The Uniqueness of Electrification
Gretchen Bakke on power, profit, and the promise of the future grid.
Hello again! Looks like this week is about trying to understand BIG systems. This interview is a personal favorite from our archives. Enjoy.
This interview with Gretchen Bakke, a visiting professor of anthropology at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems, Humboldt University, Berlin Germany, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews. It was originally published on 02.28.19
frank| I have your book here, it's such a great framework that simplifies something so complicated.
Incredibly complicated.
What was your initial motivation in writing The Grid?
The original motivation is kind of twofold, but they go together. One is that I felt like I saw a lot of people trying to intervene in the system who didn't understand what that meant and didn't understand what it was as a system. The thing that I really understood about the grid when I was writing the book is that nobody understands it. There isn't any one person who understands how it all fits together. People understand their tiny little piece of it, and they understand the thing on either side of that tiny piece, and that's it.
Also, this idea that you could make electricity into a commodity and make money off of it like anything else has been so damaging to the system. I had the desire to try to tell the history of America in a different way. I was surprised how much the book ended up being a business history. I did not intend it to be that way, I was really like, "I'll have a technology history chapter, a business history chapter, legislative history chapter, and then we'll just sort of go forward.” The uniqueness of electrification in the US is that it's always been for profit.
It really is this American story of a battle between freedom, independence, self-reliance, big money, and big government.
I would love to talk about energy democracy.
I think when you talk about energy democracy, it's not quite the same thing as equity.
I've spoken to some people who incorporate equity into their definition of energy democracy. They say, in trying to fix certain systems, we need to also engage people who have been marginalized from energy systems in the past. But it is also definitely its own issue.
Universal electrification seems to be an early 20th-century idea. Places that didn't get a grid in the early 20th century have a very partial and elite system. If you look, for example, at Lagos, what you have is rich people on the grid, and poor people on a generator system. The fact that there already is universal electrification, even though it's not profitable for companies, is something that in my experience, everybody wants to preserve. I never talked to anybody, the entire time I was doing research, that thought some people should have electricity and other people shouldn't.
I did talk to people who thought it might be wise, as the system is redeveloped or overhauled, to think more about the quality of electricity as being matched more closely to the needs of the user. This is maybe true, but it's also a sneaky way of saying Facebook should have more reliable, more stable voltage, and the home user should not.
The question is, once you open that door, how far can you go with it before you start to actually develop two parallel systems? It might be true – maybe I personally don't need to have the same quality of electricity as the US military — but give an inch and they take a mile.
I think the other thing, and this is what I would guess you're interested in talking about democracy, is thinking about the way in which the electrical systems are becoming more individualized, especially with rooftop solar, and how that sense of ownership, or control, over the electrons that you make can be produced while maintaining this universal system.
Absolutely.
The dream version of it is that everybody has solar, everybody has some kind of small wind, everybody is connected to a big grid, and everybody has some kind of storage, and thus has the capacity to run off their own electricity when they want, when it's cheaper, or when the big system is down, and also have the capacity to feed into a public electricity system. This is perfect.
In this ideal, is it a combination of public and private sectors maintaining the larger infrastructure, and the individual running their personal solar on the home?
If it was really the ideal, the individual could choose to run it or not. The only way that that kind of system can actually work is with some pretty serious AI. When I was finishing the book, people were always talking about an “orchestrator” to make all of this complexity work together. For a while it was assumed it would be a person, but what I’ve found is now there’s an assumption that computers can do this. Computers can make it so that whatever is happening on the level of the individual, the small-scale producer doesn't actually take down the larger grid. You could just have a button that said, “I'm available to go off the grid if needed”, on your phone, I guess.
Then, if there is too much demand, the orchestrator can just flip you off, and you can run on your own system, because it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you live in Phoenix, and you need air conditioning. You have your air conditioning, and you also have your solar. Solar and air conditioning are so nicely married to each other. That's the ideal, but then the question is, where are all the ways that it can go wrong? Where do we lose democracy and equity?
As we move forward do you think we continue to use the grid as our primary infrastructure? Or do we move away from it?
