Light At The Darkest Time Of Year
I wanted to change things up with an in depth blog post tonight about the energy grid . . . I’m talking IN DEPTH. We are going to get down in the weeds of it here, I hope you’re cozy and ready for a long read!!
Do you ever think about what happens after you flip your light switch? All the components, the people, the many inventions that all have to coalesce for those photons to be filling your room with brightness to see by, and at the press of a button? We live in an incredible time, but also in an incredible town because here in our town we have something that not every place does:
Our own power company.
That’s right, a municipally owned power company, as well as municipally owned internet and cable service. This isn’t something you can find everywhere. Trust me where I grew up in Ohio I DREAMED of being able to have actual choices for internet, much less have one of them be run by the community I lived in! That means the money paid into it goes back into the town, and that’s an incredible dynamic. But there’s something else very special about our municipal power company. Did you know that we are one of less than a handful of towns in Massachusetts where the Board of Selectman double as the Light Commissioners?
That means that if you vote for me as Selectman, you’re also voting for me to be one of the Light Commissioners. An elected, rather than appointed, position. A lot of people assume that I’m very excited about the internet portion of that responsibility - and that’s totally true. I am very excited to have a direct hand in innovations and affordable quality service for residents on the internet side of things. Yet I have another unquenchable passion, and that’s for energy and the electric grid.
No seriously, I don’t think I’ve really to this point taken the opportunity to truly get up on my soap box about energy utilities.
Well tonight is the night my friends!
Pull up a cozy blanket and a snack, and prepare to be serenaded by me with the song of one of my great fascinations in this world: energy.
What in particular about energy?
EVERYTHING.
“You can’t mean everything?”
EVERY. SINGLE. THING.
Allow me to get a little emotional here before I get into the deep knowledge . . .
I grew up in Dayton Ohio. We’re broadly known for our contributions to human flight. But Dayton was also a place of incredible invention, with more patents per capita than any other US city. So I had a deep appreciation from a very young age for what it means to create something that changes society … and the duality of it too. When I was a kid I’d spend a ton of time at the US Air Force Museum. So in one afternoon, I learned that my home town brought human aviation, connecting us, but it also brought the first human made megadeath with the Manhattan Project work (delivered by the aforementioned aviation technology). The duality of society-changing innovations is incredible potential for help and harm.
Energy is one of those things with incredible duality too.
From the tiniest transformer to the biggest hydro dam, every aspect of how energy gets to us is this intense opera.
Of technology and hard work.
Of invention and danger.
Of complexity and wonder.
Progress and devastation.
Injustice and aide.
Infamy and hope.
The full spectrum of the ravages we’ve wrought to obtain energy, and the dreams of what we could do instead, is a saga that is etched into who we are as humans. To me, if you’re going to fancy yourself a good Light Commissioner, it means you are fully present with all of that, and you envision ways to work with your team to harness the good and learn from the bad. To be a Light Commissioner is to have a passion for energy, the people and technologies who make it possible, and the community you’ll serve with it.
Today I’d like to take you on a deep dive into the magic that happens behind the flip of your light switch. I hope it gives you a new appreciation for energy, and that it inspires you to come out and vote on April 4th to ensure that you have a fully invested and engaged Light Commissioner serving you.
Let’s start with the very very beginnings. The energy itself!
Energy is everywhere. But not well captured.
When you think of “energy” you might envision stuff like electrons and little lightening bolts. But the key to energy is that it is eeeeeverywhere and in many forms that you might not have considered. Energy can be:
Thermal - like from heat, or even from the differential between temperatures.
Chemical - from reactions between atoms or molecules, like chemiluminescence (think lightening bugs and glow sticks).
Nuclear - from fission, fusion, and decay of reactive materials.
Mechanical - Kinetic and potential energy!
Gravitational - The attraction between objects based on their mass.
Sonic - Yup. Even sound has energy.
and of course … Electromagnetic.
Energy can also be converted into different forms in tons of ways! Nuclear into electrical, gravitational into mechanical, solar into gravitational, and so on.
Now, I’m going to confess something: there is one thing that I have always found incredibly disappointing about our energy advancements here in the US. That whole big list above is amazing, yet when you look at how we tend to generate energy for utility purposes, we tend to fall back on the same technique over and over again, which is: make magnets go spin spin spin.
Meet the electromagnetic generator:
Spin spin spin!
This puppy spins a bunch of conductive and magnetic materials around each other in a circle to generate the necessary conditions for power (to put it simply). Now this technology has been around since the 1800s, and for a very long time getting the spinning piece of things to happen meant finding a mechanical way to move those parts around and around for as long as possible. The most common method? Using heat (thermal energy) to turn a steam turbine (mechanical energy), which in turn spins the rest of things. Where does the heat to make the steam come from? Burning things. Usually fossil based things like coal, gas, & oil.
