For decades now we have been missing the point about the accelerating and overlapping energy and climate crises and how to address them. The ultimate goal should not be to make our electrical grid as green as possible, it should be to eliminate it entirely.
As grid operators prepare for another summer of record heat and peak demand, new reports show Big Tech and other industries are putting a massive strain on our energy infrastructure that no one seems to have planned for.
The vast majority of the US is connected to the grid, whose operation (about two-thirds) is largely split between seven system or transmission operators. Numerous power plants and other energy sources operated by governments, corporations or electric cooperatives make up the membership of these grid-maintaining super-entities, which have recently struggled to keep up with demand and keep the lights on.
When a freezing winter storm in 2021 led to power outages of Texas’ independent but still centralized grid, there were over 240 deaths. Heat waves and wildfires exacerbated by climate change have also led to outages across the western US, as often aging and infirm infrastructure struggles at times when energy is needed most.
Add to the problems of grid operation the fact that new sources of electricity are simply not coming online fast enough in the US. According to the US Energy Information Administration, total net electricity generation nationwide increased by 9.1 percent between January 2023 and January 2024. Meanwhile, over the same period, demand for heating went up 18.1 percent, natural gas consumption jumped 16.7 percent and coal burned jumped by 19.5 percent.
In the second half of the last century, growing suburbanization and an oversized, consumerist culture was blamed for growing energy consumption as we barely began to confront the reality of a changing climate. Today, new energy-hungry culprits are compounding the problem in the form of data centers to power a boom in artificial intelligence and the Big Tech platforms that have swallowed so much of our lives. Not to mention the nascent movement toward electric vehicles and a push to bring manufacturing and industrial facilities back on-shore.
Making the problem worse is the fact that few saw this sudden surge in demand coming. Estimates of growth for demand in electricity were nearly half the actual figures, according to a recent report, and the reality on the ground is thought to be even worse.
This leaves grid operators scrambling to increase energy generation to meet demand. This means dirty coal plants that should be closing are staying open for now, energy costs are increasing and taxpayers must pay billions to update and expand the grid. A plan to beef up California’s transmission system alone is expected to cost over $30 billion.
There has to be a better way to think about this.
Renewables and cleaner sources of energy are great and essential and they (especially the batteries) just keep getting better and cheaper. The technology is not the problem. We’re really good at technology; our systems are optimized to constantly and relentlessly upgrade the tech.
It’s coordination, planning and executing across diverse geographies, interests and bureaucracies that we are very, very bad at. You can engage with these hurdles minimally and still build cool new tech. What you cannot do at the moment without engaging with all of these obstacles is build a reliable, efficient, gargantuan, interconnected electrical grid to bring all the wonderful clean energy the shiny technology generates to nearly every built structure on the planet.
The problem is not energy generation. It is not peak oil. It is not the efficiency of batteries, solar panels or the never-ending debate about nuclear.
The problem is centralization. More to the point it is the bureaucratic centralization in the management of our grid that has not kept up with the tech. While our energy generation infrastructure is somewhat decentralized, management of distribution is not.
In certain underdeveloped and developing countries, telephone lines never reached many households. That’s because mobile technology leapfrogged the slow-moving legacy telecoms to provide better, affordable service to populations deemed unworthy of such critical infrastructure.
Imagine the same kind of energy independence being available on the household or neighborhood level. We have the technology to do it and we could eliminate the bureaucracy and coordination struggles in the process.
Pushing Control To The Edges
A more decentralized grid with baked-in autonomy and more opportunities for redundancy can address not only the problem of massive outages, but also provides more resilience against cyberattacks and the opportunity for communities to have greater say over the management of their own energy flows.
This obviously sounds like some fantasy cooked up by an off-grid fanatic (guilty), and it is admittedly a long way off. But a grid-less future doesn’t have to involve every homeowner installing solar panels or drilling for geothermal power. The point is just to push energy generation and management out from the power plants and operations centers at the middle of the network and towards the edges of the grid in all directions. The more sources and autonomous points along the way the better.
The Department of Energy is among those entities also taking the idea seriously enough to invest in some research into microgrids and autonomous energy grids.
Researchers at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory are hopeful we could begin to see AEGs that decentralize and better automate energy distribution and efficiency in place within the next decade.
Here in New Mexico and elsewhere, some rural co-ops are taking the initiative to build microgrids that can provide power when the larger grid goes down. There is also an active global movement to build out microgrids, especially in vulnerable places like Puerto Rico. Look for that leapfrogging to ramp up soon.
The more decentralized the better. Why not ask Big Tech companies to bring their own power sources when they build a new data center than subsidize that cost of doing business for them and adding strain to a grid we all must share?
The ultimate goal should be total energy independence and the eventual planned obsolescence of the entire energy grid. Then the only remaining consideration becomes what to do with thousands of miles of unneeded transmission line…
