Rebuilding the North American Electrical Grid

As highlighted in a recent cover story in Wired¹ magazine, the electric power industry invests just two percent of revenues in research and development; that's less than the makers of pet food invest in R&D.  This is one reason why today's American electrical grid is a vast and sprawling tangle of wires, outdated mechanical switches, and analog devices. 

Making matters worse, that electrical grid isn't really just one grid.  It is an ad hoc hybrid composed of many local grids that have been haphazardly thrown together ever since the Edison Electric Light Company opened its doors for business in 1880.  At that time, local monopolies, approved by each state, set up power plants, strung wires, and delivered power to customers. 

Companies like General Electric and Westinghouse, in the meantime, began inventing new products that would encourage customers to use more electricity, such as refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners.  As demand rose, the local utilities simply built more coal-fired power plants or dammed rivers to supply the need. 

When the energy crisis came in the 1970s, Congress required utilities to meet certain efficiency standards and to open their transmission lines to anyone who wished to use them.  This spawned a subsidiary business in which brokers competed to find the cheapest power and sell it at the highest price, further complicating the web of supply and demand and resulting in even broader inefficiencies.  This also complicated the physical links in the electrical grid, sometimes transporting power thousands of miles to reach customers. 

This tight coupling of diverse grids made the entire system vulnerable to widespread power failures, in which the failure of one component could cast a vast region of the country into darkness.  That happened in 2003, when a failure in Ohio's antiquated power system plunged the entire Northeastern United States and a large portion of Canada into a blackout.

The power failure covered an area from Lansing, Michigan to Hudson Bay and from Sault Saint Marie in Ontario to New York City, putting about 55 million people in the dark.  It switched off more than 500 electrical generating operations, including 22 nuclear power plants.  This widespread failure points out how very fragile the electrical grid can be.  Its ultimate cause was the fact that FirstEnergy Corporation neglected to trim certain trees in Ohio.  The day was hot, the demand for energy high.  As more power was pumped through the lines, they heated up and became ... To read the full article, you must be a Trends Magazine Subscriber. To learn more, click here