The fact of the matter is, it's not replaceable at this point. It's simply not. We are replacing little tiny bits of it all the time, but you can't just build a parallel system next to the current system. It's too expensive to do that.
The idea of being island-able seems like a very good thing. People like to point to Wall Street during Sandy, which seemed islanded off.
They actually had generators in the basement, so everything was out except this one building. People were really mad because they saw the lights on, and they're like, "Why do those guys have it?", assuming that they were prioritized to get electricity, but they actually had a generator system in their skyscraper, and on the ground floor of the other skyscrapers were all kinds of shops and restaurants that then served everybody. Everybody talks about this like, "We could go there, or we could have kebabs."
At least we have kebabs!
They weren't islanded properly speaking, it's just that they had giant diesel generators in their basement.
They weren’t on their own grid.
The problem with that is, of course, you run out of gas.
Now, there's a race in the technology sector to figure out how to store renewable energy. I mean, we have batteries –
People love batteries. There are a lot of ways to store electricity that are less detrimental to the environment, but people do love batteries.
How do we determine what energy is worth? As you wrote, it's not tangible. It's not a banana.
One of the problems I have with the way these arguments are happening in the US is that what is it worth, always, somehow only has one metric, and that metric is money.
But what is it worth to you that you have energy security? If there's a way you can have solar and not lose your power, which is not that complicated, what is that worth to you? A lot. What is it worth to stop carbon emissions? If you just get a lot of solar up, all you've got are the emissions that go into making those panels, and getting them on your roof, from China or wherever they come from. The singular metric is a part of capitalism – that we're not allowed to measure anything any other way. That's not true everywhere.
I saw one talk by a Chinese electrical engineer, whose job was to make a new green city from scratch. Everything he presented had two metrics, how much it costs, and what the carbon emissions were. I was just like, "Okay, great, I don't care what the metrics are, but I'm so happy you have two of them so that then there's this possibility of saying, "Okay, how do I, in fact measure worth?"
Right. It's actually a much deeper conversation than just what technology is available, how much does it cost, and how much money can you make?
I think you really see that with the fires in California. How can you maintain a system that doesn't spark? What is the cost of that? It's not just about money.
I was thinking about how relevant The Grid is in relation to these California fires.
I think the thing to look at is the difference between the way in which Southern California Edison had been upgrading its system and the way in which PG&E was not. And I mean upgrading at a very basic level of asking how a wire connects to a pole, how a wire connects to a transformer, and if you're in a situation where any spark creates a fire, what's the necessary technology to not have any sparks at all, ever?
PG&E was just neglecting that sort of upgrade?
I don't know if they were neglecting it, but they weren't prioritizing it to the same degree that Southern California Edison has. There should be fires in Southern California too. It's not just bad luck that they're all happening in PG&E territory. There are sometimes fires in Southern California, but it's not the same, or with the same frequency.
This is where energy democracy becomes a question. This is a public thing, the grid. I embrace the infrastructure, but also what it gives us, what it affords us. If I'm the master of my house and I have my solar panels, and I live in Southern California or Northern California, I do not want to be the one responsible for hooking that system up, because I'm going to burn down everybody.
In terms of policy in the U.S., what do you think we need in order to move towards a more ideal scenario?
We need to stop using fossil fuels. I think what Governor Brown did wasn't little. It will be interesting to see if it sticks, but it was an interesting first trial, which is just, here's the date we'll be done. We're not going to put it in our cars, we're not going to put it in our electricity system, we're not going to extract it, we're not going to burn it, we won't import it. The fossil fuel businesses will be gone.
I recognize the current government does not want to do this, but as soon as that kind of thing gets said seriously, there's a lot of innovation that starts to be funded. Things begin to change.
For example, if the car becomes electric, how do you deal with that? You need some people who conceptualize it, but you also need a lot of tiny little machines that are going to make these things interoperable with each other. This is a wonderful thing, you have the car, it can store electricity, and then it can charge at work, and then you drive it home, blah, blah. But it turns out that the cars are using their own electricity at precisely the same moment the sun goes down. Actually, they are not a storage resource to a solar power grid, not at dusk at least. These little things, where you're like, "Oh, weird, that's not going to work." It was a great idea, it won't work. But those kinds of studies, and the kind of investment, if we're keeping capitalism for right now, that's necessary to make major change happen, will only happen when there are laws in place.
