The Epic of the American Grid
The Epic of the American Grid
Historian Julie A. Cohn shares lessons learned from building the world's largest machine
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Climate is not a technology problem but a story problem.
Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter about the narrative potential of climate.
The fact that you and I can charge our phones from a plug in the wall is a miracle ✨
We sat down with Julie Cohn - historian and author of the book “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology.”
This interview has been on my mind since I first picked up her book a couple of years ago. I still have to pinch myself to realize that she took the time to answer some of my burning questions:
Why researching the evolution of the American grid was a deeply personal affair 💛
What the required step changes were to build the largest machine in the world 🪜
What Hollywood gets wrong about blackouts ⬛️
And much more…
Enjoy ✌️
The Epic of the American Grid
By Art Lapinsch
Please take us on your personal journey. Looking back, what are some moments that led you to where you are now? How and why did you decide to research American history through the lens of energy infrastructure?
My bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Anthropology provided me with good research and writing skills, but in the early 1980s, opened very few professional pathways.
I worked in city government, with non-profit organizations, and in university research groups on topics as wide-ranging as fine and performing arts programming, K-12 teacher training to bring new technologies into the classroom, to writing and reviewing a wide array of grant proposals – including those for environmental projects.
While compelling, none of these topics engaged my attention as deeply as questions surrounding my own father’s career, why he was busy successfully selling control instruments in California during the Great Depression, what kept him and his colleagues so deeply engrossed in the quotidian problems of power systems, and how we ended up with something called “the world’s largest interconnected machine” to keep our lights on.
These questions led me back to graduate school in history, specifically to study and understand the development of the North American power grid.
Your father - Nathan Cohn - entered the energy industry in 1927 and worked in it until 1989. What were the most important step changes he witnessed during his career? Why were those so important in the grand scheme?
My father’s career in the industry spanned sixty-plus years, from his college graduation in 1927 to his death in 1989.
He worked for Leeds & Northrup Company, a company that manufactured precision instruments and was just barely active in the power market in the 1920s. A mentor advised him not to take his first job with Leeds & Northrup, asserting that the utility industry had their practices already down to a “cut and dried proposition.” At that point there were a handful of power pools and very little understanding of how companies that shared power were going to keep the systems stable. The tools for measuring, calculating, analyzing, and controlling system behavior were marginally useful.
Within 10 years the country boasted the largest interconnected systems in the world, and utilities were using analog computing and automatic control devices to model and predict system behavior, to plan investments, and to control power on grids. This was an enormous step change.
The huge demand for power to fuel war production in the 1940s was another step change.
The third was probably the adoption of digital computing and control – which happened more slowly and much later than in other economic sectors, but fundamentally changed the industry. This occurred over several decades – some use of digital computers in the fifties, many computational challenges for the industry as grids became quite large by the 1960s, calls for better control following the 1965 blackout, and then gradual but widespread adoption of digital computing by the late 1970s/early 1980s.
These changes were important because they accompanied the increasing reliance on electricity across the economy. Without the computing and automation capabilities offered by digital machines, it would have been far more difficult to maintain stability on the ever larger power pools of the post-war years.
In your book “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” you describe the grid as the world’s largest machine. Can you expand on this idea? What do people commonly misunderstand about it and why?
I’m not sure who originally coined the phrase “the world’s largest machine,” or “the world’s largest interconnected machine” in connection with power grids, but it refers to the way in which every device on a system affects and is affected by every other device on the system.
There are two types of usable electricity – direct current and alternating current. In direct current, electrons flow in one direction – this is the type of electricity you get from a battery.
In alternating current, electrons flow back and forth at a high rate of speed - this is the type of electricity you get from a wall outlet. The speed at which the electrons go back and forth is called the frequency. On an alternating current system, every device must operate at as close to the same frequency as possible – 60 Hz is the standard in North America. When any device turns on or off, or slows down or speeds up, it causes all the other devices to adjust. Thus when someone turns off the light, it has a tiny effect on the whole system.
A power grid is made up of thousands, if not millions, of devices – generators, transmission lines, transformers, distribution lines, everything leading up to your wall outlet. And then there are the additional devices that connect to the grid – factory conveyor belts, hospital MRIs, my coffee-maker, etc. Because all these devices are linked, and because any one of them turning on or off affects all the others, the grid can be considered a single machine.
By the late 1930s, the Interconnected Systems Group, which extended from the Carolinas to eastern Missouri and from Florida to Michigan, was the largest grid in the world. This system ultimately grew into what we now call the Eastern Interconnection. Until recent years, this remained the largest interconnected machine in the world.
The top three things for people to remember about the grid are:
It’s not a single grid – there are three big grids serving customers in the continental United States.
It is owned and operated by thousands of entities, and there is no one person, agency, or company in charge of the grid.
The safe and reliable operation of the grid is an incredibly complex process – an everyday miracle if you will – that is only going to get more complex as we add renewables, EV’s, customer-owned generation and storage, and more and more electrified activities.
What can we learn from the standardization processes and its subsequent unlocks (e.g. interconnection)?What is one unlock you would like to see in the future?
Until the 21st century, standards for system reliability at the national level were developed through both competition and collaboration, were decided in settings that drew the attention of academics, utility managers, manufacturers, and regulators alike, and were entirely voluntary. Mutual self-interest seemed to be the motivation for adopting the standards.
