Recently, a friend sent me a copy of Bakke’s book, The Grid. Two days ago, after getting a draft journal article off my desk, I took it off my stack and cracked its cover. My hope is that the remainder of it is as good as its introduction and first chapter. It's quite an accomplishment; and a very well written one. She quickly gets to the heart of the challenge posed by integrating intermittent renewables (a tautology, once hydro is excluded) on p. 13. She writes ”Power production isn’t just an industry, it’s an ecology. And renewable resources are not just about the planetary good kept from public offer by corporations with other visions for their own profitable futures. Making American power is about how technological, biological, and cultural systems work in concert to keep our lights on, our basements and roadways clear of flood water, and fresh fish on our tables. It’s delicate in all sorts of ways….it does the reader well to remember that the vulnerabilities of the grid as a technological system is intimately linked to the fragility of biological systems (like salmon runs), the intractability of legal and bureaucratic systems (like the endangered species act), and the unpredictability of meteorological systems (like wind storms)….The grid’s entanglement with culture and law and natural systems were always there. Renewables have just made these entanglements impossible to ignore…”
In that passage, she correctly frames the problem that studies asserting it's technically and economically feasible to go 100% renewable now...all we lack is a sufficiently strong will, miss.
image courtesy of Amazon.com
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