Now what about nuclear power, how does that work? As a kid a nuclear plant just seemed like orders of magnitude more complex! I imagined that those nuclear plants had to be full of really elaborate widgets and shenanigans that transformed weird sci-fi style chunks of radioactive glowy rocks into the stuff in the powerlines, right? Nope. It turns out that the whole fancy schmancy nuclear plant has but one purpose:
Be really hot to make perfectly ordinary not sci-fi steam.
… steam to make the perfectly ordinary not sci-fi magnets go spin spin spin in the same old generators we normally use.
It was so soul crushing to me to learn time and time again that every sort of power method was just yet another way to make a turbine spin. Hydro power? Make turbine spin. Wind? Make turbine spin. Concentrated solar arrays? Make turbine spin.
Until along came photovolatics. I don’t know if it’s possible to have a “favorite” power technology, but these sure are mine! They’re what I consider one of the few truly innovative forms of power generation in a long time in my opinion.
Photovoltaics are the thing you most commonly see when you see a picture of “solar energy”. Rows and rows of square shiny flat panels, aka solar panels.
Before I regale you with the wonders of photovoltaics, it’s important to know a bit more about the solar industry in general. When you hear someone use the term “solar power”, you need to ask: which kind of solar power? There’s three kinds of solar power:
Thermal Solar - By using the sun to heat up dark surfaces, they can - you guessed it - make steam to spin turbines.
Concentrated / Mirror Solar - They basically line up a bunch of mirrors and point them at a central spot to create a LOT of heat from the sun, which is so intense it can heat molten nitrate salts which can be used to store the heat energy for a longer time use than using ordinary steam. But the purpose is the same: use the heat to turn a turbine.
(“Fun” fact: many thermal and mirror based solar farms supplement their output with natural gas. So you’ve gotta do your homework when someone says “solar” energy to know whether it involves carbon based supplements. Things a Light Commissioner needs to know and be capable of spotting to stay in compliance with the Mass General Laws around “carbon” based energy sourcing.)
The third type of solar, my all time favorite, is Photovoltaic panels.
How do photovoltaics work? Well take everything I just taught you about spinning magnets and steam and throw it out the window. Photovolatics (which you’ll sometimes see called PVs) are doing something truly different. The short version is that they’re layers of material that behave differently when exposed to light. When arranged in the right way, as light particles pass through them, electrons get knocked free from atoms and … from there it gets more complex but to summarize, this reaction creates direct current. No spinny parts. No steam. No heat. Something fundamentally different than all the other methods I’ve told you about.
The other wild thing about photovoltaic panels is they’re not something hooked to a turbine or hooked to a generator. They are the generator, which is also quite different than most of the other power generating techniques I mentioned. It means that instead of housing all the materials, steam, and generators in a single power plant location, you can shove photovoltaics spread out around basically anywhere that you can get enough exposure to photons and directly link them up with the power infrastructure from wherever you’ve put them. On open areas, on top of buildings or structures, sprinkled here and there on whatever sun-exposed surfaces will yield the most output.
Other interesting tidbit? Some recent studies around the benefits of growing certain crops beneath solar panels. The plants thrive, and workers thrive from having a bit of shade during harvest time. So it may be possible to have a “solar farm” function as a food farm too. I’m watching this research closely.
So Why Can’t Solar Solve It All?
Despite my great love for photovoltaics, there’s one problem. The same problem that haunts hydro, wind, and a few other renewable types. Inconsistency. Our grid technologies, and all the gadgets we use that are fed by it, need the flow of power to be happening at a certain consistent rate, or the whole system falls on its face so to speak. That’s why so many power companies have been so all in on things like coal or nuclear over the years: those energy sources have no fluctuation in how much they output. With many non carbon based renewables (wind, solar, hydro), their strength ebbs and flows with nature. The moon tugs at water flows, our seasonal distance from the sun, and so on. These things make the energy outputs lower - or higher - than we need at variable times.
Now you see why fossil and nuclear fuels were so prized. As long as you had the materials, you knew predictably how much power you could churn out.
So with all of that said, it’s also important to understand a bit about the power grid infrastructure itself to really grasp why this matters.
The Power Grid
All around you there’s wires, poles, BIG towers, and other equipment that is used to deliver power to you and everyone else in town that you know who uses electricity. That equipment is all so common in our area that you likely don’t even pay much attention to it, it is sort of part of the landscape. Today we’re going to really look at it though and get a sense for what all that stuff is doing . . .
The energy generators out there are geographically spread around. That energy has to get moved from where it is made to the places it will be used. Second off, all those power sources I mentioned before are putting out a LOT of energy. Way too much for you to use directly. It would be like trying to drink from a fire-hose. In order for you to actually use it for your various devices, the power has to get converted into a usable form. All of this happens across a big network of wires and other equipment. Let’s break it further down:
Those BIG Towers Are . . .
Transmission lines. I’m talking the REALLY big ones like the ones you see off the highway when you’re coming into town. Those towers hold up the lines that are taking energy from where it’s being made to the places it needs to be used.
