Embedded - 213: Electricity Doesn't Act Like an Apple

Episode Date: August 31, 2017

Gretchen Bakke spoke with us about the future of power generation and transmission. Her book is The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future. Gretchen is a professor of anthropology at McGill University. Gretchen’s website The book’s Facebook page Grechen’s first book is Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader

Hello, I'm Elysia White. This is Embedded. My co-host is Christopher White, and our guest this week is Gretchen Bakke, a professor of anthropology. She's written about the intersection of art and anthropology, which is naturally what I want to talk about. But she's also written a book called The Grid about power transmission, specifically the power grid in the United States. Hi, Gretchen. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Hello. Thank you for having me. I gave a little bit of an introduction, but how would you introduce yourself? I would say actually that I'm a writer that sort of doubles as a professor, doubles as a public speaker. But my primary interest is in research and writing

and writing across broad domains. So offering things for the general public, offering very obscure things for the academy. And, you know, even sort of writing on demand, what people want, what people are interested in, what I'm interested in, but maintaining a writerly practice and fitting in and everything else around that.

Well, now I have a whole bunch of more questions about writing. So I'm happy to talk about writing. I mostly teach writing as well, I should say. Oh, neat. Yeah. Before we get into the deeper questions about the grid, writing, anthropology, and art, boy, it's going to be a long show. Before we get into those questions, we do this thing where we have short questions and

we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we don't ask for explanations. Okay. Christopher, you start. Okay. Favorite movie or book that you encountered in the last year or so? So there's actually a, this is not very short. There's actually a sort of, I've been reading into this climate fiction.

There's enough of it now that you can sort of jump in and read around inside of it. And some of it's really irritating, some of it's really good. And so that's, I move away from it, I've stepped away right now from that, and I'm reading mostly science fiction. But the climate fiction is kind of where I've been most curious. So there's the Kim Stanley Robinson books. He has a new one out about New York. But even before that, he had this set of three books about bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. in relating to climate change, which have these just very long-winded descriptions of people in meetings. It's kind of incredible.

And The Girl on the Road, which has a terrible ending, but the story is really looking at climate change without ever talking about Europe or the United States at all. So it's mostly about India and Africa. So that's where I've been. I didn't know that was a genre. Now I have to go look at it. Mm-hmm.

So preferred voltage? I'm Catholic at it. So preferred voltage. I'm Catholic about it. I think both is fine, but not both in the same house. I think that's 120 and 240. I think 110 and 220. All right. I might be wrong about that. That's going to ruin my reputation right there. Since our listeners, well, since we work on devices that tend to work at 1.8 volts or 3.3 volts, that was why I was checking. So house voltage is favorite voltage. So, yeah, and I would actually say that anything that these very low voltage kind of new inventions, I find very, very interesting. Any way that you could run a house at five volts and then have people be able to do all the

tinkering themselves to make systems work, to put things together, to change things. I find that very encouraging, very exciting, but that's not where it's at yet. All right. Do you read your own Amazon reviews? I do not. Smart. I do have somebody who reads them and then summarizes them for me.

Technical or writing tip you think everyone should know? I think the best writing tip you think everyone should know? I think the best writing tip is to have a file that you never share with anybody. I tend to call the quotes a notes file where you take interesting and brilliant things that people have said that are related to whatever project you're working on. And then you write out in longhand why they're not in longhand but on the computer why those things are interesting and what they lead you to and this can be done engineers do this creative writers do this dissertation writers do this it's uh it's a way to sort of expand your own thoughts um about a project without having to give it to anybody or show it to anybody.

I like that. Science fiction concept that you think will be real in your lifetime. Oh, I can't say Ansible, can I? Probably. It'd be kind of cool, though. How about the one I would like to be true in my lifetime? Ansible. Okay.

And how amazing was the eclipse in Oregon? It was pretty great. We had the funny thing happen that we were on an Indian reservation. And the big powwow was the day before. It was three days, but it ended the day before the eclipse. And so we arrived in the middle. We spent the Sunday all day at the powwow. And then we watched the eclipse on Monday morning.

And the eclipse was clearly the less important event of those two. So not just for the people who were there, for everybody who was there. And I wouldn't say exactly for us, there's something sort of amazing about the full eclipse, that one minute and a half that you get. Did you see it? We did not. We had plans to go, but it sort of dissolved. Dissolved, yeah. No, it's remarkable. And the last one I saw was in Oregon in 1978 when I was a little girl. So I didn't even remember that. All right, so let's get to your book, The Grid. Could you tell us about it? So it's, I'm an anthropologist, which means that it is, it's a non-technical book with a lot of technical details, but written not in any way that anyone who works with electricity

would ever imagine was possible. That's designed to explain the changes happening to the current system to anybody who feels like intervening in that so anybody who's sort of making those changes happen whether inside of the utilities or people who are trying to municipalize their sort of their local grid to people who are trying to go well not exactly off-grid, but have the capacity to have battery storage and to sort of island themselves as they like, sort of, and people who are curious just about how electricity works in a way that is really approachable. So that was the desire going in.

But what happened with the book is it actually became, it split in two in a very logical way. The first half is mostly the history so how we got to the grid that we are now trying to reform what were this sort of series almost of accidents the business history the legislative history the policy history that makes it sound really boring but it's really really not boring um it's an exciting this technological history it's a very it's very exciting to watch all of these ideas develop. How can you make money off of electricity? It was a totally new kind of product.

To see how that was worked out in the 19-teens is fascinating. And then the book sort of moves into the present and has a chapter each about, there's a chapter on wind power, there's a chapter on smart meters, there's a chapter on micro and nanogrids, there's a chapter on storage, and there's sort of a chapter on what comes next. And so the people tend to have a preference for one side or the other of the book. As an anthropologist, I thought it would all be about the present and the history would be sort of secondary. But what ended up happening is that the history is extremely meaty and substantial, as is the stuff on the present. But the present is moving so fast.

