Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence

by Daniel B. Botkin

  The grid has 130 control centers operating 24/7.5 Most of the time everything works, but on this day at around noon, hundreds of miles away from New York City in Carmel, Indiana, Don Hunter, one of the coordinators of the Midwest Independent Transmission System, saw that there was too much electricity flowing on the wires. If the power load got too high, the grid could break down, even catch fire, just like an overloaded electric circuit in your home.

  Concerned, Hunter put in a call to the Allegheny Company, one of the 30 cooperating power producers and distributors his firm coordinated, and asked them to reduce their electrical load on the grid. Allegheny’s representative at first agreed, but then said, “Don, question for you. I got a call from the people at our marketing end. They want to bring on another unit at Wheatland.”6

  “We would have to say no to that, at this point,” Hunter responded.

  But Allegheny Power went ahead and upped its power production anyway.

  1:00 pm: The grid started to unravel. In Cincinnati, Ohio, an employee at Cinergy Corporation, another of the on-the-grid electric power producers, called the Carmel, Indiana, coordinating offices.

  “Hey, we’ve got big problems,” the Cinergy employee, Spencer, said.7

  “We don’t want no big problems,” a center employee responded.

  “No, we’ve got a huge problem,” Spencer said, explaining that a major transmission line across Cinergy’s system in Indiana had gone down, and the power moving east through the state was endangering other lines. To protect the still functioning lines, Cinergy wanted generators in the western part of the state to cut their electrical output and asked that generators to the east simultaneously increase production, assuring that enough power would continue to be available but taking some of the load off the remaining power lines. “We need to get something under control here.... We’re setting for bigger problems if we don’t get this under control quick,” Spencer said.

  4:10 pm: The entire northeastern power grid started to become unstable. Electric power flow suddenly reversed direction between Michigan and Ontario, and then power started to oscillate all over the grid, the flow increasing and decreasing rapidly, tripping safety circuit breakers. New England and the Canadian Maritime circuit switched off the main grid immediately, and this saved them, so they kept working independently. But the oscillations set off a cascading blackout throughout the rest of the grid, starting somewhere in the Midwest and shutting down electricity in Ohio and Michigan and then on to other states. Suddenly, power went out in eight states and the Canadian province of Ontario, creating North America’s largest blackout.

  Back on our terrace in New York City, we saw traffic lights on Eighth Avenue wink out. Big floodlights on skyscrapers went dark. Although we didn’t know it, more than 100 power plants had just shut down—80 fossil-fuel plants and 22 nuclear. In New York City, 6.7 million customers lost electricity in a few minutes. In the Northeast, 50 million people lost electric power.

  4:17 pm: The loss of air conditioning on a hot summer day would have been bad enough, but much more than that was gone. Take Detroit, for example, right in the center of the blackout, and where events were well recorded. The blackout hit Detroit at 4:17 p.m. One thing about electricity, it moves fast, and when it goes, it goes quickly.8 The city’s airport shut down because all its lights and electronics were powered by electricity from the grid. Northwest Airlines alone would soon have to cancel 216 flights in and out of Detroit Metropolitan.

  Rush-hour commuters were stalled everywhere. Perhaps the worst spot to be driving was in or into the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel between Michigan and Ontario. About 27,000 commuters used it daily. Some were stuck in the dark. People waited seven hours in the line to go through.

  Amtrak trains stopped running; the railroad was without electric signals, and, even more surprising, no one had any idea where any train was. Even the main train from Detroit to Chicago was lost temporarily. You might ask why people stuck on trains didn’t use their cell phones to give their trains’ locations. The answer is that all cell phones stopped working too—the towers that sent and received their signals were powered by the grid. Even Detroit’s homeland security director couldn’t use his cell phone. The city was suddenly much more vulnerable to terrorism.

  Water became a problem. Half of the Detroit region’s residents, 4 million people, were suddenly without water because water in Detroit is moved by electric pumps also running off the grid. An arsonist set fire to a two-story duplex, but without water pressure the city’s firemen could do little. Worse, an explosion occurred because of the blackout at the Marathon Ashland Refinery in the city. At the moment, the firemen couldn’t do anything about it.

  Although hospitals have backup generators, in some cases they weren’t enough. A backup generator at the North Oakland Medical Center broke down and sent smoke through a hospital in Pontiac, Michigan, and 100 patients had to be evacuated.9 Fortunately, the hospital’s emergency vehicles had fuel even though all the gas stations had stopped pumping.

  You couldn’t buy gasoline, because at that time gas stations had only electric pumps connected to the grid. (Early in the 20th century, gas stations used pumps worked by hand.)

  Dusk, August 14: The view from our lofty perch showed an island of light—Penn South, our ten-building cooperative complex—in a sea of darkness that was the rest of the city. Even the colored lights atop the Empire State Building had gone dark. Our island of light existed because Penn South has its own electrical generating station that operates both on and off the grid and thus was running despite the blackout. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that such an off-the-grid electrical generator might be part of a future solution to our nation’s growing energy needs.

