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The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future |  |
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The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future | |
A revelatory look at our national power grid--how it developed, its current flaws, and how it must be completely reimagined for our fast-approaching energy future.
America's electrical grid, an engineering triumph of the twentieth century, is turning out to be a poor fit for the present. It's not just that the grid has grown old and is now in dire need of basic repair. Today, as we invest great hope in new energy sources--solar, wind, and other alternatives--the grid is what stands most firmly in the way of a brighter energy future. If we hope to realize this future, we need to reimagine the grid according to twenty-first-century values. It's a project which forces visionaries to work with bureaucrats, legislators with storm-flattened communities, moneymen with hippies, and the left with the right. And though it might not yet be obvious, this revolution is already well under way.
Cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke unveils the many facets of America's energy infrastructure, its most dynamic moments and its most stable ones, and its essential role in personal and national life. The grid, she argues, is an essentially American artifact, one which developed with us: a product of bold expansion, the occasional foolhardy vision, some genius technologies, and constant improvisation. Most of all, her focus is on how Americans are changing the grid right now, sometimes with gumption and big dreams and sometimes with legislation or the brandishing of guns.
The Grid tells--entertainingly, perceptively--the story of what has been called "the largest machine in the world": its fascinating history, its problematic present, and its potential role in a brighter, cleaner future.
媒体推荐"Bakke describes the grid as far more than towers and wires . . . She leads readers through a history of the grid and a maze of financial, legal, regulatory, and environmental considerations with sprightly good humor . . . Finally, Bakke sketches a possible design of the ‘intelligent grid’ of the future . . . A lively analysis." - Kirkus Reviews
"Hopefully, Bakke’s startling exposé revealing how electricity sloshes around the country across a precarious grid will be a wake-up call." - Booklist
"Gretchen Bakke shows that everything is, indeed, connected. If we want a cleaner energy future, we're going to need a smarter grid." - Elizabeth Kolbert, author of THE SIXTH EXTINCTION
"A remarkable achievement. Bakke deftly shows us how a system most of us are happy to ignore--the electrical grid--is both inseparable from everything we think of as civilization and on the verge of complete failure." - Paul Roberts, author of THE END OF OIL and THE IMPULSE SOCIETY
"If you want to keep your lights on, read The Grid. This is a smart, deeply reported, poetic book about how electricity moves through our lives (and why it sometimes doesn’t). It's a journey through the nervous system of the modern world, one with profound implications for climate change, national security, and ensuring America’s well-lit future." - Jeff Goodell, contributing editor ROLLING STONE, author of BIG COAL
作者简介Gretchen Bakke holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. She has done research on several failing nations, including the Soviet union , the former Yugoslavia, and Cuba. She is a former fellow in Wesleyan University's Science in Society Program and currently an assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University. Born in Portland, Oregon, Bakke lives in Montreal and calls Washington, D.C. home when she's in the United States.
网友对The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future的评论
I bought this book based on an engaging interview with Ms Bakke I heard on NPR. I had hoped her book would be as engaging. It is not. Her book rambles covering the material in too many words that never seem to get to the point. Even the scant illustrations impart no knowledge, for example exhibiting direct current as two adjacent rectangles and parallel current as one rectangle above another. At 20% through her book, I decided to jump ahead, but found the chapter headings opaque as to their content and gave up. What a shame, this topic has so much potential which is why I gave it a third star.
Those of you looking for a book on the technical detail of how we modernized our electrical grid will be disappointed. My only criticism of this book is that it is sparse in this respect.
However, Gretchen Baake is an anthropologist and she has a novel perspective on our relationship to the grid--the way it affects our economics, our culture, and our lives. She writes extremely well, making the dry subjects of electricity generation and distribution relevant, exciting, and intellectually challenging.
The abstract concept of the electrical grid is a character in the book. It has a back story which conjoins its past with its current recalcitrant behavior. By analyzing its development we are less intimidated to deal with its problems and more hopeful of its future. Speaking of the future. Ms. Baake is no futurist. She makes no prognostications but leaves us with the future of a clunky, complex, distributed system filled with potential.
This is not an engineering book but a highly recommended read for anyone remotely interested in our environment or who has plugged an electrical cord into a socket.
Author presented historical events to describe how our existing GRID came to pass (and occasionally fail). The current Grid needs to concern us all with Utilities desperately trying to make their business model work. Author discusses legislative influence at both state and federal levels. Discussed new technology impact (wind, solar, and electric-cars with battery potential - no pun intended). Several 'green' projects in the US are discussed. What worked what failed - the author presented an insightful analysis. In the end, the book's message foreshadows what we all know to be true - that change is heading our way in how we use and pay for electricity. Our existing centralized utility GRID must become a platform of interconnected systems (home, industrial, wireless) that, hopefully, will provide a stable and cost-effective source of electricity. I enjoyed the read and recommend. (Only 4 stars because sometimes the author kept going on after her point was made - and I can be impatient.) :)
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