The book was published a year ago now, and there's already space for another chapter and, you know, a chapter and a half, just in what's happened in recent times. Well, that history, that involves a bunch of larger-than-life characters like Edison and Tesla, right? So, I mean, there's a lot of fascinating stuff that people probably don't realize this is where it came from. It came from these people fighting over how to do things when they didn't really know how to do them. And monopolies and the discrepancy between people rich enough to afford it

and more rural areas where it was people rich enough to afford it and more rural areas where it was far more expensive. Yeah. And where that wasn't even on offer because there's no way, there's no way to make profit off a farm. You know, it's so building the infrastructure out to a single farm, you can't do it profitably. So you have to have some other kind of intervention. In the U.S. it was the Rural Electrification Act during the Depression that sort of said, okay, we're going to be a country that has, the government said, we're going to be a country that has universal electrification, because this is part of equal, sort of equal access, the pursuit of happiness, all of these ideals, which we still have, but we're kind of

more present, I could say during the Depression when the Depression, when things were really bad for a lot of people. And I liked both the history and the more technical, although it was the immediate history, the current state, that I found very interesting because it hadn't occurred to me how it could break. In particular, the idea that you need to generate exactly as much power as is being consumed by users. Yeah, within about a five second window. And as somebody who has turned on high power things and expected it all to work just at my beck and call it never occurred to me that somewhere either this had to average out with somebody turning off something of that power capability or something spinning up at the same time or within

five seconds of when i wanted my power yeah it, it's kind of shocking. It's shocking to realize how fresh electricity is. So that if you are in coal country, for example, if your electricity is still made by coal or even by natural gas, but let's say coal, you turn on a light and, you know, less than a minute earlier and usually within about this five second range you've got that electricity was made so there was coal dust a minute ago and that that is now power in your house and i think that the even if it's um you know even if that coal um fire power plant is 100 miles away or 300 miles away, electricity is, it's not the speed of light we'd like to think of it that way,

but it's sort of terrestrial, the terrestrial possibility, the closest that we can get to the speed of light, given that there's resistance all over the system. It's just, it's that fast. And so the fact that we have this giant rangy grid in the US, it provides strengths because you have all different kinds of generators on one single system and you have all different kinds of loads, which are just the people, the users on this one single system. And so balance is easier with that complexity, given that there's not grid scale storage. And when I was finishing the book, there there's not grid scale storage. And when I was finishing the book, there really wasn't grid scale storage. Now there start to be some decent experiments

in that direction. But I can even say, you know, two years ago, all of that power was being made and being used and being balanced simultaneously. And the great surprise, I think for most people reading the book, is not just what you just said, but it's also that as soon as you start to convert to solar power or to wind power, you don't have a power plant like a coal-fired power plant or a gas turbine. What you have is a gust of wind, so that that is producing electricity variably

in this way that is predictable, but nevertheless, not steady and not controlled by us. And then on so that's on one side generation. And on the other side, you have users who are just chaotic, which is what we've sort of always been. And we also at 5 a.m. But the balancing act has become much more delicate. And there's a lot of people who are putting a lot of time and energy into figuring out as renewables sort of continue to march ahead into the system, how to keep everything running. And in part, and this is something that people always kind of forget, is that when it's really windy, or when a lot of people have solar panels, too much electricity is just as bad

for the system, the functionality of the system as too little electricity. So we can, making a renewable power electric grid, which seems to be where things are going right now, has to take into account that renewables can make far more electricity than we need, but not 24-7, you know, kind of when it works, when the sun's out. Humans are chaotic, but it's sort of chaotic in a stochastic way. On average, we do something reasonably predictable. i mean i may turn on something high power but on average over lots of people a certain amount of power will be used and this idea that okay we kind of know what those averages are and and there may be oddities like Thanksgiving day is one of those Thursdays that doesn't look like any other Thursday in the calendar if you are looking at power consumption,

because it's a different sort of day. But this idea that, okay, we have an average user base, and now suddenly a cloud can stop the amount of electricity or a really bright day can dump too much in. You mentioned grid scale storage. And as I read the first, until you got to that part of the book, as I read it, I was like, where are the batteries? We need batteries. We need batteries.

Don't batteries do this? How about rechargeable batteries? Could you, what are, I mean, why don't we just all have rechargeable batteries? Well, we might. I mean, there's like 4,000 questions in there. So let me see. I know. Let me see what I can do. So first, back in the day, before the internet, you know, we still largely communicate by telephone. So slower, significantly slower than electricity. Or by even by email or by, you know, text even. We start to get up to the speed of electricity. But if there's something going a little bit awry on the grid, the way in which humans deal with that

is much slower than the way that electricity is moving, is making things go awry. So it's kind of phenomenal that the strongest, most reliable years of the grid were actually before there was any storage, a little bit of pumped hydro, but essentially no storage, and before there was any electronic communication. And what happened was that there would be essentially four meetings a year, where by season, where the executives of these utility monopolies would sit down and they would say, here's what our output is going to be for this period of time. And that's because humans were reliable enough that you could set it by the quarter. There are still these sort of weird bumps. In England, they have this problem with their electric kettles. So like after,

um, in the overtime of a, of a soccer match, um, they, the grid can be crashed because everybody gets up and plugs their kettle in. They're the highest surges that they have. they're just absolutely,

I don't have the numbers for you, sadly, but they're just absolutely phenomenal. Um, so yes, the, the utility now knows that, right. And so they have everything, you know, like, sadly, but they're just absolutely phenomenal. So yes, the utility now knows that, right? And so they have everything, you know, like, okay, this match is going into overtime,

what can we turn on, right? In order to not have the national grid crash. Oh my god, the tea kettles are crashing the internet. Exactly. And I have to say, in New York City, during the Super Bowl, there's also problems with the sewers for the same reason. So when there's an ad, everybody flushes their toilet and they have the same issue. So yes, predictable. Yes, predictable, but not always easy to accommodate. Let's maybe put it that way. And so I don't know where I was going to go with that.

Batteries. Batteries, yes. Eventually to batteries right eventually so the idea was um the idea was as you as you sort of started out that we would all like humans people americans especially can use the electricity they want when they want it and that will be accommodated by generation so that the balance was between how we when and how much electricity we make and sort of patterns, generalizable, averageable patterns of human consumption, American consumption.

I say human, it sounds crazy. So say American consumption. So then we sort of started to move away from that because suddenly if you can't control all the generation, you can't really control the people. let's have batteries right that gives us so then everybody sort of turned their head there was this giant swivel like let's have storage right we that way we don't always have to be burning if we have a bunch of sun at noon in phoenix that we don't use it is overloading the grid and then we have no sun at 8 p.m in phoenix right like why isn't it that we don't use and is overloading the grid. And then we have no sun at 8pm in Phoenix,

right? Like, why isn't it that we don't just use a battery? It makes a lot of sense. But the grid, it ran for most of the 20th century without storage. So there's a third way, which is gaining in popularity now, which is sort of, I'll give away the end of the book, it's kind of where it ends, which is, how can we actually balance people? So instead of intervening on the side of storage, instead of intervening on the side of generation, maybe there's a way to intervene on the side of how people, how and when people use electricity, especially energy intensive things. And energy intensive can mean drier. It't have to mean you know industrial wind tunnel um so those are sort of the three things that are in play right now as um the the whatever the grid of the future um turns out to be i'm sure we'll talk about what that is but all three of

those options can't should we turn up you know should we deploy generation should we deploy battery storage or some other form of storage? Or should we deploy some sort of intelligent, aggregatable use patterns? When we say change people, there's changing their habits, such as when they told us all to turn off the lights, and then we didn't use as much electricity, and then they had to raise our rates. But then there's also using technology to turn off the air conditioning if you're not home. Right, exactly. And the great story is in Texas right now where they have a lot of wind power in the evening, at night actually.

