The Power Grid Problem

The U. S.'s power grid — a nearly 100-year-old network of electrical circuits — is facing increased demand and weather-related stress. What will it take to modernize? We interrogate that question today with the help of Anjan Bose https://school.eecs.wsu.edu/directory/bose-biography/, an electrical engineer at Washington State University. Interested in more stories about electricity? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:12Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. For the majority of humans' time on Earth, we haven't had access to electricity. That means no phones, or computers, or speakers, like the ones you're using right now to listen to this podcast. No refrigeration, or washing machines, no light bulbs.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Basically, for most people, the day ended when the sun set.

• 0:37Regina Barber?

  This is electrical engineer Anjan Bose. He teaches at Washington State University, GoKooks. And he says even though we rely on electricity for so many things nowadays, 150 years ago, it wasn't accessible for most people. But then, in the 1880s, Thomas Edison built the first electric grid in New York City.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  The Vanderbilts and the richest people lived in mansions in southern Manhattan. And so he basically went to them and said, "We'll provide you with electricity." So he put in a generator, and he ran the wires. And it wasn't a very large area, but it had all the rich mansions all lit up.

• 1:18Regina Barber?

  And it wasn't just in New York. As generating electricity got better and cheaper, more and more places could be connected.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Very soon, there were a whole bunch of these companies that sprung up. First, the big cities, and then the medium-sized cities, and then the small towns. They all had their own power company. And then it became very clear that there's a major advantage of connecting these companies together.

• 1:43Regina Barber?

  Because, one, if you're generating power from something like a waterfall or a coal plant, which are things that can't easily be moved, it makes sense to connect lots of places to that readily available power. And, two, it's smart to have a backup power source. If your electricity generator goes down and you're alone, that's no good. But if you're connected to your neighbor's generator as well, you can use it for backup. So all of these power companies started connecting.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  And by the '30s and '40s, most of the US and the big continents were already connected. So that's why it's called a grid, because everything gets connected to everything else.

• 2:22Regina Barber?

  These early connections laid the groundwork for the electric grid we have now. The generators connect to the power lines, and the power lines connect to the customers. Anjan says it's really just a big network of electrical circuits. But like you and me, the electrical grid is aging.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Everything ages. I mean, the grid is made up of a huge number of equipment pieces, right? Generators, transformers, circuit breakers, all of these things, all of them age with time.

• 2:52Regina Barber?

  For over 20 years, Anjan has been a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineers, and he's consulted on some big reports, including several about the future of electricity in the United States and the challenges it faces.

• 3:07Regina Barber?

  So today on the show, we're tackling the demands of a century-old electric grid. How does it work? Why does it fail? And how can we make it more resilient against climate change? I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 3:27Speaker 00

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• 4:31Speaker 00

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• 4:43Regina Barber?

  Okay, so before we dive into the future of electricity, let's do a little electric grid 101. How does the modern day grid work? First, generators convert mechanical energy, which comes from wind, or water, or heat, to electrical energy. Those generators send that energy to substations, which convert the electricity into different voltages. So it can be sent along the power lines to buildings, and factories, and houses, which means electricity is literally at my fingertips when I switch on a light. But all those connections, they don't just work indefinitely. They need to be maintained.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Most generators have lifetimes of, say, 30 years, 40 years, something like that. Transformers made the same way. Okay, now with good maintenance, you might be able to extend that a little bit. So you've got to replace all this stuff that's there in kind of a 30-year, 40-year cycle.

• 5:40Regina Barber?

  That's the first challenge, maintaining the aging grid and upgrading it or changing it when necessary.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  This whole idea that you won't replace a coal plant with another coal plant, that is relatively recent, right? That has only started once we realized that the climate change is taking place and, you know, all these greenhouse gases are having a major impact. So all the generating plants, the big coal generating plants, which were inside the cities, most of them have been shut down. And then as you move generation, you know, you don't put the solar plant where the coal plant was because the sun may not be shining over there.

• 6:18Regina Barber?

  Right, you don't put the wind there. You like, yeah, yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  So once you do that, you have to sort of rejiggle the transmission and distribution lines because the generators still have to connect to your load.

• 6:31Regina Barber?

  And keeping up with our existing electric needs isn't the only challenge.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  In addition to just maintaining or replacing the old stuff, We're consuming more energy. And so you had to add more generation, more transmission lines, more distribution lines to do this.

• 6:48Regina Barber?

