The Machine Stops

Try explaining the awesome scale of carefully synchronized mechanics that send electricity over long distances, and you'll sound like a madman.

A network of wires that are energized with a perfectly equal amount of energy generation and demand at all times, with the exact same rhythmic wave, held aloft and weightless through the inertia of enormous spinning hunks of metal. Like a clutch of spinning plates, juggled and balanced by an enormous, many-armed Shiva - otherwise known as the control room of your local grid operator.

It's WILD. And I feel like, in order for people to understand and appreciate the scale of what we're trying to do with the largest and most complex machine humankind has ever invented, we need to be able to talk about how it works without being boring.

For a great example, tune into this recent episode of Shift Key to hear Jesse Jenkins explain how electricity moves through a wire. Before the discussion dives into what maybe, possibly, could have been going on with the recent major blackout event across the Iberian Peninsula, Jesse breaks down the basics of how the machine that is our grid actually functions. The image of atoms packed together in a row, standing in a line, jolted by an elbow, which passes the energy on down the line, is so genius.

A good analogy doesn't have to perfectly capture the exact specific nuances of the thing you're trying to explain. Understanding is a feeling, that "ah ha" moment when your brain has related a thing being demonstrated to a thing you already know.

When the invisible becomes suddenly, terribly visible

At roughly 12:30pm local time on Monday, April 28, generator outages and grid disturbances coincided on the Iberian Peninsula and within 5 seconds of the initial disturbance, the entire grid went black. Spanish and Portuguese citizens living in urban areas became suddenly aware of how dependent their lives are on the invisible infrastructure of the electricity system. Nate Hagens 's guest on this recent episode of The Great Simplification offers a firsthand account from Madrid and some technical analysis of what may have gone wrong (official disclaimer: the cause is not yet fully known).

After the initial shock wore off and the reality of the outage settled in, people began to take stock of their circumstances. Buildings were unable to pump water to the upper floors, elevators were stuck, payment processing and internet services were down. A highly-electrified city like Madrid, with a normally-reliable grid, is woefully unprepared for a prolonged period of power outage.

The stories we hear of people coming together with neighbors, dining al fresco, conviviality and Rioja flowing freely, are very nice and romantic, but what of the elderly neighbor stuck in their top-floor apartment, vulnerable to heat? What of the diabetic whose insulin must be kept cold, or the mobility impaired? Not everyone had a lovely time during the blackout. Wealthy urban areas like these lack resilience in the face of energy failure in ways that rural communities typically don't. As we continue to pursue broad electrification policies, which are without a doubt one of the best ways to decarbonize certain sectors like passenger transport and buildings, what do we need to consider in terms of resilience? How do we facilitate mass evacuations after power cuts due to wildfire with a broadly-electrified transport sector? How will people boil their water with an induction stove and no electricity after a hurricane disrupts their local water treatment plant? This is where theory meets practice, and why it is so important for community-level advocates to be engaged in the business of energy policy. Those who are most vulnerable will always be left behind, and our invisible energy infrastructure is essential to sustain life in so many ways.

For more on where theory meets practice, I found this recent episode of Chris Whitehead, QEP 's Perspectives on Sustainable Development to be really compelling. Two heavyweights in the energy transition - Mark Jacobson and Doug Houseman - engage in a mostly-friendly debate about where the rubber meets the road on deploying sufficient new generation to decarbonize our grid. It's not often you get any real disagreement among guests on an energy podcast, and I'd love to see more of it.

Will the AI save us?

The CEO of Octopus Energy is one of the best energy communicators I've encountered, and their success is no surprise - a company focused on delighting its customer, on a business-to-consumer level, and leveraging an array of market tools, has cracked the code on making the sustainable choice the most enjoyable one. All of the things Greg Jackson describes during his guest appearance on Azeem Azhar's Exponential View, from smart device integration to V2G, everything we should be able to do with the data we have, they are actually doing it in places like the UK and Texas. What do those markets have in common? Rapidly modernizing grids chock full of renewables and energy arbitrage opportunities. This company feels like one of the more interesting players in the game as we try to figure out how to evolve our old energy constructs to maximize the value of new technologies.

Meanwhile, the core technology driving the Octopus Energy model, Kraken, has some new competition in the AI grid management space: Google's new Tapestry AI platform for the grid. With their tagline "Make the Grid Visible," Tapestry's target customers are the grid operators and transmission system owners themselves. General Manager Page Crahan explains how Google's cache of existing street and satellite images can help utilities better identify and predict areas where power lines could be disrupted or damaged on a recent episode of Volts. It's interesting (and more than a little alarming) to imagine how much data Google has of every possible type you could imagine…

The machine that never stops

Here we are, at what is most certainly still the beginning of the energy transition, trying to make huge paradigmatic shifts to the nature of energy generation feeding the grid, enabling devices that access the grid to operate ever more dynamically, all while the whole machine is still running and can't ever stop. It's like trying to retrofit a Formula One car into a Formula E car while it's mid-race. Absolutely bonkers. This might be the hardest thing humanity has ever done. It requires coordination across technology, society, and economy at a gargantuan scale, at a time when our ability to bridge ideology and identity has never been more fraught.

There are very few things of sufficient enormity and relevance to break through to broad public consciousness in a unifying way. This shift, the challenge and scale of it, should be galvanizing us instead of dividing us. Not a single person would tell you they don't want to live in a cleaner, healthier environment, in a future that feels more hopeful, a future whose beauty is all the more satisfying because we cultivated it with our hands and our hearts. We have the winning story all day long, but telling a good story is more art than science.