They have a huge amount of wind power at night. Very reliable, which is great. But that's also when people don't use electricity. So what one Texas utility has done is they've made electricity free at 9pm. And so in that way, the behavior that gets changed is that people stand up at 9pm, and they press the button on their dishwasher. Yes, right. So that's a dryer, turn on the dryer, whatever, but that's changing people. And that will get I mean, there's always the coming Internet of Things that we now somehow never get rid of the coming word, right? We just have it. But that's the that's the the

sort of the low hanging fruit of the Internet of Things is having having a dishwasher that knows the price of electricity at that instant, and changes it or having a light bulb that knows the price of electricity at that instant and changes it. Or having a light bulb that knows the price of electricity at that instant and switches over to battery power or dims itself. So it's not necessarily just humans, but it's the demand side. And getting the technology to do that for us because we're cumbersome. And lazy. And lazy. And yeah, whatever.

And it's like, it's not that expensive. I'll just turn on my dishwasher at 8.30 or 5 or whatever it's convenient to me, right? So letting the, to some extent, letting the dishwasher make those decisions or be able to say to the dishwasher, today you get to make these decisions. It doesn't matter very much if it's one dishwasher. But as an aggregate, if we continue to have a system the size of the system we have today, as an aggregate, those kinds of shifts really matter. And there's a lot of argument about how much people as individuals, but also as sort of organized groups can actually get money back for not using electricity. So that's new that you would value and quantify and pay for non-use

as opposed to always paying for the electricity that is made for you. So it sounds sort of maybe simple when I say it, but it's a major change in thinking about how this particular system should work. Are there, maybe this is getting too far into the technical details, but are there interfaces, are there APIs? Could I look up when my power was expensive and turned down or when my power was cheap and turn up? And is it just me or is there some central way

I could create a device that could look this up? So, no, yes, no. Bureaucracy says no. So you, the issue right now, and this is my understanding of things. So there are people who would clearly argue with me about this, but the issue right now is that the utility doesn't quite trust customers. Utilities don't quite trust customers enough

to let them know how much their electricity costs in real time. So that information is normally available at about a 15-minute lag. And there's still sort of this process of getting even real. There's many utilities which don't have real-time pricing yet. There are some that do. But they're not quite ready yet to turn over all that information. There are, however. I mean, there is a light bulb, a prototype of a light bulb that

does have a price factor in it. So the light bulb has the capacity to make a reaction based on whether a price is over a certain limit or under a certain limit. But that information is not yet coming into the light bulb. It seems like starting with light bulbs is a little bit of the wrong end. I want to start with the big, you know, big, big hardware, the dishwashers, the electric cars and that kind of thing. Yeah. And people might be, that's the one I know about. So people might be doing that as well. The electric cars, that's also becomes very, that becomes a very interesting conversation. I've begun to feel, so when I was writing the book, I was like,

these things are not taking off. This is what's not, not just electric cars were doing okay, but electric cars that could give electricity back to the grid. Right. Right. It's not taking off. They're still not. That's much harder. Yeah. And it's not there yet.

But I feel a little bit right now in relationship to electric cars or the internal combustion engine, the way that probably Kodak felt about digital cameras, which is that there's a shift that could happen very, very quickly. Yeah. And so that then, if there's enough electric cars around, I think that next technological piece. But again, if you have people who want to work on something, I would say that figuring out how to compensate people for the electricity they store for the grid with their car in a very easy way. Not the iPhone piece of it, but like the actual thing which communicates to the utility that communicates information and also communicates electricity to the utility. That would be a very useful plug and play thing to have out there.

That is not my final thought. Utilities aren't making that available at this time. Right. And so what you see is a lot of people actually turning away from their utility. You mean like going off grid? No, like municipalizing. There are many towns which are trying to municipalize or aggregate a group of people and then allowing them to make decisions about where the electricity is coming from and what the rates will be and how it will be managed. So that's happening. There are some

forward-thinking utilities which are really, have become forward-thinking because they were seeing all of this defection, not of individuals, in fact, though that will become easier as small-scale battery storage becomes cheaper and becomes more sort of interoperable with other things. But the, so there's some forward thinking utilities who are really trying to, in New York, they're trying to encourage microgrids, but have them be not in island mode almost all the time. So it's just becomes a different underlying sort of substructure to the grid. And there, you know, and there are utilities who are like, we don't want to have anything to do with this. So Florida is sort sort of a classic beautiful example which has no solar power essentially

um in florida it's so wrong so there's you know there's different there's states there's legislatures there's utilities there's municipalities um and part of the reason i wrote the book is because it's there's so many players with the fingers in this game and yet it has to be balanced essentially second to second, the whole system. So that just makes it kind of crazy that it even works ever. It's kind of crazy. Yes.

You mentioned islanding and microgrids and we should explain those, but I want to go more over to why we need them. So there are a lot of reasons. Right now in the United States, which in electrical terms also includes Canada and a tiny piece of Mexico. We have three grids, a grid for the West Coast, a grid for the East Coast, and then Texas has their own grid. Mexico has, for the most part, their own grid, and then Quebec also has their own grid. But we can say for the US, we have these three big ones. And the reason for that is simply that there's not enough people in the Dakotas to make it worth anyone's while to connect those two halves. So they can be connected to each other, but for the most part, they just

kind of break at that point. And the intense complexity of each of these big grids means that there are complexity-related blackouts. In fact, most of the blackouts we have, the big ones, they might even be caused by a storm to start with, but it tends to be the complexity of the system. A lot of self-preservation, which means fuses, essentially fuses. So in order to keep lines from burning out and not being usable anymore, they have fuses built in. And if things get too out of balance those fuses trip they take the line out but they they propagate a

blackout but they save the line could say it that way so there's it's very easy to for a very small blackout to propagate across the system um and then it's very hard after that to get the whole system or this giant chunk of the system back up and running again because it's just so much and there is a wonderful story which is not in the book which is after the first New York blackout which was I believe in 1968 which was it was caused by an incorrectly set relay up sort of around Buffalo New York it was a big blackout it was the first of these like the eastern seaboard blackouts that were just shocking to people um actually the the the generators have have we generate electricity with electromagnets

and so they had to wheel in um diesel generators to actually get a charge into the electromagnet to turn the coal coal fire power plants back on again right so that's just it just takes time that and you just imagine these people like because does anybody have a generator you know we can't turn our power plant back on can't turn a power plant on without our generator exactly what actually physically breaks in these blackouts is it it it primarily transformers? Is it wires just blowing up? Squirrels.