  Friday, August 15: The power outage continued the next day. In Detroit, the more imaginative did a little creative thinking and made some money. Tim and Deb McGee opened a breakfast bar in their driveway with a row of tables and chairs.10 Others did the usual price gouging. According to the Detroit Free Press, a skinny kid stood on a street corner in Dearborn, Michigan, waving a water bottle and shouting, “Wattaa wattaa, wattaaaaaaa! Only two bucks!” Reading about this, I thought of the New Hampshire house I’d once lived in that had an old-fashioned water pump in the kitchen. Even back in 1963 friends thought we must be a little crazy to depend on that antique, but folks in Detroit certainly could have used a few of them on August 15, 2003. At the least, it raised the question of whether there weren’t alternatives to a single grid, perhaps a mix of energy sources that would give our cities and our nation better energy reliability and security.

  Most amazing is how quickly so much that we take for granted about modern civilization and its technology was suddenly revealed to be fragile.

  This event, our nation’s largest blackout, was short-lived, but it demonstrated two truths we have been reluctant to face: how dependent we are on cheap, easily available energy and how vulnerable our one huge, complex, interconnected energy-supply system is.

  By Friday afternoon, a lot of the power had been restored in Michigan. By 9:00 p.m., power was restored to New York City and adjacent Westchester County to the north. It hadn’t been a long blackout, but it had covered a large area and, despite its brevity, had many effects.

  Why did the lights go out?

  Spencer and others who kept the giant grid running knew the breakdown was not an “accident” in the ordinary sense. It was the disastrous result of a series of events and a set of conditions that were well understood by those in charge.

  There are basic problems with the grid as it exists today. First, it’s getting old—few of the transmission lines are younger than 15 years.

  Second, in recent years it wasn’t being cared for; spending to maintain and repair the grid declined. From 1988 to 1997, investment in new transmission lines decreased almost 1% every year, and maintenance spending for existing lines decreased more than 3% per year, while at the same time power demand increased 2.4% a year. With growing interest in impro
ving the grid, some recent developments are encouraging. In 2009, the U. S. Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided $343 million to build a new grid transmission line in the Pacific Northwest to increase the amount of electricity from wind power. But so far these are small advances compared to the overall need.11

  Third, the grid hasn’t kept up with technology. For example, state-of-the-art digital switches, which could respond better and faster in power emergencies, haven’t been installed.

  Fourth, the grid was built for use in emergencies only—say, when one utility’s power plant went down and it needed to temporarily borrow power from another system. But today the grid is used in ways that were not foreseen and for which it was not designed.

  Fifth, the grid’s control centers cannot force member companies to comply. In the few minutes before the blackout started, employees at the Midwest grid control center were in a bind: Their company was responsible for preventing a collapse, but it couldn’t force the member companies to act; it could only try to persuade them. “It would be kind of a voluntary thing,” Janice D. Lantz, a spokeswoman for the Hagerstown, Maryland-based Allegheny Company, explained later. Individual companies resisted attempts at centralized control. They wanted local control over their own actions.12 And they had it.

  At the start of the blackout, some key people were not aware of the problem until it was too late. Representatives of the International Transmission Commission said they were unaware of the problem until two minutes before the power went out in Michigan. Detroit Edison made the same claim.

  And because there is just one grid in any area, few had any alternative sources of electricity after the grid went down. Here and there families had purchased portable generators powered by small gasoline engines, but most people found these too complicated to use, and many were reluctant to store gasoline in their houses. Throughout most of the nation, there didn’t seem to be any alternative. There was the big power system, and if it failed, you suffered. In summer, you turned to your stockpile of candles and bottled water, hoped not to lose everything in your freezer, and simply waited and sweltered. In winter you piled on more clothes, since most home heating systems required electricity to make them run, whether they were fueled by natural gas or oil, the two major fuels to heat America’s buildings.

  Can we prevent more, and bigger, blackouts?

  Plenty of people will tell you that a nation that turns more and more to solar and wind energy is asking for more trouble of this kind. They argue that wind and solar are too variable, that there aren’t any good ways to store the electricity they produce, and that massive electrical generation from them will only further destabilize the grid.

  People still heating their homes with firewood ask why we don’t go back to biological fuels. And there was just the beginning of interest in large-scale farming of crops like corn that would be turned into alcohol to run cars, trucks, and electrical generators. This, they would soon be arguing, was a better way to go because America already had large facilities to store liquid and gas fuels.

  Watching the city go dark from our Manhattan apartment, we could see once again how much our modern way of life depends on energy—and not just a minimal amount of energy to help us get food, water, and shelter. We need an abundance of energy for all the aspects of life that people enjoy and depend on, from recreation to health care. I believe we can achieve this.