Right. And laws that say no fossil fuels?
I think we need laws saying no to fossil fuels. That's what I think. The issue is, does it need to be across the board, like what California did? Does it need to be sector by sector? If there was no global warming, I think by 2100, we'd have renewable electricity anyway because once you build it, it's free. This is something that has been a shock to everybody that I've talked to. That the price per kilowatt hour is coming down to about zero. You still have to build the thing and there is some maintenance, but essentially, what you're paying for is the labor power to make it, and continue to make it work. I think that transition would happen, we'd figure out how to do it, we'd be at 100% renewables, and people would start having electric cars because it's cheaper to use free electricity than it is to pay for gas. The shift would happen slowly, but even without global warming, we would be doing this anyway. The question is, do we need legislation to make it happen, and happen faster?
That's a really interesting way of framing it because that doesn't seem to be the debate. The debate seems to be why should we do these things? Is global warming real? Who cares? This is how things function, any alternative seems impossible, new policy that’s ambitious is wild idealism, etc. etc. But framing this as what is already happening, climate change or not, is really interesting.
I guess the problem is just like when we lose coal – we should all be super attached to coal. But industries change.
Everything is an issue of perception. I like your idea of working backwards.
I think we'll move that way with capitalism completely intact. There are a lot of reasons to challenge the current world order, but we don't even have to challenge it.
It's like getting ready to go to the airport. Your flight is at 10, you need to be there at 8, so you leave your house at 7. If we're going to move to renewables by 2050, what are the steps that need to take place right now?
Exactly. But something needs to happen, and that's the thing, any kind of law is going to make a giant difference, but it seems to be very difficult to make a law.
Do you find one argument most compelling after all this research?
Of why we should have a law?
Of why laws should change? Of why our energy systems are important to focus on period.
No. I feel like I don't talk about things in terms of climate very much. Sometimes because I've been explicitly told not to, but sometimes because everybody gets really anxious. When you're talking about transforming the electricity system, people are like, "That's a funny problem". Engineers are all super excited, because they have a good job again, and they used to have a boring job, and the utility people are kind of scared, but they're also excited, because maybe they can change the way the company works.
The transformation of the electricity system is producing all of these very exciting problems for people who are in the industry. I think it's producing a lot of exciting opportunities for people outside the industry. There's a kind of hopefulness.
It hits the desire to tinker, that a lot of people have. There's not an ideological argument in it.
Part of that is, we need to retire all of our coal fired power plants for 2050 anyway. They've been retiring for a while, we've been replacing them with natural gas for a while, natural gas works differently than coal fire plants. We've already had to adapt the system to that, now we're not building as many, and we're building more renewables. But it's all outside of a conversation about good and bad people.
I feel like 2018 has made climate change a much more mainstream conversation than it was before. The weird weather piece of it, like, "Okay, we don't know about climate, but weather", we can tell you that it's weird. That might be just the beginning of a way in, where it stops being about having this abstract conversation about what lefty people believe rigthy people should do.
I feel like there is a holier-than-thou attitude that gets rolled in. People have a lot of other problems and desires, so for now, how can an energy transition not be about climate change? That's the slow path. But if we want to speed it up, then it has to be about climate change, and after that, it just turns to politics, and that's hard. I don't have a solution for that one.
We'll talk in five years.
Who knows what anything will look like in five years! The slow way is avoiding climate change in conversation, and the fast way is folding it into the conversation, and risking politicizing everything.
Really. I think what you said about the airport is really nice because there is the sense that the airplane will leave if you're not on it. That's essentially what the IPCC's latest report was – we have 12 years to do this. What do we do?
Do you feel optimistic?
I have decided that being optimistic is a more interesting story. I think it's really easy to talk about how you would fold up your life and future generations of your family and call it the death of humanity and all that. That may be where it all ends up, but at least for now, it's not the more interesting story to tell or to investigate. Until it's hopeless, I would say I'm kind of in the, what are we doing? What is working? What is stopping us? How can we get around that?