Squirrels, yeah. Lightning. Because, you know, you have to send people out. It's not like you can sit at a computer and type any type and reroute things. It's that you have to send trucks out with people in very dangerous situations to replace big pieces of infrastructure, right? Right. So it really depends on where the problem has happened. In places that have a lot of trees, especially big trees,

so Santa Cruz County, for example, which has these sort of random pockets. Really? Yeah. We experienced this just a few months ago. Is that where you are? So there's these random pockets of redwoods. There's all these microclimates, and there's these random pockets of redwoods. There's all these microclimates and there's these like random pockets of redwoods and you just blow like in comes the wind. It doesn't even have to be a big storm and branches just go everywhere.

So that's one, right? They just take down the wires and then you just fix the wires. But whoever those wires are feeding, if they're higher voltage wires, they're feeding a neighborhood, they're feeding a community. So they're called feeders for obvious reasons. And so you take one down and then that community is out until that wire is replaced. There are duplicates. My hometown, which is Astoria, Oregon, for my whole life growing up, there was one wire, there was one feeder to the town. There are now two. So that means the main feeder goes down, the secondary will then to the town. There are now two. And so that means the main feeder goes down. The secondary will then carry the power. If you lose both of them, this is the problem.

It's not infinite how many wires there are. We don't want it to be infinite. It's a pretty robust system at present. The challenges to the system right now isn't the organization of the wires, it is to some degree the ferocity of the storms. Even though we're never supposed to say climate change, I'm going to say climate change. The storms are just, the storm of the century are coming more and more often. And they are incredibly devastating. And in some cases, those even in the in the center of the country,

it can be an ice storm, you know, there are ice storms in the south that knock out power for a week. So those are taking down lines. In Florida, substations will flood. That's a problem. So now there's now sort of a habit in places that are tidal or that have are quite swampy that you build your substation, you build a little artificial hill and you stick your substation on top of that. You move your important equipment up to the second floor. Um, you don't keep it in the basement, even if it's really heavy, that means you have to redesign your building. Um, so that, so, so storms, but storms in these very specific ways, um, will cause outages. Squirrels are often accidentally connecting to pieces of wire that shouldn't be. That kills them, but it also,

I don't know if you've ever seen this, but it makes this tremendous pop as it blows out a transformer. It's absolutely astounding. And, you know, there's fire like shooting all over the place. And so that, yeah, so that's the classic, the squirrels.

So, and, you know, you can't stop the trees from growing in America. You can't stop the squirrels from doing their thing. Hacking is becoming, I was just reading an article today that was saying that it's actually finally a real problem. So for a long time, we've been talking about it, like, this is going to be a real problem. This is going to be a real problem where we're this this from an analog system into a digital system and that is going to be meaningful in terms of the way that disruptions can propagate across it and where they get those disruptions can come from and so it's sort of official i would say today

that that is is a real is a real threat because we're moving from having to send people out in trucks to typey typey. And once you are in typing land whatever. But the fact but the fixing is still done in trucks. So there's, you know, there's typey typey for the to make the disruption now. But that you can't once those wires are down. It's maybe there will be a day people are always talking about the self healing grid where there's sort of a software fix that helps bring things back up again. But by and large, it's still guys and trucks. One of the things you said in your book was that we needed to move from a brittle, interconnected, house of cards sort of system, and I'm paraphrasing there, to something with more resilience. And that doesn't necessarily mean having more lines into a city.

Absolutely. It's something else. Can you tell us about what resilience means in terms of the power grid? Yes. And this actually comes back to the question, your real question and the last question, which I didn't answer, which is like, why microgrids? Right. Like, what is this microgrid thing? And the answer, what brings

down the grid, right? So if complexity brings down the grid, and men in trucks bring the grid back up again, which is quite slow, what microgrids can do is that they are much smaller, which means they're easier to fix. They're easier in some cases to manage. And so resilience becomes, it's not the same as saying, this thing won't break. It's saying that given this thing will break, what can we do to make it break less severely? What can we do to make it easier for us to fix it? What can we do to make a particular area come back on, even if the rest is blacked out, right? So, after Sandy on the East Coast, what they found actually is the people who felt the least traumatized by that storm were the ones

that had a good neighborly relationship before the storm. So they felt like they could go to their neighbor and ask for help, have company, have, you know, coffee if possible, right? And so there's been a lot of movement in New York State, especially, but in the whole Sandy Zone, also Connecticut, to make something like, New Jersey too, to make something like New Jersey too, to make something like warming houses. So that if you have a community that goes down, if there's a micro grid, it can go, it will still go down, but maybe for an hour instead of a week. And then that place

becomes someplace that can help comfort, feed, keep warm, charge people's phones, charge people's cars eventually, for a community which is out of power. So resilience can be thought of as like, how do we get this whole community back up? But it's also like, how do we make sure that this community is as little traumatized by this event? And that means psychic, but also just like the old folks' homes also just need to have power, right? And the hospitals. Like real physical, you know, being able to take care of the people in a community, especially a very, very densely populated area. That's also a part of resilience.

You mentioned islanding. Yeah, so islanding just means that you can run your system um without being connected to the big grid um and i use i think i use the word macro grid uh in the book so to begin to stop to think of the grid as being just this one macro infrastructure which is taken care of by utilities and legislators and um people in the know and it starts to become more like what are these what are smaller systems um that are managed at the household and it starts to become more like what are these what are smaller systems that are managed at the household level that tends to be called a nano grid or a micro grid which is more than one source of generation and more than one draw and it's people tend to think

of like now they tend to think of a hospital or a campus or something that has a that's you know where it's it's about a place it's like there's this place that has power and it's a an island in their mind is not an archipelago it's really like an island with water of you know what is water in a real island it's darkness in a in a big blackout but the new jersey transit company is actually building it building, it's essentially a privately owned infrastructure, which is a microgrid, and it will work so that the stations will work as warming houses. And the lines will work to get people out of Manhattan if needed. So that the whole thing becomes sort of looks more like a dendrite than an island, right?