Those Smaller Poles Are . . .
Distribution lines! They connect to the specific homes, businesses, and locations that use electricity.
So … how does the power get to the transmission lines in the first place, and how does it get back out of the transmission lines into distribution lines to get to our houses? Are they all just directly connected to generators and each other? Not quite.
Power has to be manipulated in order to move it and utilize it in the ways that we need. That happens at sub stations and using equipment like transformers and inverters.
Sub Stations Are . . .
Places where the power that is generated is manipulated from high or low voltage so that it can be properly utilized.
Transformers Are . . .
Equipment that helps to step down (or up) voltage. While they can be found at sub stations, you can also see them on other parts of the grid too, like the small ones that are attached to distribution poles in your neighborhood!
Inverters Are . . .
Equipment used to switch current from Direct Current (DC) to Alternating Current (AC). Certain situations call for direct or alternating current depending on how the power will be used. Like most of the outlets in your home? That’s alternating current. The little off-grid solar devices you can plug your USB into? Those are direct current. There’s a whole other essay I could write up about what DC and AC are, but for now the easiest thing to remember about them are that they’re used in different applications, and that current can be changed using inverters.
There’s other equipment involved in the grid infrastructure, but those are some of the biggies that you tend to see easily.
All of that stuff is “the grid”. It’s really big. How big? Okay it’s not the entire continental US, but it spans pretty far! We’re on what’s called the Eastern Connection. It runs across most all of the eastern half of the US (and a lil Canada too). Once you get past the middle of the country, it’s a different grid. And Texas has its own grid separate from either of those.
The thing that the Grid needs to perform well is … consistency. It literally needs things to be powered consistently or you get a host of problems. Operators of the grid are trying to do things like synchronize the voltage magnitude, the frequency, and the phase angle of what’s being fed into the grid. Because when that goes badly? That’s when you get outages. Hence the desire for steady consistent energy generation. This is why battery technology is going to be so important with non carbon based renewable energy sources! Being able to store the excess energy from times when the renewables are peaking, and then release it during times when it’s low, will help it to behave more consistently, like other power sources.
The other problem is that the time when we want to use energy most also happens to be the time when the sun is available the least. If you map when we all want to use power vs when the sun is best providing power, they don’t overlap well enough. This makes a bit of sense if you think about how we use power. Wait … how do we use power and why does that matter?
Why You’ll Constantly Hear Us Talk About “Off Peak”
We humans got really good at utilizing energy for the things we want and/or need. To see by. To cook by. To control how hot or cold we are. And it turns out that the times we most do all of those things are … not the same times when the sun is at its most effective. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise. It gets darker, so we run artificial lights. We’re home from the day’s errands or work, so we activate temperature controls. There are a host of activities that we like to do in the mornings and evenings when the sun is not at its best. So that makes it challenging for renewables. But it impacts more than just renewables!
When ALL of us are trying to use our electricity in combination, all of us taking our evening meals or turning on our indoor lights and such, we’re all drawing down power at once. And we tend to do it predictably, oriented around similar time frames to each other. This is what is called the “peak”. Peak usage. The point at which the most of us are all trying to use electricity at once.
Power companies try to predict how much energy their customers are going to tend to use so that they can properly service customers and maintain the various parts of the grid successfully. The grid equipment has thermal limits on how much it can handle (each generator for example can only pump out so much energy), and parts in the grid wear out over time and must be replaced.
So to discourage the frivolous building of unused equipment, discourage the under-serving of communities, and avoid companies drawing down more than they’re paying their fair share to maintain, companies who do not predict their usage reasonably accurately are penalized with extra fees. That’s because by not having a good handle on how much energy is needed for the customers in their region, they are causing extra strain and expense on the system.
As more extreme weather continues, and - let’s face it - as our power consumption climbs unchecked because none of us are really taught this stuff as end users, it gets harder for companies to predict how much power their customers will need. That is why you’ll see such importance put on residents to use energy “off peak”. Because when we have simultaneous usage, all of us charging our cars and running our air conditioning systems and what have you at the same time, those spikes could reach higher than was predicted for, and then WHAM. Power Factor fees. Capacity costs. It’s not great.
Maybe that’s enough for one night?
I’ve only scratched the surface of this stuff tonight though. I haven’t even gotten to tell you yet about the forward energy market, or Renewable Energy Credits, or which things we do that consume the most energy, or the super cool trucks they use to set fallen power poles, or about the arch nemesis of power companies: squirrels! I guess I’ll have to save those tales for the weekend. For now, if you’re out enjoying the holiday lights, take a moment to think about how those holiday lights connect to the grid! And I’ll be back here with more fun facts about Energy soon. Because I want to be your Light Commissioner. And if you want me to be too, make sure to talk to friends & family about voting for me on Monday April 4th, 2022.
Learn more about Energy and the Grid in Part 2: An Energy Carol.
