The Consumer: Profitable Prospect, or Willing Participant?
brucenstein's recent contribution regarding tariffs set on Chinese-made solar panels got me to thinking. There are not just one issue to discuss here - the more obvious and immediate being the way China's government funds industrial activity - but two. We must also consider what kind of electrical grid we have and what kind we want for the future.
To consider that, we need to also consider what the past was like.
A few months ago, I finished Jane Brox's Brilliant. The light we take for granted, the light that has made so much possible today, is a very recent phenomenon indeed. First and foremost, the cost of lighting has plummeted:
In 1800, in the United States, $20 a year would light a house for three hours in the evening with a luminosity equivalent to 5 candles, or 5,500 candle hours per year - and many householders would have considered that much light an extravagance. By mid-cntury, $20 would purchase 8,700 candle hours per year; in 1890, 73,000 candle hours. By 1900, for $20 a year, on average people lit their homes (exclusive of electricity) for five hours a night with a luminosity equivalent to 154 candles, or 280,000 candle hours. That miners once worked by the phosphorescence of putrescent fish and lacemakers produced intricate designs by the light of a flame magnified through water must have seemed incomprehensible to them.
(Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, 2010, Houghton Mifflin Co, p. 156.)
Along with the development of artificial lights, we as societies have had to make some pretty hard choices. Gas or electric? If electric, alternating current or direct? These were non-trivial decisions which would affect the cost of building and outfitting just about everything. Brox notes that older buildings in New York can still be found with two, parallel electrical systems; until a winner in the industrial grudge match of standards emerged between Edison (direct current) and Westinghouse (alternating current), best to double the cost of construction lest the building owners needed to rip everything out later and start again.
There were other considerations to be made as well. Amusement parks, for example. When early electrical companies were starting, balancing the load was extremely difficult. After businesses shut down and most of the electric streetcars were parked following rush hour, but before people had switched off the lights and gone to bed, the load - the total current the company had to deliver to their system - found itself in a vague and difficult to balance position. The solution? At the end of the streetcar line, electric companies encouraged the construction of artificial electrical loads in the form of brightly-lit amusement parks with as many electrically-operated rides as could be supported. Coney Island was one of the very first, it seems, at the very end of the line from the City.
Though this approach to load balancing dates back to a time when electrical generation was crude by today's digitally-controlled standard, the attitude backing it prevails. And that's where we are today.
Here's the dilemma in a nutshell: Should electric companies regard the power they provide as a service to the population at large, or as a product to be made ever more profitable over time? In some parts of Europe, the former philosophy was followed, while here in the States companies adopted the latter. As an example, the cost to run electric lines in cities is fairly low; every mile offers quite a few paying customers. As the number of users/households decreases, every mile of line gets more and more expensive. In urban areas, "spectacular" lighting, such as spotlights at movie premiers or Times Square-style lit billboards and Broadway marquees, are profitable for the companies. Rural areas, though. . . .
The slow and halting extension of electric lines into the countryside was not inevitable. Historian David Nye notes that "street lighting in the United States quickly developed far beyond functional necessity to include advertising and public-relations spectacles. In contrast, in Scandinavia, Germany, and Holland, spectacular lighting developed more slowly, but the electrification of every home was considered a desirable political goal, and had been 90 percent achieved before 1930." In countries where government regarded the establishment of electric power as a social and political responsibility - and took and active role - rural electrification often developed much more quickly. . . .
(Ibid, pp. 183-184.)
Until the lines arrived, most farms were lit the older-fashioned way, with candles and lanterns, fueled the older-fashioned way with whale and later mineral oils. Oh, and the soot: "Even with quality kerosene, the simplest lamp found in the most modest of homes required meticulous daily attention. Only a well-cleaned lamp would give off good light, and a poorly trimmed wick made for a flickering and smoky flame, which left soot on the chimney and sent soot throughout the house. Indeed, the ritual of spring-cleaning was largely a response to a winter's worth of soot from hearths and lamps." (Ibid, p. 86.)
(As a parenthetical aside, the first luxury item farmers often chose to buy after the lines reached their homes was not lighting, as one might expect, but electric irons. Brox's description of "ironing day" as a tedious, torturous and thankless task must be read to be appreciated.)