  So Anjan says that's the second challenge, helping the grid meet increased demand. We already use electricity for things like manufacturing and data centers. As we transition away from fossil fuels, in the future, we'll be using more electricity for transportation and heating.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  We are hearing more and more about data centers and electric vehicles and all of these things coming in. So the demand will grow again. And that means that you have to keep building enough generation and building enough transmission to meet the demand growth that you can predict.

• 7:21Regina Barber?

  And finally, if we're going to have so much that depends on the grid, that grid needs to be reliable.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  If a hurricane or a storm takes out the big transmission tower, that transmission line is down.

• 7:33Regina Barber?

  Got it, okay.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  If a lightning strikes a transformer in a substation, that transformer is out. And then there's, of course, flooding.

• 7:41Regina Barber?

  Plus, snowstorms, earthquakes, landslides, you get the picture. And that's the third challenge, making the grid resilient against this kind of extreme weather. Anjan says that when all of these things are happening to our electrical infrastructure, causing, say, rolling blackouts in California or sweeping power outages in Texas and in Florida, that's not because the grid is old, it's because it wasn't originally designed to handle weather events of this magnitude.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  This is the problem. If the weather is within predicted amounts of variation that you have, then it's fine. But you never designed in Houston your gas generating plants with the idea that the gas was going to freeze. You know, they have their gas lines on top of the ground. In Minnesota, they have to bury it more than four feet below the gas.

• 8:32Regina Barber?

  Wow, okay.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Because it freezes up to four feet, right, in Minnesota? But in Houston, the gas lines were on top of the ground, all right? So when the temperature went down to, I don't know, 30 degrees, the gas lines froze. So they couldn't have generation and then they had blackouts and, you know, some people even died.

• 8:53Regina Barber?

  These weather events have become more frequent and more extreme due to climate change, and they're only gonna get worse.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Now we have more hurricanes happening, more storms happening, more... Things like that which has a tendency to take down the grid or damage the grid. So when people are talking about resiliency, they're not talking about the fact that these things are failing because of their age. They're failing because they've been damaged.

• 9:21Regina Barber?

  So if these once rare extreme weather events are becoming more common, shouldn't we just strengthen the grid? Anjan says that would come at a cost.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  We can strengthen against anything we say we want to strengthen against, but that costs money, a lot of money. It's just a matter of how much money are we going to sink into it? And then the question comes, you know, anytime you sink money into it, your rates go up.

• 9:44Regina Barber?

  Right.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  So how much will the customer be able to bear?

• 9:50Regina Barber?

  Which is why people who build the electric grid are always trying to do a cost-benefit analysis of the future. Like, what's the amount of strengthening we need to do to minimize cost while maintaining protection?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  So now the chances, what are the chances that the fire is going to burn exactly in the same place again?

• 10:07Regina Barber?

  And thanks to climate change, the future is shifting.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  If you can predict 10 years ahead of time, you have plenty of time to build up. But this throws in a little bit of a twist by saying, and also you have to take five hurricanes every year. All right? So now you've got to think even more, how much strengthening of the grid do you need? And these things are rare events. So the question is, how resilient do you want your grid to be?

• 10:38Regina Barber?

  So to sum it all up, there are three problems that affect the future of the grid. First, keeping up with predicted demand. Second, maintaining and decarbonizing the grid. And third, making it more resilient to extreme weather events, not just hurricanes and storms, but extreme heat and earthquakes and tsunamis.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  The problem is, we think that we can just shut down all our coal plants and our gas plants and maybe even some of the hydro dams, which we don't like because it stops salmon, and replace it all with wind and solar, and everybody would be happy. Well, it's not that simple. Wind doesn't blow all the time, solar isn't available all the time. It's always a trade-off.

• 11:21Regina Barber?

  And until we develop different energy sources, or better electricity storage, or new technologies that magically fix more of these challenges, we're going to be making these trade-offs.

• 11:32Regina Barber?

  But Anjan says he's still optimistic because we have the tools to figure this out.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  It will take time. It can't be done overnight, but this will happen. And it's happening all over the world. I mean, we're not the only ones that are struggling with this. So I'm very hopeful. I won't see it in my lifetime, but we're looking at much cleaner energy. It'll be easier for the average person to use electricity in all its forms. And it'll be provided without having major repercussions to the environment.

• 12:09Regina Barber?

  That's the goal.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  That's the goal, and that's something to look forward to.

• 12:15Regina Barber?

  Anjan, thank you so much for talking to us about the power grid. I learned so much.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 12:24Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by Hannah Chen and edited by Burleigh McCoy. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 12:49Speaker 03

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