacks supplementary material that would of have been of interest to the public. As an example: maps of key grids, table of electrical consumption around the country, timelines, charts and diagrams showing the use of renewables versus non-renewable energy sources, etc.4. Not only verbose but at times even tedious to read.5. Missed opportunities to “shock” the reader with interesting tidbits or curiosities.6. Lacks scientific rigor, the book is intended for the masses.7. No formal bibliography.In summary, this book should have been much better. The topic of the grid is personally interesting to an engineer like myself but I’m very disappointed on how verbose and poorly presented the material was. The lack of supplementary materials did the book no favors either. On the other hand, I agree with the findings and conclusions of the author and I did learn a lot about the electric grid as en essential and pervasive infrastructure. More like a 3.5-star quality book, if you are interested in the grid by all means read this book but you just need to be patient with it. A mild recommendation.Further recommendations: “Living on the Grid” by William L, Thompson, “Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World” by Jill Jonnes, “AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War” by Tom McNichol, “Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics” by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon, “The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell” by Basil Mahon, “The Electric Life of Michael Faraday” by Alan Hirshfeld, and “Tesla” by W. Bernard Carlson.

When it first came into being in the late 1800's the electricity grid was a revolution in how power was delivered and how we thought about what we used it for in our lives. Over the course of the 20th century we gradually took the grid more and more for granted until it faded from view and became almost invisible to us. Over the last twenty years it has suddenly crashed back into view with Smart Meters, Smart Grids, Blackouts, Grid Resilience questions, Distributed Generation and the possibility of micro-grids and nano-grids. How to make sense of all of this? Gretchen Bakke's book The Grid helps to provide clarity, context and understanding.The Grid, is a very ambitious undertaking. Bakke deploys her skills as a cultural anthropologist to understand and explain the way that the electrical grid in the US works. Given that the grid is, as she notes, the "world's largest machine" with a long and intricate history, and that this history is a nexus of fearsome technical, legal and cultural interactions this is no easy task. She manages the task with great skill and provides an excellent account of the grid throughout its past into the present day and also hazards some thoughts about its future.This is a very timely book since the demands we are making of the grid are changing very rapidly. Fifty years ago the utilities were seen as safe, if sleepy, investments. They occupied a predictable world of regularly increasing electrical consumption where their main responsibility was to "keep the lights on" and, provided they did that, they would be protected from disruptive competition and would be allowed to collect their rents on the massive infrastructure in which they had invested.This has all changed, first in the seventies with the oil price shocks upended the energy world in a way that resulted first in the National Energy Act in 1978 passed by the Carter Administration, but then followed a decade later by the Energy Policy Act (1992) passed by George H.W. Bush's government. These acts changed the comfortable world of utilities forever. These changes and our resulting expectations have changed with increasing pace since then with the mass deployment of renewables, the continuing price-reduction that makes storage a viable possibility and the movement towards electric vehicles to name just three major societal shifts that we are currently living through.Bakke explains step-by-step why these and other developments are instrumental in changing the way we think about electricity and its delivery to our homes and businesses. She has a marvelous ability to make even complicated technical or political issues accessible and clear. The subject matter in the book is well structured and the narrative always purposeful and entertaining as well as informative.If you have never given the grid so much as five minutes' thought but are concerned about how we will manage to successfully evolve our electrical infrastructure in response to the competing pressures of our modern world I can thoroughly recommend this book as a marvelous introduction to what is an under-appreciated and too often neglected field.

One suspects that this book has been propelled into the limelight from a recommendation by Bill Gates. Indeed, such an important topic- with its impending problems on the horizon - has been covered so little in hardback print that it warrants said propelling into the limelight. However as a book, I am beginning to question if Bill Gates might just have made the right choice when started Microsoft instead of becoming a literary critic.Gretchen Bakke has a PhD in cultural anthropology, which doesn't matter so much as this is a scientifically a very high level book. The problem begins to arise when she starts swaying between aiming the book towards those who don't know their AC form their DC, and aiming the book towards those interested in the statistical details. At times we are given paragraph upon paragraph of fascinating statistics on blackout occurrences and the danger it poses to the military and worse - Facebook. Only for this detail to be shortly followed by page upon page of opinion, such as the the enjoyment we would have in life if there were more blackouts and less computer time. The chapters seem to lack direction and sometimes paragraphs are oddly disconnected from the prior.The continue criticising the book would be seriously unfair to a book that should have been dissected by the publisher. The essence of the book is great. The history of the grid from Westinghouse, through Carter and to modern day, was certainly a great addition to the book. The statistics on the grid and problems it faces are certainly in there. The problem is they are just too scattered and lack some coherent chapteral direction.An immense effort but alas not an immense book.

Interesting book that explains how the grid's history and how it works. Wish someone would write the same for the UK - where our creaking system seems to be completely unready for any significant decarbonisation

I am writing this review a day after a blackout happened in India's financial capital, Mumbai, due to grid failure. There are very few books out there which talk about electricity grid, an omnipresent but complex infrastructure without which life in a city (and increasingly villages) will be unimaginable. The book begins by attempting to explain the basic concepts of electricity and the grid in very simple manner. Electric current doesn't behave like other commodities such as oil, coal etc, and works on different principles. The author mostly succeeds in helping the reader see the various moving parts and multiple systems at play in keeping this complex machine stable. However, when that stability is impacted, we see familiar events like blackouts. A failure in one part of the grid can bring down the whole system even after having multiple built in safety nets. In fact, blackouts might be the result of the triggering of one of those safety systems built within the grid. The book uses real world examples and case studies to help demonstrate how a tree branch can trigger a state wide blackout.It also highlights that instances of these failures might increase as goverments push toward large scale deployment of renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions. Besides being variable and inconsistent in its generation of electricity, the renewable generation is being built out too fast for the vast monolith of grid to adapt. The utilities and goverment are also trying to think of new solutions to rationalize a market distorted by factors such as rising rooftop solar generation, which is reducing utilities' revenues in the US, thus starving utilities of capital to maintain the grid.However, before diving into these complex questions, the book charts the history of electricity generation and development of grids. It is interesting that electricity generation started with the rich operating their own small coal fueled power plants. However, with the advent of large grids, electricity became an affordable and a basic commodity. Today, we are back to square one, where people are using solar panels to again operate private power plants.While the book delves into these issues in most of the chapters, the author seemed to have the lost her trajectory in last few chapters. The last part seemed to be incoherent, and sounded more of a monologue into what might or might not happen to the grid.We also need to keep in mind that the book focuses entirely on the US grid and while it does impart a lot of knowledge, every country works differently. The model of development for grid in India will be different keeping in mind that it is yet to reach every Indian. Unlike US, electricity in India is still unaffordable for many and therefore a lot of distribution is still subsidised and handled by goverment-owned entities. Hence, developing countries have to chart their own path, which fulfills both development and market needs wherever necessary.Still, this book will really help the reader in deepening their understanding of this vast synchronized machine that looms large in our imagination via those big towers dotting suburban and rural landscapes.

Still reading it. I also bought a Kindle edition so I could pass on the print version to my son before I’m finished reading

Everyone should read this book that cares about the the past and future of technology in the world. Surprisingly, it is a page turner through most of it. This is surprising, considering the dry subject matter.