The Grid (2016) - 2021 Book #9

Last week I finished reading my ninth book toward my goal of 50 for 2021 – The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke.

The Grid was published in 2016, and according to Amazon has a print length of 364 pages. It took me 8 days to read, having started on February 24 and finished on March 4.

This book could have been totally boring, but it wasn’t. It was awesome. I didn’t imagine getting pulled into a story of ubiquitous infrastructure quite as much as I did with this one. I certainly recommend it to anyone with an interest in our increasingly electrified economy.

Onto the review…

What The Grid is about

It’s another book with an appropriate title - it’s about the US electrical grid. It gives a thorough, but not tedious, history of the development of electricity and the adjacent technologies. We learn how the US relatively quickly settled on electrical standards and common infrastructure to ease the transition. Next is an exploration of some of our grid’s most important and most visible failures, followed by a forward look into what may be in store for our grid of the future.

Why did I choose The Grid?

When I set my goal to read 50 books this year, I wanted several of the books to be relevant to my current day job. I’m the Director of Market & Data Analysis at Pinnacle, a company that helps make the world’s complex process facilities – things like refineries and water and wastewater treatment plants – more reliable. With this in mind, I wanted to make sure I read about core infrastructure. Cadillac Desert, about water availability in the Western US, was my first book of the year. The Grid is next in line with this theme. I plan to read about manufacturing, transportation, and possibly mining before the year is out, all with the same motivation.

Why you would like The Grid

If you are interested in the history of electricity-enabled technology, you will like The Grid. If you are interested in the energy transition, and how our grid will or should handle increasing contributions from renewable energy sources, you will like The Grid. If you are interested in the resilience of the grid, and why things like storms and squirrels (yes, squirrels) cause so much damage, you will like The Grid.

Why you would not like The Grid

If you are looking for a deep dive into Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, you might not like The Grid. There are better biographical treatments elsewhere. If you are looking for environmental and economic impact assessments of oil, gas, nuclear, and renewable energies as means of generating power, you might not like The Grid, as it focuses much more on the grid itself, and how the grid will respond operationally to different power sources. If you want to learn more about decentralized power generation, you might not like The Grid. While Ms. Bakke does tell a few stories of people going off grid, it’s not the thorough investigation you might want.

Specific passages that captured my attention

Here’s an articulation of the core challenge of today’s electricity grid:

Edison himself, as the historian Maury Klein explains, “discovered his error in using the gas industry as a model. Gas could be stored, which made it possible to produce on an orderly, rational basis like other manufactured products. It could maintain reserves to meet peak requirements and level out demand over a twenty-four-hour period. Not so electricity. It had to be produced, sold, delivered, an used all at once, which meant that the plant supplying it needed the capacity to deliver the total maximum load demanded by customers at any given moment.”

Like I mentioned earlier, my day job is all about industrial reliability, which is why this particular passage about the 2003 US Northeast blackout resonated with me:

This was not the first major blackout in the East, nor will it be the last. In [the blackout of] 2003 no one in particular was to blame. Nobody noticed the tree as it grew, nobody noticed the [software] bug as it slowly gummed up the works. Like rust and rot, like tiny leaks and hairline cracks, like age itself, the tree and bug were too minor and too quiet to catch anyone’s eye. And yet there they stand at the beginning of the cascade, singular monuments to all the smallness that can add up, with time and opportunity, to total systems collapse.

I’ll close with an interesting anecdote about one way that widespread adoption of electric cars could help our grid become more resilient:

Together, all our cars keep our common electrical system strong. And the grid, with their help, can at long last balance itself. Upgrades, maintenance, and necessary investments to keep it smart will still need to be done, but the cars, as integrated, dispersed, deployable storage, would go a long way toward increasing both the reliability and the efficiency of the infrastructure as a whole.

My overall impression of The Grid

Like I said at the top, I really enjoyed The Grid. It could have easily been dry and boring. It wasn’t. Even better, I felt pulled through the story. It never felt like a chore to pick the book up.

Another reason I liked the book was its nuanced take on renewable energy sources. Wind and solar power are exciting for the obvious reasons. The known intermittency of these two technologies – the fact that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine – wreaks havoc with our grid, as presently constructed.

Fortunately, the book doesn’t just leave us there. We learn about some cool ways we may be able to work past the intermittency. Grid-scale energy storage is one important technology in this respect. I feel much better equipped to further investigate these kinds of challenges, having read The Grid.

I strongly recommend this book if you have even a passing interest in our electrical infrastructure. It’s a quick read. It helps inform a lot of what we see and hear around the ongoing energy transition. It’s worth your time.

As for my next book, it’s Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America by Stephen L. Klineberg. I should finish it today or tomorrow, which means I’ll quite likely have a review posted next week.

As always, thanks a bunch for stopping by.