What Keeps the Lights On

The first commercial electric power plant in North America opened in Appleton, Wisconsin, on August 20, 1882. The second, built by the famed inventor Thomas Edison in Manhattan, opened two weeks later, on September 4. The Appleton plant, on the Fox River, was also the world’s first hydroelectric plant. The plant channeled the Fox’s current through the plant to turn a turbine — an axle with waterwheel-style blades. The turbine, spinning, turned a set of gears. The gears rotated a cylinder of conductive metal (the rotor) by six big magnets (the stator). An electric current emerged.

Edison made money from his patents on electric plants — his plant in Manhattan was mainly a demo. The people in Appleton had to cover their costs, which included paying Edison to license his patents, by selling and distributing electricity. This meant putting up big poles all over town and stringing wire on them, a pricey endeavor. Unfortunately, the costs didn’t go down as the customer base grew. Connecting the ten-thousandth home was nearly as expensive as the first.

Equally high were the costs of maintaining the system. The flow of electrons in a power line is not, so to speak, friction-free — it heats the metal, a phenomenon called resistance. (Resistance is why the elements in an electric range glow red and get hot.) If resistance heat can’t dissipate, a metal wire will soften, expand, and lengthen. If the wire is a power line, the heat will make the line sag between its supports. If the line droops too low, it can spark out onto nearby trees or other objects, causing a spike in the current or shorting out the line entirely. Today’s electric cables reduce the risk of flashes by being built with a complex multilayer design and sheathed with insulation. But sagging power lines are still responsible for a large fraction of the big wildfires in the West.

Swamped by the costs of building and maintaining infrastructure, the Appleton plant went belly-up in 1896. So did a host of other early utilities. Customers were furious. The upheaval lasted for decades — one reason why today’s utilities are heavily regulated and, often, publicly owned. It is also why the national grid is a patchwork jumble of older and newer elements, all hooked together higgledy-piggledy as they developed.

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Minute by minute, power plants have to produce just about exactly as much electricity as is being used at the moment. Too much electricity is as much of a problem as too little. Water systems maintain a continuous flow by storing extra water in reservoirs, releasing it when needed, taking it in when there is surplus. For electricity, the equivalent of a reservoir is a battery. Battery costs have fallen in recent years, but storing electricity remains much more difficult and costly than storing water. As a result, electric power is still mostly generated, transported, and used in real time. The energy you use to turn on your monitor was a ray of sunshine or a puff of natural gas just milliseconds before.

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North America’s electric system is a miracle, but also kind of a mess. 

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I have immense gratitude for being alive in a time and place where I have the comfort of electricity. 

When I say I have gratitude, I thank water, electricity (and other basic needs) everyday.