In 2005, Congress gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) the authority to develop mandatory reliability standards for the “bulk power supply” – so not the distribution systems that bring power to your meter, but the generators, transmission lines, and transformers that deliver electricity to the distribution systems.
FERC designated the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) as the entity that develops and enforces the standards. FERC adopted the first 83 standards in 2007.
Between 1965 and 2011, we experienced 8 major cascading power failures, roughly one every five years. Between 2011 and 2024 we have had none. This suggests that mandatory reliability standards make a difference.
With generation now appearing on the distribution portion of the power system, and also on the customer side of the meter, it will be interesting to see how quickly stakeholders converge on reliability standards in the future.
The regulators at both the state and federal levels will have to cast a much wider net to include all the owners and operators whose technology choices and operating conditions will affect reliability.
What can we learn from the evolution of the electrical grid for contemporary infrastructure projects such as hydrogen networks (and potentially fusion energy)? What applies like-for-like? What would we have to re-think?
One salient feature of our grid is that it was developed piecemeal, by a collection of public and private entities, often through opportunistic decision-making.
There was no roadmap that everyone followed. The internet is a bit analogous, although the backbone of the internet was a federal project.
The power grid had no similar backbone. At every stage of the process, new needs or desires for electrification evolved based on what had come before, and solutions to problems often were good enough rather than ideal.
For well-conceived contemporary infrastructure projects, there is the opportunity to build-in both resilience and flexibility on purpose. The grid developed with geographic specificity, with certain types of collaboration that were possible only because companies couldn’t compete, and with cutting edge technologies that were of interest to academics and manufacturers alike.
It is hard to know if those same characteristics will apply for future systems.
Which other trends/technologies evolved hand-in-hand with the grid and were critical to its development?
Perhaps most important were developments in calculating and computing devices.
Power systems offered early examples of big data problems, and they were among the earliest adopters of calculators, analyzers, and computers. While computer history tends to focus on the big machines developed for wartime activities, the applications in power systems were very important.
Solutions to power control problems paralleled solutions to control problems in air flight and other feedback/feedforward systems.
What’s the past, present, and future of storage batteries for the grid? What is one surprising thing that people frequently misunderstand about this development?
Utilities relied very heavily on storage batteries during the earliest years of electrification, for all the same reasons storage batteries are in use today.
For example, companies could generate power more consistently over each 24-hour period if they could charge up their storage batteries during times of low demand and draw from the batteries when demand hit its peak. Unfortunately, a storage battery large enough to support a system during a power outage lasted only a few minutes.
By the early 1900s, utilities found they could gain the benefits offered by storage batteries, and more, through interconnection. Battery popularity dropped.
I think your readers may be surprised by how important batteries were to the early development of power systems. In 1904, one utility executive said, “the conviction forces itself that this former 'ugly duckling' of the electrical art has, in its later perfection, become a swan."
For a time, storage batteries were economical, had multiple uses, and seemed the wave of the future.
In a recent project, you researched the representation of electrical blackouts in American film. What is something that Hollywood gets terribly wrong? What is something that they get right?
Hollywood draws on tropes that emerged from high-profile blackouts, and that were largely based on documented events in New York City.
So, 1965 was the “good” blackout, when people shared stories and passed around food and drinks on the steps of Grand Central Station while waiting for the lights to come one. Then, 1977 was the “bad” blackout, during which widespread looting occurred in the city. Years later, 2003 was the “scary” blackout when we briefly thought a foreign terrorist had taken down our power system.
But the actual experience of blackouts is much more diverse, in some places life threatening, in others simply tedious and inconvenient. And the explanation for what happened and what has to be done to get everything working again is often so technical and complex that it really isn’t easy to make it into entertainment. And perhaps it shouldn’t be.
I appreciate that sometimes screenwriters try to portray this underlying technical complexity, and its implications. And at other times they simply try to capture the ordinary human experience.
Having lived through several power outages in Houston in recent years – none of which were cascading failures – I can say that there is very little about it that is glamorous, sometimes the experience can bring neighbors together, often the outage produces misplaced anger, and always it is an enormous relief when the lights come back on.
What is something that you have changed your mind about since researching the energy space? What is something you have doubled down on?
My thoughts about renewables are definitely in constant flux as I learn more about the challenge of operating a grid that is rich in renewables, the uncertainty about resources needed to produce renewable technologies, the advantages of off-grid operation provided certain types of renewables/storage battery combinations, the inequities that may result from customer-owned generating sources, and the big question of what role the existing infrastructure will play in the future.
I have doubled down on two things:
Our power system is an everyday miracle
Electrification has definitely improved lives across the last century
What’s your favorite, big question that you don’t have an answer to yet? Why do find it interesting and important? Any best guesses for an answer?
As I alluded to in the prior answer, the very interesting big question is how we are going to use our grid in the future.
Will we build larger, longer transmission lines that ultimately link across the entire continent, or will we shift to a system of smaller networks that can easily operate islanded from each other?
And whichever approach we take, how will we do it so that everyone who wants or needs to use electricity has access to it at a fair price.
I don’t have an answer.
Looking back from a Net Zero future, what do you hope they will say about us?
That we figured it out!
🙏 Thanks, Julie for taking time and sharing your perspective.
Thanks, Berkay and Tomas for reviewing the questions.
I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch and tell me whom I should interview next or which topics you’d like to see covered ✌️