But it becomes the system which has this robust capacity to come back on when there's a big power outage. So as that technology becomes better and better and as more and more microgrids sort of come into being but are most of the time just hooked into the big grid so that they're there only in island mode when necessary right now. And what will become one day when cheaper,

which we can talk about in a minute, it's like the underlying structure of the grid shifts toward privately owned systems. But the way in which people experience that infrastructure doesn't change at all so the utilities are they on board with this kind of shift because you know they've been pushing back on things like solar to a certain extent in california and in other states where you know it's not advantageous to them to pay consumers when the consumers overgenerate.

This doesn't seem like the sort of... It seems like the utilities are incentivized to resist this kind of change, which is actually better for everybody. Yeah, so the East and the West are quite different. The East Coast and the West Coast are quite different in this regard. So the East Coast, basically anywhere that sandy or hurricane irene uh hit there tends to be a real interest on the part of the utilities to figure out a better system and microgrids work well in a

densely populated area so you have vermont is like they're putting power walls in people's basement the utility is putting power walls in people's basement. The utility is putting power walls in people's basements. And the idea is that they have access to that battery as much as the person who has the solar on their roof. New York state. Like I said, New Jersey, there's a lot of there's that Northeast sort of traumatized Northeast part of the country. There's a lot of utility interest in trying to figure out how to make it work. And the West, I would say that the population is so much less dense. And the strengths of the system in the West have to do

with the fact that you have all of these different sort of weather zones, geological capacities, that mean that you can balance a grid with renewables that's quite large and so what you have to the arguments start to be like um well we don't want to be we don't california doesn't want to be getting solar power from nevada because what we think they're going to do is sneak in a bunch of fossil, right? So it becomes this much more kind of like in-state bitter infighting, but it also becomes a system which is balanced over this giant space

so that you might have solar power. You might have a huge amount of solar coming out of Nevada at a time when there's some sort of cloud cover, like too many puffy white clouds in Arizona. There's a lot of wind in Tachipi. There's a lot of, there's too much water in the dams in the Pacific Northwest. All of these renewables can be balanced around each other.

And people who are thinking about the West Coast and how the future of the grid, a renewably powered grid on the West Coast will work, they often use the metaphor of the symphony. So that the idea with a symphony is that you have beautiful music, but not every instrument is playing all the time. So it's about getting this balance between all of these renewable resources, which are actually on offer, and a fairly sparse population. That's actually the Rocky Mountain Institute. They like to use that. And it works really, really well for certain sorts of places. In the East Coast, it tends to be much more, how can my privatized infrastructure be useful to me, but also to my community?

And me being not just a person, but also a company. I like this discussion of resilience because it applies to more than the brittleness of the power system. I mean, you think about just regular engineering, modularity like islanding is going to be important and planning for failure, even though we try not to have it happen, we shouldn't ignore its possibilities. We should minimize its impact. And even utilizing diverse methods to solve problems, that's all stuff we should be doing everywhere. It's not just with this system. But going the other way, mentioned that the innovations associated with creating

smart devices that could work with the power companies to go on and off what other innovations do we need to do what to make it more resilient to make it more resilient to make to make our power cheaper to make power cheaper all over the world. My fusion's going to be here in 50 years. I heard that they moved it from 30 to 10. Yeah, right. Yeah, but that was already 10 years ago. I think so, yeah.

Yeah, and slow batteries, right? It's a great idea. I mean, it's like fusion. If you're happy with energy and energy out roughly equaling each other, the flow battery is great. It lasts forever. What other kinds of devices do we need? Is that what you asked? Or what kind of innovation do you think is important for the next five years yeah so here's what i think will happen here's what i guess i can say here's what i think the space of innovation will be which is um up till now the way that the power grid has been designed it's the same at every scale um it's sort of like a firm right it's fractal it's like a fern right so it's like the closer you look at it, the more it just resembles itself, but on a smaller scale.

And I think that what is coming, and this is from talking to a lot of different people, is that buildings, so not just single family homes, but buildings in general, will have a link to a macro grid, but they won't necessarily function with the same rules as that macro grid.

It won't look like the same thing. So you might end up with DC and AC systems intertwined inside of a building. You might end up with a building that's all on DC. You might end up with buildings which have storage capacities and their main purpose is to take power off the grid when there's too much.

There's just all different kinds of innovation that can happen in this building space. And that seems to be, you know, that seems to be where creativity is being focused. devices, it's like, okay, if we can actually make an electricity system inside a building, however we want, right? As long as it's on, as long as it works, right? However we want, we can have generation, we can have storage, we can have three different kinds of generation, we can have no generation, but a buddy we can have, you know, like, it's all different ways to do it. You can run a five volt system, DC system, whatever. As long as there's an interface with the larger grid, that's fine. So I would say that in terms of thinking, it's not the device level so much as the building level. What is a building capable of? Is it a solar rooftop? Is uh power generating curtain walls is it um you know electricity energy recycling or sort of what is that called hunter gathering energy what's the right word you know when you just like there's extra energy and you just use it it's not recycling it's not coming in my head

opportunistic no but anyway you can you can actually gather the energy from people's footfalls oh right so harvesting energy harvesting so all of these things are kind of up for grabs No, but anyway, you can actually gather the energy from people's footfalls. Oh, harvesting. Right, so harvesting, energy harvesting. So all of these things are kind of up for grabs. None of them really do what they need to do now. But then those buildings can begin to communicate with each other, not just electrically, but financially. and that's where you'll start to see the con the some sort of question about how the connections between how a smart meter is designed for example what a smart meter is capable of doing how it can interface with a car how it can interface with another building um how money

and information and energy are flowing back and forth um from the smaller from the smaller scale back up again so um that's, that's what, that's, that's where I would push people, um, is to thinking with the broadest mind possible, we can do so much now. Like what could a building be? How could a building work? Um, how could electricity within a building work? Um, and there's all kinds of answers to that and all of them can work and all of them are fine. We don't need standardization now. That's sort of what you're saying about resilience, too.

Resilience is about sort of letting go of standardization and letting the capacity of the information age, the capacities as they are now, but also as they're developing, allowing those to figure out a way to let non-standardized entities communicate, you know, become interoperable. So communicate in a standardized way outside of themselves. Okay, that makes sense. Is that too crazy? No, I mean, it seems futuristic, which is what I wanted.