This is not to suggest that all farms suffered without electricity. From (appropriately enough) Home Power magazine:
The late 1920's hosted a flurry of activity by experimenters trying to adapt an airplane type of propeller to the wind generator. When making electricity, airfoils are far more efficient than waterpumper wheels because the power curve of a spinning airfoil closely resembles that of an electric generator. Technical articles began appearing in the scientific journals speculating on the efficiency advantages of airfoils over wheels. By 1931, the first patent was issued to Harve Stuart for what became known as the "Stuart (wind generator) Airfoil." Wind generators would never again be confused with waterpumpers.
(Home Power, issue #27, Feb/Mar 1992, p. 14, author Mike Sagrillo)
An industry grew around providing houses too remote for lines with their own systems to supply power, especially after the radio grew more and more popular.
Lots more pics like these
at this great site!
As I said, radio may have been the first device made popular off the local power lines, but it would not be the last. With a slightly larger tower, blade and battery bank, a host of modern conveniences made it to the rural farms. Again from Sagrillo's article:
Some companies offered all the conveniences of the city with a complete line of 32 volt DC appliances. Virtually all the electrical appliances we have at hand today were available to the 1930's and 1940's farm household. In the kitchen were mixers, toasters, hot plates, coffee pots, electric irons and refrigerators. Over in the parlor was the vacuum cleaner, fan sewing machine, and, of course, the radio. Bedrooms held electric blankets, heating pads, and hot water bottles. Those families fortunate enough to have indoor plumbing could indulge themselves with electric shavers, curling irons, and space heaters. In the summer kitchen were cream separators, butter churns, and the ever popular washing machine. Electric milkers and sheep shears were used in the barn. Electric drills, grinders, and saws could be found in the workshop. All of these appliances ran on 32-volt DC electricity!
(Sagrillo, ibid, p. 16)
What became of these wind towers and battery banks? The 1936 Rural Electrification Act. The Act may have funded extending power lines to farms, but nowhere in the law did it require power companies - who, let's remember, needed to make a profit selling power over the long-term - to suffer the whims of farmers who wanted both the security of the power line and the wind tower with all the free power the turbine could provide. When the line men finally arrived at the front door, farmers were given an ultimatum; our power or yours, but not both. "Many towers were brought down and the gensets ignominiously shoved into a hayloft. Others were disabled by a rifleshot. Still others were simply disconnected and left to rot." (Sagrillo, ibid, p. 17)
In another article, Sagrillo follows folks who rediscover these old wind machines and rehabilitate them. Many still work with a minimum of restoration.
Beyond simply getting the power to the people, Brox notes that profit for the future drove appliance development decisions that exist to this day. For example, growing up I never considered that it was weird to have electric ranges and water heaters. It is weird, though . . . for everyone not growing up in the land of cheap hydroelectric power. Most power companies burn some form of petroleum fuel. Why burn the fuel in a power station, use the heat to boil water into steam, convert the steam expansion into rotary motion, convert that rotary motion through electromagnetic drag into electricity, deliver the power it provides through a line, only to convert that energy back into heat? There are more than a few losses on that process.
Ah, but that's the path power companies took, develop future markets for electricity, and worry about the supply later. This popularized electric water heaters and space heaters. They were cheaper to install, for one, making them the favorite of developers. The higher cost of operation was simply passed onto the future home owner, who wouldn't even get in the door until the check cleared and the developer had the money in hand.
Getting back to the solar tariff kerfuffle brucenstein noted, that's where we are today, taking our power grid consumption for granted and focusing all of our attention on what powers it. In short, we are thinking like power companies. I think we've listened to power company executives for so long we fail to even consider that the best way to "make" additional power is to avoid needing it by removing the need for that power in the first place. We have become a society of electrical consumers. In my opinion, we need to become consumer/producers.
You see, that's the biggest advantage technology has given us: the ability to seamlessly combine the output from farm wind turbines of the past and the present with the power created by a coal plant hundreds of miles away with the power from the neighbors' solar panels with the dammed power of falling water. Just as the big-G Grid is one massive interconnected entity, we as small households and businesses can produce as well as consume, contributing a small portion of the required overall load as we can afford . . . and as the powers that be allow.
