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wires, outdated mechanical switches, and analog devices.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...