Yeah. But it's not far in the future. That's not far. I can see how new buildings, especially big buildings, corporations could put in a lot of power generation, even storage. I mean, because batteries are good insulators. But I don't see how my home is likely to participate in that unless I put solar panels on, which they said we'd have to cut down the big tree and that's not happening. Right. So let's say, so your home, you can't have solar panels because you're like your big tree.

Your neighbor has no basement because their house is built on sand, but they can put solar panels on. So you could technically, you could have the storage in your house, and your neighbor could have the production in their house. Right. Right? And we'd trade. And you'd trade. Yeah. And so you don't even need the utility in that case. And there's a movement now called swarm electrification, which is being tried out in Bangladeshladesh actually but um it's uh

it doesn't sound good yeah you should really work on that name but there's also uh there's also oh what's it it's i tend to think of it as person-to-person energy trading but it now has a name like it now has a technical name that also just appeared like three weeks ago um but in auckland new zealand um they're working on this with downtown business buildings. But the idea is that you essentially have your solar panels or your resource. So in your case, your resource could be your battery system or your resource could be, I can turn my stuff down on call. I don't, you know, like I don't need to be using electricity right now. That can be a resource.

So you have your resource and you set your resource to buy or to sell. And your neighbor has their resource and they set their resource to buy or to sell. And you can interact just with other people who you know, which tends to be actually quite appealing to people. Or you can think of it as a sort of redefining the way the market for electricity works it tends to be quite local these these systems um but that's essentially what what swarm electrification is it's an app on a telephone that's linked to a bank account and a solar panel on the roof and you just switch it back you just say now i'm selling i don't need power right now i put it on sell oh i do need power right now i put it on buy interesting yeah

so it seems far away but it's not far away it's not far away that's neat there are so many micro economic things like that that i think that i hope are coming that will just change how we do everything so the the the issue with this is um rich people do tend rich people tend to win and poor people tend to lose. At least for a while until the technology is so cheap that it doesn't matter. But that takes time. That takes time, exactly. All right, that's depressing. Could you tell us about molten salt?

Can I tell you about the Sisyphus train? Yes. So molten salt um solar so let me talk about wind and then i will come to molten salt the the way that we've uh historically meaning since uh 1898 um made electricity in the United States, is in big power plants far away from where people live. And wind power, when it first came out, was like, ah, wind power, it's variable. We don't know what's going to happen. Scary, scary, right? All this wind, not enough wind. But that's largely been dealt with. And the fact that wind farms tend to also be big power plants far away from where people live means that they have come to be managed in ways very similar to the way that you would manage a coal-fired power plant, a hydroelectric dam, any sort of big, even a big

wood burner, nuclear power plant, et cetera, right? So the management of a big wind farm, it sort of makes sense within the utility model. Solar, and you'll see this in California, there's a big divide because there can be big solar farms, which are far away from where people live, that then feel to the utility and to a century's worth of history like, oh, we're familiar with this way of making a lot of power in one place and then shipping it over a familiar with this way of making a lot of power in one place and then shipping it over a line at a high voltage to a bunch of people who live somewhere else um so let's just talk about that solar because there's the other solar which is what's causing all the trouble right now which is rooftop um so this solar these big solar plants um

the sun goes away every day every day like one thing we know about the sun yes not just but like clockwork actually clocks are like sun work actually i would say and the that sun it goes away and the time that that we contemporary americans which who have also been produced during the last century in part because of electricity. Like our ways were made because electricity made them possible. So contemporary Americans, they tend to go home around five. Some of them, but not all of them. So some people are still in the office and they have all their crap on. There are people cleaning those offices, so they are using all their crap. And some people are home already, and so they have all their crap on. And the sun is starting to go down. So the highest demand is at the moment at which solar

is least capable of providing the electricity. So solar then goes, the output goes down, down, down, down, down, down, down. And then slightly later, the amount of power we use goes down. So like by 10, 30, 11 o'clock, you see this giant dip in demand. So it's not actually, let's say we need more electricity from solar power between 5 p.m., 4.45, and 10 p.m. five hours and so the people who build these big solar plants they're not looking for a storage solution solution um that's that's on call all the time right or that can work all night long they're looking for a storage solution for four or five hours and one of the ways to do this um and you will see these pictures of them, I've never actually seen a real one, the pictures are beautiful, these solar arrays, which are like

a giant eyeball in the desert. And all the mirrors are focusing in on this huge tower in the middle, or like a flower, sort of like the stamen, right in the middle. And all the light from these mirrors are focusing on the tower. And inside that tower, there's also trough version of this but inside that tower is salt and that's salt table salt table salt right and that salt it gets really really really hot and it never actually cools it's liquid so it's molten right better word than liquid liquid table salt is not nearly as sexy as like molten salt um and that's salt when it's so the thing that i found amazing is it takes a week to even get the salt to melt so you turn these power plants on you build them and you have to wait a week for all that sun to just even melt the salt but then once it's melted it stays liquid um and during

the day it gets very very very very, very, very hot. And that heat is then used to turn a normal steam turbine. So it's just as if you were using coal. You just have, you're banking the heat, essentially, you're making the heat, you're banking it. And it takes longer to cool down than it takes for the sun to go down. So you get this four hours during which you can still use this superheated salt to make electricity. And then at some point you can't produce, you can't run a steam turbine on it anymore. It's still molten, but it just doesn't work well enough to continue. But that also tends to be about the time that demand,

that we start to go to bed. That sounds great. Why isn't the entire Southwest blanketed in these? Well, they're working on it. Yeah. I mean, they are working on it, yeah. And that kind of, so when we talk about storage, I think it's also really important to realize that the battery is not only not the only answer,

maybe not even the best answer, but that what is demanded by a storage device, um, changes radically depending on who you're thinking of. Um, so, uh, a storage device that's, that's in your basement that can deal with a one puffy white cloud that's going over without like blacking out your entire house because there's not enough electricity at that moment. Um, that's a really different kind of machine. Um, that that's you could have a flywheel almost for that right then uh then um an electricity plant that's trying to deal with four hours um so there's all kinds of again like my push is always for um understanding the breadth

of possibility because that's when the grid was built in the in the 19 aughts and the 19 teens um it was it gained the form that it has because there was immense creativity going into solving exactly these same problems they couldn't store it right they had they had a business they had business problems um there was no real sense of a mass market. Like in the beginning, it was really like electricity is just for rich people, because there's no way to make money off of it by giving it to everybody. So those things had to get worked out. And for them, at that time, it was very difficult to turn a coal plant up and down. And one result of that is that they needed people to use a lot of electricity in the middle of the

night and what do we have electric refrigerators right electric air conditioners those are results of an of a financial need on the part of financial and technological problem of a coal-burning power plant right so why do we have why do we have electrical why do we have electric fridges um to produce load, to produce midnight load for an electricity system that is slowly aging away. Oh, a giant conspiracy. It's not a giant conspiracy. It's, you know, each of these things is so hard to manage.

