May 23, 2016
The omnipresent but seldom-noticed apparatus of electricity supply is in conspicuous upheaval, according to this interesting but scattershot history of America’s grid from Bakke, an assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University. She recounts the evolution of the grid from thousands of small-scale generators into giant utilities and explores the phenomena that she contends are now nibbling that model to death: environmental regulations, deregulated electricity markets, burgeoning wind and solar sectors, rooftop photovoltaics (PV), microgrids, and squirrels gnawing on transmission lines. Her lucid, accessible discussion is clear-eyed about the pitfalls of these developments, and she adopts a supportive, populist tone in discussing them as ways for folks to take control from centralized electricity monopolies. Unfortunately, small mistakes (rooftop PV is not “producing three times more electricity in California than are central station solar plants”—quite the opposite) and large misinterpretations (“big, expensive power plants... aren’t needed much, if at all, anymore,” she writes, though they still generate almost all U.S. electricity) undermine confidence in her judgments. Her tour of faddish green-energy doctrine—Amory Lovins is frequently invoked—makes an argument for the cultural inevitability of change, but the practical case for reinventing the current centralized grid, that triumph of collective provisioning, feels weak and ill-supported. Agent: Susan Rabiner, Susan Rabiner Literary.
June 1, 2016
A primer on the challenges facing a power industry in transition.Electricity is like no other commodity. Because there is still no way to store it on a large scale, the electricity we draw from the grid must be produced at that very moment. Production was easy to control when all electricity came from large plants burning fossil or nuclear fuel, but the rise of renewable energy sources has thrown these arrangements into chaos since renewables provide "an inconsistent, unpredictable, variable power that nothing on our grid is prepared to adapt to, the grid itself least of all." In her debut, Bakke (Anthropology/McGill Univ.) describes the grid as far more than towers and wires. It is "a machine, an infrastructure, a cultural artifact, a set of business practices, and an ecology," the result of a Progressive-era combination of business incentives and government regulation, designed for the exact opposite of 21st-century needs. The author keeps the physics and tech talk to the minimum necessary as she leads readers through a history of the grid and a maze of financial, legal, regulatory, and environmental considerations with sprightly good humor. Bakke's analysis is confident and evenhanded; she delivers harsh judgments equally on myopic utility companies, uncomprehending legislators and regulators, and simplistic advocates of renewable energy production for poor planning, lack of vision, and failure to anticipate the consequences of their actions. She covers the causes of blackouts--most often trees and squirrels--and suggests that rather than hardening the grid, we need greater incorporation of microgrids to make it less susceptible to damage and minimize the impact on consumers when disasters happen. Finally, Bakke sketches a possible design of the "intelligent grid" of the future that uses widely distributed, small-scale generation and storage options to provide resilient and reliable sources of power. A lively analysis of the challenges renewables present to the production and distribution of electricity.
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July 1, 2016
Bakke goes beyond technology in her depiction of America's electrical grid as dilapidated and desperate for innovation to include politics, culture, nature, business, and law. She explains that energy monopolies made the first multiuser grids, then persuaded regulators to create noncompetitive service areas based on ever-falling energy prices, ever-rising demand and power plant efficiency, and sweetheart construction loans. This system faltered as pollution increased and oil embargoes went into effect. During the Carter administration, laws were enacted that required utilities to buy competitively priced power from whoever made it, providing, Bakke observes, a toehold for efficiency, innovation, and entrepreneurship. But later deregulation allowed exploitative trading that, along with failure to update the grid, led to market collapse. Energy trading still discourages capital investment in the grid. Bakke advocates for large grids saturated with microprocessors that respond to all variables, a software solution that may be inevitable, though entrenched interests, privacy concerns, and costs currently block the way. Hopefully, Bakke's startling expose revealing how electricity sloshes around the country across a precarious grid will be a wake-up call.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)