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By Root 1017 0

plants and transformers are old —many are working beyond the natural end of their thirty-and forty-year life spans. Power companies routinely fail to attend to necessary maintenance, including tree trimming, along the lines. It's no coincidence that there have been five massive blackouts in forty years, and three of them have occurred in the past decade. Most significantly, in the United States coal constitutes the greatest single electricity fuel source, powering more than 55 percent of our electric plants (oil now accounts for less than 3 percent of the fuel used to produce the nation's electricity), and further exploitation of fossil fuels isn't tenable in a time of climate change.

The grid of the future, still more imagined than real, may take the shape the U.S. Department of Energy envisions: a system that relies on renewable power sources in the heart of the country. Large solar farms in the desert and wind farms on the Great Plains could produce power that would be delivered as far as the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, where the demand for energy is highest. In such a scenario, transmission lines will need to carry much heavier loads than existing ones can bear, and they will have to be much more efficient than the lines of today, which lose up to 7 percent of power during transmission. As far back as the 1990s, Richard E. Smalley, Nobel laureate and former director of the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory at Rice University, suggested that new transmission lines could be built of carbon nanotubes. These tubes are smaller than a blood cell, resilient, and capable of conducting electricity quite efficiently—more efficiently than copper or aluminum—which means that more energy can be transmitted over fewer lines with far less loss along the way. Still, the practical application of nanotube technology is not yet feasible, and the cost of building such a grid would be enormous.

The construction of such a system faces other challenges as well. For one thing, a grid that depends on solar and wind power needs to be able to compensate for the natural fluctuations of these energy sources. Proponents of a stronger national grid imagine that it will be a smart grid, with sophisticated monitoring systems that could match supply to demand across large areas. At times when the wind died down on the plains, the system could instantaneously redirect demand to, perhaps, solar generators elsewhere.

The smart grid would eventually be able to monitor home use and would work in concert with energy storage. Although electricity, except in very small quantities, still can't be stored effectively, Smalley imagined that all homes and businesses would have systems that could store a short-term supply of it—twelve to eighteen hours' worth. Such storage capability would be coupled with a system of real-time pricing, meaning that electricity would cost the most at the hours of greatest demand, so customers would have an incentive to avoid purchasing power during peak times. They could buy it as they slept to even out the demand on the system.

The national grid would also be accompanied by a strengthened localized system of energy production. In a smart grid, the meters would spin both ways, which would enable surplus from small local sources of power, even backyard windmills and solar rooftop panels on private homes, to be instantaneously sold back into the system.

Other energy specialists, including environmental writer Bill McKibben, envision a different grid of the future. They put greater store in applying smart grid technology almost solely to local power sources. There would then be little need to develop expensive long-distance power lines. Each area of the country would exploit the renewable sources—wind, tides, sun, falling water—that it had in abundance. McKibben envisions a decentralized, scaled-back, localized grid that would be seamless, intricate, finessed: "Imagine all the south-facing roofs in your suburb sporting solar panels. Imagine a building code that requires all new construction to come with solar roof tiles and solar