So refrigerators will change, I think. One of the things that somebody said recently to me, which I think has really the ring of truth, is that when people, people meaning buildings, begin to manage their own electricity, whether or not it just means they're putting generation in or they're putting generation storage in or they have the capacity to island,

efficiency is going to go through the roof. It's going to be like nothing we've ever seen. And refrigerators will be one of the first things to get redesigned for that new system. And the air conditioner, I mean, I have it in my book, but it essentially already has been because you can use electricity when there's a lot of it to make ice, and then just use a fan to blow that ice as it melts through a house or a building. That sounds so bizarre, and yet the idea that sometimes electricity is cheap, you should use all of it, and sometimes it's expensive, you should use none of it,

starts to make that ice cube fan sound a lot more sensible yeah absolutely and and places that have cheap electricity cheaper and renewable electricity which is iceland which has geothermal and quebec which has hydro we i say we because i live in quebec use more electricity per capita than anybody else in the world. Because why not? Right. So conservation, conservation of electricity is linked to the fact that electricity is dirty. I see. You don't want to be making more of it if you're using coal or if you're using natural gas.

But if you have wind or solar, you just don't want to have so much of it that you're going to crash whatever scale of grid that you have. But there's absolutely no reason to be conserving it. That's crazy. That's so crazy. I know. It's like the 1970s just got kicked out of the house. Let me shift gears a bit and ask you, what led you to write a book about this? I mean, what path took you here? Well, there's a very straightforward answer, which is that I wrote this PhD thesis dissertation that was great. I love to quote Donald Trump with that. It was great. It was really great. About something that nobody cared about at all, including the people that I had done research with, like there was just nobody, the audience for this thing was zero. And that doesn't mean that it can't be turned to become interesting,

which is actually what I'm trying to do right now is to try to understand how all of this work that I did actually fits into a world which has interests and cares. But at the time, I said, well, I'm going to do another research project. I was a newly minted PhD. I was like, I'm ready to do another research project. I want to do something that everybody cares about. I want to work on something everyone cares about. And that was in 2007. And in 2007 was when wind power was starting to become a real issue, the variability of wind power. And I originally thought I would work just on the interface between wind and the grid, which is a totally academic way to talk about something that everybody cares about, because nobody cares about that either. It quickly grew because of the ways in which I saw people losing faith after numbers of blackouts

over decades or more. I saw them beginning to lose faith in the capacity of their utility, or they often think of as government, to keep the power on. And you saw that then in spades after Sandy. That's where this resiliency talk comes from and the actions that follow from it is this loss of faith in the system that's there. And so that pulled me in. And I started to research that. And what came of it was that the grid then began to change because wind turned out just to be the tip of the iceberg. So this book and I kind of grew up together through this radical transformation, which I had just seen the glint of in 2007, but which is now undeniable and everywhere. And actually being done.

Like the book in some ways fills its spot to give people enough history and enough knowledge to continue to make, you know, hopefully smarter decisions about how to do this. But every day I get emails that's like, here's this little thing we figured out. Here's this thing we've built. Here's this new idea. Here's this. And it's all about keeping the lights on while nevertheless completely revolutionizing the system. I presume you met many engineers in the course of writing this book. Yes. Was your understanding of what engineering is changed as a result of your work? I mean, I had two relationships with engineers. The first was really quite funny, which is that the press,

so I sold this as a popular book, not as an academic book, which meant that I had to learn how to write a popular book. And so the press kept saying to me, you need interesting characters, right? Like you need interest, you need people who can carry a story, right? And everybody's thinking of Michael Lewis, right? He can find an interesting character anyway, anywhere, and those people will talk to them and be fantastic. The guy is just a phenomenal writer. But I was like, I was like, okay, and then I would go meet with an engineer, you know, who's doing amazing things, like forward thinking, putting things together, like, you know, sort of remaking the world in ways that were conceptual and material. And you cannot pin a story. You can't pin a story to him.

It's really, it's just like, I was like, so that was, that was a huge struggle. It's like, what do you do when it's not Edison and Tesla? Right. Um, when it's just, uh, Joe and Mark and John, that's the other thing that all have these little tiny names, these like white guy names. They're not all white guys. Most of them are, but they have these like, they're mostly guys and they're mostly white. Um, so that was, so that was a big struggle for me was like, how do you make a compelling narrative, um, with, uh, out of characters, which can't, I think of them as really like, they don't have, they can't bear, they can't be the bearers of a narrative. On the other side, I would say that the engineers were very, very gracious with me because when I, I wrote this book for people

who knew the amount about electricity that I knew when I started, which was absolutely nothing. And the first guy I sat down with had worked with NREL, which is sort of the NASA renewable energy in Colorado. And he had retired. And I was like, come, I'm thinking about doing this project on the grid, come talk to me. And we went out to coffee. And he was like, talking, talking, talking, talking. And he's like, you know, somebody looked at me and he's like, you know what a transformer is, don't you? And I was like, no. And he's like, okay. and we walked outside and he pointed up at the police like that

gray canister is a transformer and so I went so that's where I was and so I wrote for that I wrote to be able to educate people who had that not that level of knowledge which is most people but I had a lot of engineers and and not just engineers like linemen actually who were willing to take my hand and be like you know this piece of you know this little tag on this post this is what it means those wires that you're looking at right now and you think are really interesting those are tv wires right like all of all of that stuff um so there was a kind of a kind of graciousness um to the you know of the community um that is the book is the product of.

Was I supposed to say something about how they're shy and introverted? No. Okay. Not everybody falls to type. Most of them do, though. Can have many an awkward meal with a room full of engineers, but I don't really care about that. Writing on a technical subject for a general audience is tough what advice do you have uh for people who want to do that don't use acronyms

i think it's not even about people writing it's not just the writing it's the conversation um so i was talking to a guy a couple of months ago, I think, out in California. And he said, you know, it's so amazing what you've done, right? Like you've made this accessible to people. People, when I start to talk about what's happening with the grid, people's eyes just glaze over. And then he started to talk to me and I could barely follow him because it was all these, every technical term that has this wealth of meaning for him. And which has, I would say, 70% of that wealth of meaning for me. And that has zero meaning for a journalist, you know, or one sort of very non-nuanced reading, reading, meaning for a journalist.

