Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [106]
Retail prices during this time, however, were fixed, so utilities, including the state's largest—Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric—had to buy energy from the trading companies at a cost much higher than they could charge their private customers. The utilities, without the resources to purchase the electricity, pleaded for energy conservation and at times resorted to "rolling blackouts" in order to alleviate high demand they could not meet: one neighborhood after another went dark for an hour or two during the day.
Jeffrey Skilling blamed the shortage on poorly written legislation. "You probably couldn't have designed a worse system," he insisted. And while speaking at a conference in Las Vegas, he took the opportunity to joke about the dire situation in California: "You know what the difference is between the state of California and the Titanic?" he asked. "At least the lights were on when the Titanic went down." No less callous were the Enron energy traders, one of whom was recorded as saying, "They should just bring back fuckin' horses and carriages, fucking lamps, fuckin' kerosene lamps."
The crisis, which was alleviated only by state and federal intervention, ultimately cost California billions of dollars, and it induced other states to pull back from deregulating their power grids. Enron eventually failed spectacularly, Jeffrey Skilling ended up in jail, and new federal legislation aimed to reign in energy traders, but the California debacle served as proof that power greater than a million disciplined, unquestioning men was no match for greed.
Now, a little more than a hundred years after the first long-distance transmission lines at Niagara Falls sent power to Buffalo, more than 300,000 miles of lines capable of carrying more than a million megawatts of power form a caul over the country. And for all the blackouts and anxieties of the past half century, most of us still take our power on faith, for by now we might feel that we cannot see—or even think!—without it, and its humming is not only the music of our spheres but also a kind of cathedral tune. To cartographer Steven Watt, who studied aerial photographs as he worked on new maps to be used with GPS technology, the transmission lines that cut across the country took on the appearance of leaded strips supporting panes of glass:
I used contemporary satellite and aerial imagery to help me correlate the position of roads with other features in the landscape. For maps in the United States, I worked one county at a time, within which I redrew the position of every road and intersection.... I looked for a fixed reliable set of points independent of the roads, which I could use to subdivide each county, and I decided to use the electric power lines, which, for the most part, are straight and clearly visible in overhead imagery. Because trees must be cleared beneath them, they often appear lighter in color than their surroundings. They cross roads, rivers, and towns, dividing the land into sharp-edged polygons that become smaller as population density increases....
As I finished my work within each polygon, I drew a line along the edge of the power lines until it closed the polygon, which I would then fill in with color. Then I'd reemphasize the power lines by drawing over them in black. As I continued working, this process had the unexpected and beautiful effect of creating a pattern reminiscent of a medieval stained-glass window.
Yet this enormous accomplishment, which the National Academy of Engineering has designated "the most significant engineering achievement of the 20th century," is also in dire need of reimagining. Not only is the grid no longer adequate for the increased demands of our times, but it suffers from age and neglect. The generating