That last ellipsis-separated portion is the rub. Power companies are profit centers first, social entities, well, last. Despite the requirement to buy back household solar and wind power, many power companies just make it so difficult as to make it impossible. The law requiring buy-back does not give the companies profit, so many retaliate at the mere thought.
This has weakened our grid and endangered its future. But hey, don't take my word. Matthew Simmons noted problems with the grid just four days after the August, 2003 East Coast blackout known as Black Thursday:
On a large scale what happened was deregulation. Deregulation destroyed excess capacity. Under deregulation, excess capacity was labeled as "massive glut" and removed from the system to cut costs and increase profits. Experience has taught us that weather is the chief culprit in events like this. The system needs to be designed for a 100-year cyclical event of peak demand. If you don't prepare for this, you are asking for a massive blackout. New plants generally aren't built unless they are mandated, and free markets don't make investments that give one percent returns. There was also no investment in new transmission lines.
Underlying all this is the fact that we have no idea how to store electricity. And every aspect of carrying capacity, from generators, to transmission lines, to the lines to and inside your house, has a rated capacity of x. When you exceed x, the lines melt. That's why we have fuse boxes and why power grids shut down. So we have now created a vicious cyclicality that progresses over time.
Deregulation, whether it be in excess capacity or ending requirements for renewable buy-backs, has hurt the grid.
I've rambled on this enough, I'm sure you'll agree, even though I've only scratched the surface. I've been mulling on this topic particularly for 6 years on LJ alone. Many of the mullings are on my personal LJ under the tag distributed generation.
Bottom line, I guess, is that we need to consider which approach to take with our existing and future grid. The way we've been going for decades now - building bigger and bigger electrical appliances but worrying about production later, failing to encourage personal investment in renewable sources and energy arbitrage with solid monetary incentives, and leaving "excess" capacity and needed maintenance as issues to ignore - has brought us Black Thursday. In Simmons' words, "We are now in a box we should never have gotten into and it has very serious implications."
The philosophy behind building an expanding energy grid doesn't work when that grid can no longer expand as it once did. We avoid this realization at our peril.
X-Posted to talk_politics.
To consider that, we need to also consider what the past was like.
A few months ago, I finished Jane Brox's Brilliant. The light we take for granted, the light that has made so much possible today, is a very recent phenomenon indeed. First and foremost, the cost of lighting has plummeted:
In 1800, in the United States, $20 a year would light a house for three hours in the evening with a luminosity equivalent to 5 candles, or 5,500 candle hours per year - and many householders would have considered that much light an extravagance. By mid-cntury, $20 would purchase 8,700 candle hours per year; in 1890, 73,000 candle hours. By 1900, for $20 a year, on average people lit their homes (exclusive of electricity) for five hours a night with a luminosity equivalent to 154 candles, or 280,000 candle hours. That miners once worked by the phosphorescence of putrescent fish and lacemakers produced intricate designs by the light of a flame magnified through water must have seemed incomprehensible to them.
(Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, 2010, Houghton Mifflin Co, p. 156.)
Along with the development of artificial lights, we as societies have had to make some pretty hard choices. Gas or electric? If electric, alternating current or direct? These were non-trivial decisions which would affect the cost of building and outfitting just about everything. Brox notes that older buildings in New York can still be found with two, parallel electrical systems; until a winner in the industrial grudge match of standards emerged between Edison (direct current) and Westinghouse (alternating current), best to double the cost of construction lest the building owners needed to rip everything out later and start again.
There were other considerations to be made as well. Amusement parks, for example. When early electrical companies were starting, balancing the load was extremely difficult. After businesses shut down and most of the electric streetcars were parked following rush hour, but before people had switched off the lights and gone to bed, the load - the total current the company had to deliver to their system - found itself in a vague and difficult to balance position. The solution? At the end of the streetcar line, electric companies encouraged the construction of artificial electrical loads in the form of brightly-lit amusement parks with as many electrically-operated rides as could be supported. Coney Island was one of the very first, it seems, at the very end of the line from the City.
