The Power Grid Problem

The House of Representatives has approved a White House request to claw back two years of previously approved funding for public media. The rescissions package now moves on to the Senate. This move poses a serious threat to local stations and public media as we know it. Please take a stand for public media today at goacpr.org. Thank you.

You're listening to Shortwave 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. Basically, for most people, the day ended.

This is electrical engineer Anjan Bose. He teaches at Washington State University. Go Cougs. 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. The Vanderbilts and the richest people lived in mansions in the southern... 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. And it wasn't just in New York. As generating electricity got better and cheaper, more and more places could be connected. 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. 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.

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

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. 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 Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

50 years after Jaws scared an entire generation out of the water. I looked down, and there was this great big head, these big white teeth. Radiolab is pulling you back in. It was just like so much fear building of what's going to come out of that blue. Listen to Swimming with Shadows, a Radiolab week of sharks. Anything you dig down on is fascinating, these creatures.

wherever you get podcasts. Decades ago, Brazilian women made a discovery. They could have an abortion without a doctor, thanks to a tiny pill. That pill spawned a global movement, helping millions of women have safe abortions, regardless of the law. Hear that story on The Network, from NPR's Embedded and Futuro Media, wherever you get your podcasts. OK, 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. 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. That's the first challenge, maintaining the aging grid and upgrading it or changing it when necessary. This whole idea that you won't replace a coal plant with another coal plant, that is relatively recent. That has only started once we realize that the climate change is taking place and all these greenhouse gases are having a major impact.

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. Right, you don't put the wind there. 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. And keeping up with our existing electric needs isn't the only challenge. 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. 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. 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. And finally, if we're going to have so much that depends on the grid, that grid needs to be reliable. If a hurricane or a storm takes out the big transmission tower, that transmission... line is down. Got it. Okay. If a lightning strikes a transformer in a substation, that transformer is out. And then there's, of course, flooding. 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.

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.

Wow. Okay. 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 they had blackouts and, you know, some people even died. These weather events have become more frequent and more extreme due to climate change. And they're only going to get worse.

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.

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. 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.

So how much will the customer be able to bear? Which is why people who build the electric grid are always trying to do a cost-benefit analysis of the future. What's the amount of strengthening we need to do to minimize cost while maintaining protection? So now what are the chances that the fire is going to burn exactly in the same place again? And thanks to climate change, the future is shifting.

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. 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...

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.

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.

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. But Anjan says he's still optimistic because we have the tools to figure this out. 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 are looking at much cleaner energy. It'll be... easier for the average person to use electricity in all its forms. And it will be provided without having major repercussions to the environment. That's the goal. That's the goal. And that's something to look forward to.

Anjan, thank you so much for talking to us about the power grid. I learned so much. Thank you. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by Burley McCoy. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi 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 Shortwave from NPR.

These days, there is a lot of news. It can be hard to keep up with what it means for you, your family, and your community. Consider This from NPR as a podcast that helps you make sense of the news. Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a story and provide the context, the backstory, and analysis you need to understand our rapidly changing world. Listen to the Consider This podcast. From NPR. On the plus side, you get sponsor free listening to over 25 NPR podcasts.

On the minus side, you get fewer chances to tap fast forward on your podcast player. On the plus side, you get to support something you care about. On the minus side, you like challenges and think this makes it too easy. So why don't you join us on the plus side of things with NPR. Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org. On NPR's Throughline. Schoolhouses are less expensive than rebellions. We've been debating the government's role in education since the Civil War.

A tenth of our national debt would have saved us the blood and treasure of the late war. How the Department of Education tried to fix a divided nation. Listen to ThruLine wherever you get your podcasts.