He was in that world. So, it's about actually translating across worlds of saying like, I'm in a world in which I know what this thing means. And I'm talking to somebody who's in a world where resistance is like what, like I talk to anthropologists, resistance means what peasants do when somebody is like trying to take their land away. Right. So it's not, there's not, there's no way unless you actually sort of stop and say like, here's, you know, here's what resistance is. I'm not, I'm not giving you an equation, right. I'm going to talk about it. And so that's the trick. The problem is, is that the, of the writing for the public now

is in this kind of like 1000 to 2000 word pieces. And like trying to explain anything about something tech, unless you're really like, I'm just going to talk to you about the meter, right? Like, I'm not going to link it to anything else. But let's like, let's talk about digital meters. Anything bigger than than that you spend so much time explaining what it is all this stuff is and how it all works together that you never manage to make a point um so there's a real limitation to the sort of the venues for publicizing um technical information in a way that people can understand it. Because I'm not just going to say the internet, but because the sort of op-ed length thing is what we're used to digesting.

So that I would say that's the stumbling block more than the, than the like getting from, you know, getting from the very sort of nuanced detail into something that, you know, I can talk to my grandmother about. I came across the phrase English to English translation today. And that sounds exactly like what you mean. There's just this whole different level of vocabulary and expectation and inference. Absolutely. And the rule for anthropology is that you spend a year, you spend four seasons.

So they could be four summers is fine. But you spend these four seasons with the people that you're a year, you spend four seasons. So they could be four summers is fine, but you spend these four seasons with the people that you're doing research with and you speak their language. And it's just as true to, I would say it took me three years of research on this book before I was ready to put a word on paper because it was just like,

what is the language that's being spoken, even though it was English, sort of, right? What is this language? What do these things mean? How do these things play out? What are the hopes and aspirations behind them? What are the desires? What are the fears? How do those things all connect to the larger cultural world, not just through the wires and generating plants, but actually to all the people who are around and their fears and their hopes. And it is, and really sort of approaching it as this giant technological system as actually a giant cultural system, technology being a part of culture, talking about technology in certain ways, being part of a subculture, and being able to try to find some sort of facility within that mass, regardless of the

fact that I speak English and they spoke English, to give some sort of gift of understanding to anybody who can't possibly understand what an electrical engineer is talking about. And one thing that I haven't said, and I think this is really so critical when talking about the grid, is that electricity, it doesn't function like anything else in our world. So all the metaphors we use to talk about it, all the expectations we have of it, is based in some way on objects. Water. Yeah, water.

And water is the best, right? Water is the best. But if I want to, it's still terrible. And if I want to, if I want to sell, if I want to sell apples, right, I can't, I can't even think about electrons in the same way. And so what you get, especially at the level of policy is a lot of people who are trying to understand a system based on a world of objects, an economic world of objects, but also just a personal world of objects. And here they are trying to make decisions about a force. Well, I mean, it's difficult enough to, when educating engineers, to come up with an analogy that works. I mean, I remember struggling with, you know, understanding some of these concepts and in electrical engineering and all sorts of stupid analogies with water systems and hydraulics and this and that.

And, you know, none of them are quite right. And so if it's a struggle to teach engineers, this is, it's a, it's a much harder struggle to try to teach people who have to make decisions who aren't engineers, these kinds of things, because we don't even have a good way of expressing it. Yeah, exactly. But listening to engineers talk to each other, they're fine. Right?

Like, there's sort of a level. Sometimes. I've been at the table sometimes where I'm just like, wow, you guys all, you can all think with a force. Like, you know, like not in the Star Wars way, but like you can think, you have this capacity to think about all of the gadgets, which are a part of the system, which are all there in order to make this force manageable,

which is say not killing us all the time and, you know, somewhat standardized and to run our stuff. manageable, which is to say not killing us all the time and, you know, somewhat standardized, and to run our stuff. And there's a kind of comfort with force thinking that I've never seen translate out of an engineer into any other human being. And so the best that I've managed to do in the book, I think, is to say, pay attention. Electricity doesn't act like an apple or really like water, but it acts more like if you're going to make a mistake, choose water, right? Even though it's not dripping out your outlet right now. I always love that. Like this idea that, you know, you always have a leaky tap. You never have a leaky outlet. I think we have kept you for long enough,

even though we never really got to art or the rest of anthropology which i assume you could have the rest of it summed up in less than two minutes anthropology is great i'll just let me say uh anthropology is the people are often confused it's the study of uh human culture now. So it can be anything. It can be the electric grid. It's not archaeology. It's not archaeology, but it's also... Of course not.

No, well, that's the study past. Right. It's also not just tribes in the forest, right? It's that it is that sort of any sort of any human, the complexity of human culture now, sort of wherever, whenever, but without taking that and making it into numbers. So like going to a place, spending a lot of time there,

learning about it, learning about what matters to the people who are there. And in my place, that was the grid, right? And it's spread out culture. And then bringing that back and communicating it to other people, often other anthropologists, without saying this percentage of these people do blah, blah, blah. So somehow making stories into other stories. You make it sound quite interesting, but we are out of time. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I mean, I feel like I've said it already, which is that think with amplitude. So moving forward, don't like not to worry if the system that you're interested in or the gadget that you're interested in or the thing you're designing or if the world that you wish existed doesn't seem like it can be true for all instances of whatever you're working on.

Work on the specific. Make something that works for a specific environment and that can talk to things which are made for a different specific environment. That's what I would say. Because once that interoperability is there, the creativity on the near side of it can blossom. The grid was made without anybody having any idea what they were doing. So we can do better than that, right?

I don't know. So many things are made that way. I know. Our guest has been Gretchen Bakke, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and author of The Grid, The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future. She's also the author of Anthropology of the Arts, and her upcoming book is Between Matter and Method,

Encounters in Anthropology and Art. Look in your favorite bookstore. Thank you for being with us, Gretchen. Yeah, my pleasure. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. A special thank you this week goes to listener Paul Gallagher for suggesting Gretchen as a guest, as well as helping me by sending along some excellent questions. Thank you also to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to our Patreon subscribers for Gretchen's microphone. And of course, thank you for listening. My quote this week is actually going to come from Gretchen's book.

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