Though this approach to load balancing dates back to a time when electrical generation was crude by today's digitally-controlled standard, the attitude backing it prevails. And that's where we are today.
Here's the dilemma in a nutshell: Should electric companies regard the power they provide as a service to the population at large, or as a product to be made ever more profitable over time? In some parts of Europe, the former philosophy was followed, while here in the States companies adopted the latter. As an example, the cost to run electric lines in cities is fairly low; every mile offers quite a few paying customers. As the number of users/households decreases, every mile of line gets more and more expensive. In urban areas, "spectacular" lighting, such as spotlights at movie premiers or Times Square-style lit billboards and Broadway marquees, are profitable for the companies. Rural areas, though. . . .
The slow and halting extension of electric lines into the countryside was not inevitable. Historian David Nye notes that "street lighting in the United States quickly developed far beyond functional necessity to include advertising and public-relations spectacles. In contrast, in Scandinavia, Germany, and Holland, spectacular lighting developed more slowly, but the electrification of every home was considered a desirable political goal, and had been 90 percent achieved before 1930." In countries where government regarded the establishment of electric power as a social and political responsibility - and took and active role - rural electrification often developed much more quickly. . . .
(Ibid, pp. 183-184.)
Until the lines arrived, most farms were lit the older-fashioned way, with candles and lanterns, fueled the older-fashioned way with whale and later mineral oils. Oh, and the soot: "Even with quality kerosene, the simplest lamp found in the most modest of homes required meticulous daily attention. Only a well-cleaned lamp would give off good light, and a poorly trimmed wick made for a flickering and smoky flame, which left soot on the chimney and sent soot throughout the house. Indeed, the ritual of spring-cleaning was largely a response to a winter's worth of soot from hearths and lamps." (Ibid, p. 86.)
(As a parenthetical aside, the first luxury item farmers often chose to buy after the lines reached their homes was not lighting, as one might expect, but electric irons. Brox's description of "ironing day" as a tedious, torturous and thankless task must be read to be appreciated.)
This is not to suggest that all farms suffered without electricity. From (appropriately enough) Home Power magazine:
The late 1920's hosted a flurry of activity by experimenters trying to adapt an airplane type of propeller to the wind generator. When making electricity, airfoils are far more efficient than waterpumper wheels because the power curve of a spinning airfoil closely resembles that of an electric generator. Technical articles began appearing in the scientific journals speculating on the efficiency advantages of airfoils over wheels. By 1931, the first patent was issued to Harve Stuart for what became known as the "Stuart (wind generator) Airfoil." Wind generators would never again be confused with waterpumpers.
(Home Power, issue #27, Feb/Mar 1992, p. 14, author Mike Sagrillo)
An industry grew around providing houses too remote for lines with their own systems to supply power, especially after the radio grew more and more popular.
Lots more pics like these
at this great site!
As I said, radio may have been the first device made popular off the local power lines, but it would not be the last. With a slightly larger tower, blade and battery bank, a host of modern conveniences made it to the rural farms. Again from Sagrillo's article:
Some companies offered all the conveniences of the city with a complete line of 32 volt DC appliances. Virtually all the electrical appliances we have at hand today were available to the 1930's and 1940's farm household. In the kitchen were mixers, toasters, hot plates, coffee pots, electric irons and refrigerators. Over in the parlor was the vacuum cleaner, fan sewing machine, and, of course, the radio. Bedrooms held electric blankets, heating pads, and hot water bottles. Those families fortunate enough to have indoor plumbing could indulge themselves with electric shavers, curling irons, and space heaters. In the summer kitchen were cream separators, butter churns, and the ever popular washing machine. Electric milkers and sheep shears were used in the barn. Electric drills, grinders, and saws could be found in the workshop. All of these appliances ran on 32-volt DC electricity!
