Technologies create their own power structures. Even the most radical new technologies very quickly create organization working to conserve the new order they established. Representative of this are America's electric utilities. A century ago bestowed with government monopolies, they become some of America's most conservative technological institutions, a great paradox considering electricity is one of the most radical forces ever harnessed by humanity.
The American electricity system developed around massive, centralized generators. A relatively few plants send power across networks of wire, the grid, to a vastly distributed consumption base. For much of the 20th century, electricity was mostly generated by burning coal. In the last few decades, burning coal was largely displaced by natural gas. The system remains centrally controlled and just as importantly amazingly information poor.
In 1997, I was contracted by Wired magazine, at that point one of the leading voices promoting tech development, for a story I had proposed about moving reliance of the electricity system from centralized fossil fuel generation to one based on distributed renewable generation, such as wind and solar, and just as importantly, make the network information rich so consumption could be more intelligently determined.
In my research for the article, I visited the grid operation center of Pacific Gas and Electric in San Francisco. The whole grid runs like a gigantic machine in which the job of the grid operator is to keep right voltage and correct frequency so the juice runs uninterrupted through the wires. This was grossly accomplished by simply bringing generation up or down, adding and subtracting plants. The control room was a large room with fifteen foot ceilings and numerous printers mounted on the walls that tracked on rolling graph paper output from the various generation plants. A few desks and consoles lined the center. In the middle of San Francisco’s tech-euphoria, it all had a very retro feel.
At the time, Y2K was being drummed-up as a problem. Y2K was older computers didn't have four numerical places for their year dates. It was said systems would all crash at 12am, New Years night, 2000, the turn of the millennium. That the grid would go down was one of apocalyptic results being predicted. So, I asked the two operators if it was going to be a problem. They looked at each other, half-smiled, then one guy replied, “Well, if the phone system goes down, it could get tricky.” Outside the billing system, the utilities didn't use many computers, maybe there were a couple in the nuke plants, but none running the grid. A year later, it wasn't surprising the utilities came out as the first industry to be “Y2K compliant.”
The relative antiquity of the system was brought further home when I visited a transmission/distribution station in the middle of the Central Valley. All the transformers, breakers, switches, etc. were labeled “Made in 1926” or so. The station reminded me of Frankenstein's laboratory from the 1931 film, yet this was an integral part of the electric system providing the juice for the burgeoning Internet Era headquartered not 90 miles west across the Diablo Range in the Santa Clara Valley.
One of the topics I addressed in the article was if generation became more distributed, solar on every rooftop for example, the utilities themselves could largely be displaced. Using information technologies, smaller participatory associations could develop comprised of rooftop solar owners combining their excess generation, selling where needed. This was after all the beginning of the Age of Disruption, no greater advocate than Wired.
The punchline of the whole affair was turning in the piece, I didn't hear anything from my editor for weeks. Finally, he called and said, “I have bad news. Battelle (Wired's Editor) was on a plane and sat next to a guy from Enron. He told him forget renewables, the future of electricity was natural gas.” I was paid. The story killed.
Years later, you can't say the guy from Enron was wrong, on this matter anyway. Gas flourished, yet that didn't need to happen. It was by no means inevitable. It happened because of specific decisions made by a handful of people atop massive, entrenched institutions. Gas generation, like coal, could be centralized, so it fit right into the established utility system. Simultaneously, the utilities remained firmly against renewables, whose value is best realized with a more distributed system architecture. Just like a chicken in every pot, solar's greatest value is best gained with a panel on every rooftop, similarly, small wind turbines can be distributed across rooftops as this recent piece in the Wall Street Journal shows.
Over the last couple decades, the utilities were slowly forced to accept greater amounts of renewables, so they turned from fighting to controlling them. Best way to do this was to centralize renewable generation too. So called “utility scale” solar and wind generation, not distributed rooftop, became dominant. The problem with this is you don't get the value of a distributed generation source. The grid keeps running as a large, unsophisticated machine. I wrote a short piece on this thinking in 2000, called “Undervaluing Wires.” This undervaluing continues as the need for changing the electricity system grows more acute.
Last week, the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) approved some proposals to reform the way the grid was run in regards to the transmission system, composed of the biggest electricity towers you see strung across the landscape. In the last couple decades, there's been a movement to connect all the regional grids across the country, so say utility scale wind generated electricity in South Dakota could be sold in California. Supposedly, and electricity numbers should be taken with a big a grain of salt as oil numbers, 2000 gigawatts of wind and solar development are being held up by the grid's present faults, billions of dollars involved.
Again, these are decisions being made by a handful of entrenched interests, with little consideration or want to change the system's established architecture and zero interest in reforming the corporations controlling the system. Last week, I heard from a very old attorney friend who in the last couple years became involved with a mountain state's public utility commission. I asked her about solar, she replied,
“Solar means either big arrays or we have this community solar program the legislature passed. So now we're gonna have over 400 tiny solar facilities with consumers subscribing to join, but the energy goes to the local utility company with the subscribers maybe getting a cost break if the community solar facility produces electricity more cheaply than the utility.”
So, twenty-five years after first writing in my killed Wired piece about distributed solar associations ability to replace the utilities, they are being ridiculously instituted under the utilities. In the immortal words of the Wicked Witch of the West, “Ohhh, what a world, what a world.”
Truly changing how we do electricity would require changing not just the industry's structure but how we do much of everything else tied to electricity, that is, become literally post-modern. Certainly there's no politics for this, indeed the exact opposite, a mad rush to electrify everything as some supposed answer to climate issues. Instead of change, we get a push to electrify American car culture led by crazy-Elon, a man in our tech besotted culture making billions shilling the future as a 150 year old technology. Recently, at a PG&E conference no less, Elon's telling American utility executives they're going to have triple electric generation by 2045 to power his double fantasy of electric cars and AI. Phew, that's just nuts! Reading this reminded me of Gore Vidal's comment on the first Roman emperors of Suetonius' Twelve Caesars, “Yet what, finally, was the effect of absolute power on twelve representative men? Suetonius makes it quite plain: disastrous.”
With just over four percent of the world's population, the US presently uses almost twenty percent of globally generated electricity. On a per capita basis, the average American uses four times more electricity than a person in Elon's native South Africa. Yet, he's calling for the US to triple its generation in 20 years. All you can say is it's not the first stupidest thing you ever heard to come from Elon's brain and out his mouth.
Technology is both the problem we face and part of the solution, but without reforming and replacing our industrial institutions through democratic revival and evolution, bringing all to into the decision making processes of how society is structured and how their life is lived, the future, such that it will be, will continue to be imposed by some tech, neo-Caesar wannabes. As for increasingly delusional Elon, I worry about him, more importantly his kids, after all he's got like a dozen. He needs to spend more time with them and quit trying to fuck things up for the rest of us.
Just like SF gets its water from Hetch Hetchy, they want to consume distant green space for big centralized photovoltaic farms so they can feel green
Thanks Joe--it was great to be on that journey early on together...and now we are seeing what your Wired piece predicted/proposed finally playing out in part at least. Let alone our call for a $50 billion global solar fund.