The Grid

"I chose this one because we depend on electricity for just about everything we do, and yet most of us have absolutely no idea of how this stuff gets to us, or what it is, for that matter. Philip Schewe, the author, refers to it as ‘bottled lightning’. He quotes the National Academy of Engineering saying that the grid is the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century, and also the largest industrial investment in history. That gives you an idea of the scale of the thing. And yet, it’s invisible. It’s something we take for granted and know nothing about. As part of my research I visited a power station, and it was very interesting. It was like going back in time, revisiting the steam age. No. It’s a descriptive book. It’s about the grid itself – how it works, what it’s made up of. If you want to understand electricity, and how it’s produced and how it gets to you, The Grid is the book you need. One of the book’s foci is what happens when it all goes wrong. There’s a very good, very detailed description of a big blackout that took place in New York in 1965, and Schewe goes into how it happened and what the consequences of losing electricity were. I found it a very enjoyable book. You have this extraordinary balancing act of supply and demand that goes on all the time. You can store electricity, but it’s very difficult. You have to resort to extreme schemes, like pumping water uphill when it’s cheap to do the pumping, and then letting the water come down through turbines when you really need it in peak periods. The book does talk a bit about solar, and what the advent of renewables will mean for the grid. There are issues there. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But the utility world is being turned upside down at the moment. It’s interesting because, as Schewe points out in the book, the utility world has been a very dull one for a long time. There has been almost no innovation for 100 years. And now, suddenly, it’s becoming a very turbulent world. Innovation is happening left, right and center, and there’s this whole notion of the ‘smart grid’ – where the individual components of this vastly complex machine are interacting with each other, in a sense like the Internet. That’s probably a good analogy for the kind of world we’re heading towards. There’s the whole business of smart metering of electricity. Have you got smart metering where you are yet? The whole idea is that thus far we have been charged an average amount for our electricity every month, which doesn’t reflect the spikes in cost – when it’s hot and you turn the air conditioner on, everyone else is doing the same thing. Smart metering means you get charged directly for the extremely expensive electricity, but ideally it also keeps you informed, so that you can adjust your usage to take advantage of cheaper times. It sounds like you’re a natural for solar! In addition to becoming cheaper, it’s also becoming more reliable. Investigate. Maybe you can even make some money investing in it."