The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy by Gretchen Bakke, Ph.D
I learned a lot about the grid in this book and it definitely changed some of the preconceived notions I had. One of the biggest thoughts I had repeatedly while reading this book was that this book was published in 2016 and so much has changed in the world of electricity and renewables since then, especially over the last five years. So much so, that there were many points brought up in the book that are worth digging into how they have developed over the last ten years since publishing. I took notes while reading this book and my goal with this document is to help me memorize what I learned and synthesize those notes into more coherent thoughts.
For starters, we have to understand what a grid is and how it functions. The grid is simply an interconnection of many different machines and wires spread throughout the country. There are multiple grids in the U.S., separated by region. The purpose of the grid is to serve as a delivery system of electrons from power producers to consumers. One of the most important things to know about the grid is that the delivery of electrons is relatively instantaneous and the amount of electrons being delivered must always match the demand. In other words, supply must always match demand. When one of these two gets out of sync with the other, that’s when we have problems (i.e. blackouts/brownouts) with our grid. If demand spikes rapidly and the utility providers are not prepared to ramp up the power plants to meet that demand, that causes issues. If power plants are ramped up and demand dies down unexpectedly that also causes issues. The demand here simply comes from plugging something into an outlet, which connects it to the grid. This creates a new path for electrons on the grid to flow to. Electrons flow in all available paths simultaneously.
Renewables are all the talk these days in the energy space and that is because they allow for the creation of electricity (flow of electrons) without emitting CO2 into our atmosphere and do not require consumption of a finite resource on Earth to do so (solar, wind, hydro). The biggest problem with integrating renewables onto our grid is that the amount of electricity they generate is variable and dependent upon weather and time of day. They cannot always generate electricity regardless of outside factors like a coal burning power plat for example. The grid of the U.S. is an old system and was designed to handle consistent predictable loads. Therefore, it does not mesh well with variable loads. Additionally, the demand for electricity is always there. A solution to the variable generation of renewables is what is holding them back from replacing all non-renewable resources of electricity currently. The author talks about how grid-scale batteries could help solve this problem, but that at the time of writing there were no options economically viable and performant. This seems to have changed pretty drastically since then, as the price and performance of grid-scale batteries have changed drastically, for the better. Currently, the grid does not handle volatility in the supply or demand of electricity very well. Technologies that help balance that out could help build a more resilient grid.
An interesting fact from the book is that coal plants can ramp up to 50% of electricity generation in 5 minutes, natural gas plants in 10 minutes, and nuclear in 24 hours. The book did not really talk a lot about nuclear and it seemed the author kind of wrote off nuclear as the right choice in the future. This fact does showcase why coal and natural gas plants would be so useful to our current grid. They are easy to scale up and down in a relatively short amount of time. However, another fact is that the largest producers of CO2 in the U.S. are coal burning plants for generating electricity. This is pretty surprising to me. Obviously, I knew coal plants produced CO2 and were contributing to climate change, however to hear that they are the biggest contributors in the U.S. really just drives home the need to replace them. In my opinion, it will be a very long time if not impossible for the U.S. or the world to eliminate CO2 production completely. However, any changes that eliminate the biggest contributors can have a significant impact on the acceleration of climate change. That is something that I don’t think many people understand. People sometimes gripe about solar and wind as “renewable” in a way but that the process to create the Solar Panels specifically still contribute to CO2 emissions, which is true. However, it’s clear that what they are replacing (coal power plants) are contributors of such a grander scale that it is a very good trade off. Solar is not perfect. However, it is an objectively better choice than what we primarily use today when you are optimizing for reducing CO2 emissions. I think when you start to compare solar to something like natural gas, the comparison gets a little harder but it is obvious when talking about coal.
Since this book was published (2016), there have been some drastic changes to in the electricity world that I want to highlight. First and foremost, at the time of writing renewables represented ~13% of installed electricity generation in the U.S. In 2023, that has jumped to 21.4% and 24.4% in 2025! That is remarkable progress and it’s great to see that trending in the right direction. It’s actually very surprising to read those numbers. To say that today in America, a quarter of electricity generated is from renewable sources! That is awesome and is probably a lot higher than most realize. Another eye opening stat: In 2014, 53.3% of new generation is from wind or solar. In 2024, 90% of new generation is from renewables, with solar accounting for 78%! That is absolutely insane to read. It shows that not only are we generating more and more electricity from renewables, but the acceleration of the addition of more renewables to the grid is increasing. This indicates that the pace of adoption of renewables is growing and I would expect that to translate to overall electricity from renewables to increase even more rapidly over the next ten years. A big factor in this is that the cost of solar has continued to drop significantly over the years. In addition to that, batteries are becoming more and more popular and more and more cheap. One major change that has the potential to alter or slow this progress is that the demand for electricity is increasing for the first time in a long time and at a very very rapid pace. This is primarily driven by ML/AI progress and the demand for AI companies for data centers and compute infra. This is rapidly increasing at a pace never before seen. This has the potential to cause utility providers to seek the easiest and quickest way to add more electrons to the grid to meet this demand. Many times, this is something like coal or natural gas. But, it has also triggered a higher demand for nuclear. It remains to be seen how this demand increase will impact renewable adoption. With the progress made in batteries, however, it could trigger data center operators to opt for a combination solar farm with grid-scale battery packs to store excess electricity during peak hours and use that load after the sun has set.
One of my biggest take aways after reading this book is that I want to learn more about the adoption and status of grid-scale battery storage. From what I have heard and read in the media in recent years, battery prices have come down dramatically and performance has gone up due to new chemistries and techniques. If that is true, I don’t know why there are not more and more solar farms popping up all over paired with battery storage (maybe there are and I am not aware). To me this seems like a match made in heaven. This does prompt questions in my mind like, what is the life time of these solar arrays and batteries? What is done with them after they have reached end of life? Can their materials be recycled? How much of their components and materials are completely unusable after that? How are the materials sourced and from where? These are all questions that I will be investigating further on my own time and will follow up on my findings.