Grid and Bear It

2025. It’s a hot summer afternoon… the U.S. has long since gotten used to the mega-hot, drought-ridden summers as “business as usual.” Energy Star air conditioners are blasting against the hot humid air pushing its way into every nook and cranny of so many American homes. Power grids are shuttering at the excess draw. Brownout warnings are on every news Webcast (is TV gone?). The late afternoon sun’s rays are burning from the west, pushing the heat with no relief in sight. Commuters scramble to get home, but the worn infrastructure keeps those motors humming as another gridlock grips the city.

Finally, millions of green commuters arrive home, sometime between 5:30 and 7:00 in the evening, and do what they have become accustomed to doing when they park their cars for the night: they plug them in. While once the early evening was a time when excess power demands from too many air conditioners fighting too much heat abated, now the power grid takes a simultaneous slam from electric cars recharging for the night. The grid shutters and dies as a rolling brownout, maybe even a complete blackout, grips the city.

This is precisely the urban planners’ worst nightmare: our power system was simply not designed to handle an entire new layer of electrical demands at a time when the old system was able to relax from the strain of the day. Our electrical grid needs to communicate with power consumption appliances that have discretionary time periods when they can be recharged: “That's one reason [planners are] hoping to see continued, and expanded, federal incentives to build out infrastructure for electric vehicle (EV) charging. Targeted charging technology would let utilities ‘talk’ to chargers and spread out the demand and underpin the incentives to integrate an array of ‘smart’ technology across the electricity system.” Energy.Aol.com , July 25^th.

Even with charging stations at work, a smart grid would allow a car to plug in anywhere, but the bill for the resulting electrical consumption would be properly charged to the owner of the car receiving the power. This requires an entire new infrastructure connecting appliances and charging stations, via the Internet, to the power company, and controlling the supply of electricity to that specific recipient, a challenging but necessary alteration of the way electricity is transmitted, delivered and billed. Modern buildings often have power control systems managed by computers that move shade, turn power on and off, reallocate piped air and speak to the power company, all in an effort to maximize efficiency.

Ending our reliance on fossil fuels is tortuous if we don’t actually have an infrastructure that is designed to accommodate the changes. If hydrogen-powered fuel cells become a viable alternative, again, we are going to have to build a massive infrastructure retrofit to accommodate that change. Think about how many billions, make that trillions, of dollars have been spent constructing a global petroleum-finding, shipping, piping, distilling and retail sales system just for the United States. Oh, did I mention that we don’t exactly have sufficient existing electrical generating capacity to replace even a small percentage of fossil fuel? Or that we will need massive new transmission lines to bring that power to us? Who’s going to front those costs? The government? They’re on the verge of shutting down. The public utilities? Who wants to pay higher power bills for future needs? I guess we need some brownouts and blackout for a sustained time period before we move to act.

I’m Peter Dekom, and do Americans always have to learn their lessons the hard way?