(Sagrillo, ibid, p. 16)
What became of these wind towers and battery banks? The 1936 Rural Electrification Act. The Act may have funded extending power lines to farms, but nowhere in the law did it require power companies - who, let's remember, needed to make a profit selling power over the long-term - to suffer the whims of farmers who wanted both the security of the power line and the wind tower with all the free power the turbine could provide. When the line men finally arrived at the front door, farmers were given an ultimatum; our power or yours, but not both. "Many towers were brought down and the gensets ignominiously shoved into a hayloft. Others were disabled by a rifleshot. Still others were simply disconnected and left to rot." (Sagrillo, ibid, p. 17)
In another article, Sagrillo follows folks who rediscover these old wind machines and rehabilitate them. Many still work with a minimum of restoration.
Beyond simply getting the power to the people, Brox notes that profit for the future drove appliance development decisions that exist to this day. For example, growing up I never considered that it was weird to have electric ranges and water heaters. It is weird, though . . . for everyone not growing up in the land of cheap hydroelectric power. Most power companies burn some form of petroleum fuel. Why burn the fuel in a power station, use the heat to boil water into steam, convert the steam expansion into rotary motion, convert that rotary motion through electromagnetic drag into electricity, deliver the power it provides through a line, only to convert that energy back into heat? There are more than a few losses on that process.
Ah, but that's the path power companies took, develop future markets for electricity, and worry about the supply later. This popularized electric water heaters and space heaters. They were cheaper to install, for one, making them the favorite of developers. The higher cost of operation was simply passed onto the future home owner, who wouldn't even get in the door until the check cleared and the developer had the money in hand.
Getting back to the solar tariff kerfuffle brucenstein noted, that's where we are today, taking our power grid consumption for granted and focusing all of our attention on what powers it. In short, we are thinking like power companies. I think we've listened to power company executives for so long we fail to even consider that the best way to "make" additional power is to avoid needing it by removing the need for that power in the first place. We have become a society of electrical consumers. In my opinion, we need to become consumer/producers.
You see, that's the biggest advantage technology has given us: the ability to seamlessly combine the output from farm wind turbines of the past and the present with the power created by a coal plant hundreds of miles away with the power from the neighbors' solar panels with the dammed power of falling water. Just as the big-G Grid is one massive interconnected entity, we as small households and businesses can produce as well as consume, contributing a small portion of the required overall load as we can afford . . . and as the powers that be allow.
That last ellipsis-separated portion is the rub. Power companies are profit centers first, social entities, well, last. Despite the requirement to buy back household solar and wind power, many power companies just make it so difficult as to make it impossible. The law requiring buy-back does not give the companies profit, so many retaliate at the mere thought.
This has weakened our grid and endangered its future. But hey, don't take my word. Matthew Simmons noted problems with the grid just four days after the August, 2003 East Coast blackout known as Black Thursday:
On a large scale what happened was deregulation. Deregulation destroyed excess capacity. Under deregulation, excess capacity was labeled as "massive glut" and removed from the system to cut costs and increase profits. Experience has taught us that weather is the chief culprit in events like this. The system needs to be designed for a 100-year cyclical event of peak demand. If you don't prepare for this, you are asking for a massive blackout. New plants generally aren't built unless they are mandated, and free markets don't make investments that give one percent returns. There was also no investment in new transmission lines.
Underlying all this is the fact that we have no idea how to store electricity. And every aspect of carrying capacity, from generators, to transmission lines, to the lines to and inside your house, has a rated capacity of x. When you exceed x, the lines melt. That's why we have fuse boxes and why power grids shut down. So we have now created a vicious cyclicality that progresses over time.
Deregulation, whether it be in excess capacity or ending requirements for renewable buy-backs, has hurt the grid.
I've rambled on this enough, I'm sure you'll agree, even though I've only scratched the surface. I've been mulling on this topic particularly for 6 years on LJ alone. Many of the mullings are on my personal LJ under the tag distributed generation.
Bottom line, I guess, is that we need to consider which approach to take with our existing and future grid. The way we've been going for decades now - building bigger and bigger electrical appliances but worrying about production later, failing to encourage personal investment in renewable sources and energy arbitrage with solid monetary incentives, and leaving "excess" capacity and needed maintenance as issues to ignore - has brought us Black Thursday. In Simmons' words, "We are now in a box we should never have gotten into and it has very serious implications."
The philosophy behind building an expanding energy grid doesn't work when that grid can no longer expand as it once did. We avoid this realization at our peril.
X-Posted to talk_politics.