On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, electricity failed to arrive in New York City, plunging the eight million inhabitants of the Big Apple--along with 40 million other people throughout the northeastern U.S. and Ontario--into a tense night of darkness. After one power plant in Ohio had shut down, elevated power loads overheated high-voltage lines, which sagged into trees and short-circuited. Like toppling dominoes, the failures cascaded through the electrical grid, knocking 265 power plants offline and darkening 24,000 square kilometers.

That incident--and an even more extensive blackout that affected 56 million people in Italy and Switzerland a month later--called attention to pervasive problems with modern civilization's vital equivalent of a biological circulatory system, its interconnected electrical networks. In North America the electrical grid has evolved in piecemeal fashion over the past 100 years. Today the more than $1-trillion infrastructure spans the continent with millions of kilometers of wire operating at up to 765,000 volts. Despite its importance, no single organization has control over the operation, maintenance or protection of the grid; the same is true in Europe. Dozens of utilities must cooperate even as they compete to generate and deliver, every second, exactly as much power as customers demand--and no more. The 2003 blackouts raised calls for greater government oversight and spurred the industry to move more quickly, through its Intelli-Grid Consortium and the Grid-Wise program of the U.S. Department of Energy, to create self-healing systems for the grid that may prevent some kinds of outages from cascading. But reliability is not the only challenge--and arguably not even the most important challenge--that the grid faces in the decades ahead.

This article was originally published with the title A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy.

3 Comments

1. 1. mikemikef 10:38 PM 8/4/08

   I am not sure how I could design a more inefficient system that could waste more energy.

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2. 2. mikedand10203 08:23 PM 10/20/08

   Just out of curiosity, is any one sure of why there's never been any real development on Sodium as an alternative energy source?

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3. 3. Moto Electric 11:44 AM 6/22/12

   Getting renewable energy from remote locations where solar panel arrays and wind farms are often located, to population centers where the electricity is needed, has been difficult up until now, and is one of the things keeping the US from being 100% powered by renewable energy.
   
   According to Ecogeek.org, a project aimed at helping to address this difficulty, the Tres Amigas SuperStation project, is about to break ground this summer, thanks to an influx of new investments.
   
   Located in Clovis, New Mexico, the SuperStation will connect the three major electrical grids in the US (East, West and Texas), allowing renewable energy to flow back and forth between them. Initially, Tres Amigas will only be able to transfer 750MW of power between the East and West grids, but eventually, solar energy harvested in California could easily be sent to Texas, as well.
   
   Besides making renewable energy available all over the country, the SuperStation hub could also help to make the nation’s power system more reliable, though smart grid technology will still be needed to modernize and secure our power system.
   
   Visit http://www.ecogeek.org/wind-power/3765 to find out more.
   

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