Break Up Big Grid

This is Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter on the rise of clean energy, by me, reporter Julian Spector. It’s free, so if you like what you see, please subscribe and tell your friends. We could all use some more Bright Ideas in our lives, right?

You’ve heard that certain institutions that dominate American life deserve to be altered if their operations become actively harmful to the public good.

That argument has targeted tech giants and big banks, but I’m going to apply it to the ubiquitous and often overlooked system that gives you electricity. We have the technology to do this, and we increasingly have the motivation.

I live in California, and though we excel at most things—economy, culture, food, landscape, technology, wine, I really could go on—a functioning electrical grid has slipped out of reach, in a manner both embarrassing and deadly. The peculiar blend of arid climate, bouts of hot, dry wind, and aging utility equipment routinely sparks wildfires that go on to kill many people and destroy many homes.

Pacific Gas & Electric has done the most damage by far in recent years, so much that its liabilities forced it into bankruptcy. It recently emerged, with a deal to pay back wildfire victims and invest in a safer grid.

But the high-tech strategy for the utility serving the high-tech capital of the world is to turn off the grid if fire risk gets too high. The company endowed with monopoly power to keep the lights on has permission from the state to turn the lights off, as the lesser of two evils. 

That was already bad news when it meant a million people stranded without schools, businesses or air-conditioning in the late summer heat. This year we also have a coronavirus pandemic keeping people in their homes as a supposed refuge from the world.

Nothing encourages the manifestation of a new system quite like the abject failure of the old one.

When the electrical grid starts wildfires this big, that’s a problem. ("Wildfires in California 9 Nov 2018" byanttilipponen is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Fight costs, and fires

California is an extreme example of the downsides of a centralized energy system.

For decades, we entrusted the grid to a bunch of monopolies to build the poles and wires that delivered electricity from large power plants to customers. It was pretty straightforward then. 

Lately, costs to maintain this system have skyrocketed. It needs to meet the largest peak consumption, usually driven by air conditioning on the hottest days of the year. It also must survive whatever storms and disruptions nature throws at it.

Keeping up with that costs billions of dollars for the large utilities, which their customers collectively pay for (as I mentioned previously, building stuff is how utilities make profits). The price you pay for power probably keeps going up, even if the cost to produce it stays flat; that’s because of the cost of maintaining the network.

So we all have reasons to care about this, whether it’s the threat of inferno and abandonment to the elements, or a creeping portion of your income going to power bills over the years.

I explored this path in a piece of darkly speculative fiction for my annual Greentech Media Thanksgiving Special last year.

Luckily, clean energy offers an alternative path.

If the old model is centralized, the new model is decentralized, or “distributed.” The goal is that cheaper, localized equipment can succeed more nimbly than the big, fancy, macro-level equivalent. Think scrappy American militias taking on the beefy column of Redcoats at Lexington and Concord.

One way to achieve this is by building microgrids, basically a catch-all term for energy sources that can be controlled locally and operate independently of the broader system. 

A house with solar is not a microgrid, because it depends on the broader system to run through the night. A house with solar and a battery can be a microgrid, if it has enough power to keep the house running. Diesel generators can turn a house into a microgrid too—the term is technology-agnostic. And microgrids can be big: whole military bases, university campuses, city blocks.

Got any friends who value their independence and self-reliance? Send them a post about microgrids.

Make it right for you

Microgrids are increasingly available, but they struggle with standardization: every house, business or campus is different, and needs different things. And the longer you need to operate independently, the more expensive it gets.

The solar and battery combo that could keep one house powered for days through an outage would tap out for a larger house that has, say, a jacuzzi and sauna running in the backyard to de-stress about the whole situation. A factory may require some gas or diesel generation. Some startups are working on simplifying things with standardized microgrid-in-a-box concepts, but it’s still early on.

The emerging model that does make financial sense merges two concepts:

• Stay connected to the grid, but use clean energy on a daily basis to make electricity cheaper

• Have just enough enough equipment to tide you through a temporary outage

That technically is what households do when they add solar and batteries: save money on the solar to pay for the backup power of the battery.

But I recently spoke with the company building the biggest version of this in the world. It’s called Switch, and it runs what appears to be the largest data center in the world in the Nevada desert. It’s going to power the whole thing with solar built onsite, and batteries from the Tesla Gigafactory down the road.

This project is going to give Switch way cheaper power than buying from the local utility, and way cleaner power, too. A big part of that is that there’s no cost to ship the power across the state, through lines that get congested, just like freeways. If you produce it where you are and use it where you are, there’s no traffic to worry about—it’s like working from home instead of commuting. And that means no new investments are needed to keep the grid humming along for everybody else.

Now California’s finally pushing microgrids as a widespread tool against the pre-emptive power shutoffs, but it took years to get that ball rolling. Just hours after I was nudged awake at 4:30 AM by our local plate tectonics last week, the news showed a flame spreading in the mountains east of L.A. This land cares little for our bureaucratic timelines.

The Energy Stream, AKA what I’m doing in quarantine

You should take a real close look at Las Meninas. It’s a Diego Velázquez joint from 1656. It’ll blow your mind, or at least it did for me, home alone on a recent night after crushing some tacos from down the block and flipping through a magazine and finding a print of it calling to me from the past. 

Diego was painting the Spanish court, but the starkly lit, vaguely sinister scene he depicts also contains him, painting it. How can you paint a scene that contains you painting it? How did he stage that without photographs to compare and superimpose different scenes? How did the royals let him get away with it?

A thoughtful creator always inhabits the work, I suppose. Maybe that’s what my friends were getting at when they told me to include more personality and less of that electricity mumbo jumbo. Velázquez just does it more suavely than most, such that you can’t see his vision without him in it, calmly crafting the experience that he knew you were going to have 350 years later.