  There are four parts to our energy crisis: (1) lack of adequate sources of energy; (2) the need to move away from dependence on fossil fuels; (3) lack of adequate means to distribute energy safety, reliably, and consistently; and (4) inefficient use of energy, with major environmental effects. We have to solve all four problems and solve them quickly. What do we do first? Can we do it all in time? What is the best energy source? Is there just one that is best, or does the solution lie with some combination of energy sources?

  Improved ways of distributing energy are crucial. In the big blackout, gasoline couldn’t be pumped at gas stations because few stations had installed small electric generators to run the pumps. The lack of these small generators at gas stations symbolized how our electrical generating system had become centralized. That old technology could have been a backup today, but wasn’t. Or a gas station could keep a small gasoline-powered generator, the kind many homeowners have on hand for emergences. Few thought about off-the-grid local energy generation. Most who did were solar- and wind-energy enthusiasts.

  A friend who built her house in the hills above Santa Barbara, California, was one of these enthusiasts. Unconnected to the grid, the house stored energy generated from the wind and the sun in a huge array of lead-acid batteries, the same kind that are in your car. But these were housed in large glass cylinders, so you could watch the acidic water bubble as electrical energy flowed into it from the wind turbine and solar cells. These, by the way, generated direct current (DC) electricity. Because most modern appliances run on alternating current (AC), to use anything with an electric motor, such as a vacuum cleaner, she had to have electronics that converted the DC to AC. But that process used a lot of the energy. So her house was wired with two systems, one AC and one DC. The lights ran on the DC.

  Because so few houses had taken this off-the-grid route, providing electricity for a house like my friend’s was pretty much a do-it-yourself hobby that took a lot of time. I admired it, but at the time it didn’t seem likely that much of America could go that way. But during the blackout, a lot of people watching the food spoil in their refrigerators would have been grateful for such a system if they had known about it. Ironically, the great electrical public works projects of the 1930s, meant to bring electricity to the farm as well as the city, pretty much brought an end to local electrical power generation, or any local energy generation other than wood in fireplaces and woodstoves. That’s why traveling across America’s farmland you see so many of those quaint windmills that used to pump drinking water for cattle now sitting idle, with perhaps a blade or two missing.

  At present, about 85% of the total energy used throughout the world, and also in the United States, comes from fossil fuels. Everyone is familiar with the controversies about fossil fuels: Coal, oil, and gas are highly polluting fuels that we use to our detriment as well as our benefit; oil and gas are going to run out, with first oil and then natural gas becoming economically unavailable in the not too distant future; and those concerned about global warming believe we must move away from these fuels. For the United States, which is no longer producing as much oil and gas as it uses, moving away from these fuels is necessary for energy independence, for national security, and for a stable and productive economy.

  There are many proponents of each source of energy, each claiming that their favorite source is the solution. Petroleum and natural gas enthusiasts say that there is bound to be a lot more of those fuels out there somewhere under the ground and under the ocean. We’ve always found more in the past. Some say, “Trust us; we will find more.”

  Biofuels have their enthusiasts as well, ranging from small-farm cooperatives to giant agricorporations. They say, “Trust us; pretty soon the technology will be invented to make our biofuel crops energy-efficient, and we will grow our own energy solution.” Solar, wind, and ocean enthusiasts meanwhile ask us to follow them.

  Which then is a possible, practical, and reliable solution? In writing this book, I have had to dig out a lot of obscure facts, do a lot of calculations from those, including costs and land area required, and think about what mix of all the sources of energy will be the solution.

  First, some terms you need to know

  The definition of energy seems straightforward enough: Energy is the ability to move matter. So what’s so complicated about it? For one thing, it’s still a difficult concept. Yes, it’s the ability to move matter, but even though we need it and use it all the time, we can’t see it—it isn’t a “thing” like a table or chair or automobile or computer or cell phone.

  For another thing, talking about energy is conf
using because of all the terms used to discuss and measure it. It comes in so many different units. At the supermarket, we buy potatoes in pounds or, outside the United States, in kilos; we don’t have different measurements for baking potatoes, boiling potatoes, red potatoes, Yukon Golds, and sweet potatoes. Each kind of energy, however, has its own measure. The two teams most familiar to us are calories, when we’re trying to lose weight, and watts, when we check what size light bulb we need to buy. But that’s just the beginning. Oil is discussed in terms of barrels; natural gas in cubic feet or, worse, in terms of its energy content, expressed in British thermal units (BTUs), an old measure dating back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Electricity, as well as any energy source used to make electricity, comes in several measures: watts, or, more commonly, kilowatts (KW), which are thousands of watts; sometimes megawatts (MW), millions of watts, to describe the capacity of a generator; and kilowatt-hours or megawatt-hours, the actual energy yield or output. Some people discuss energy in terms of joules, a measure of energy originating in Newtonian physics.