22 JULY 2016 • VOL 353 ISSUE 6297 355 SCIENCE sciencemag.org PHOTO: © WASHINGTON STOCK PHOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO By Cymene Howe W e have all seen them. Some of us even have them: a mangle of cords leading to our TVs, Xboxes, iPhone chargers, and that homely lamp that we can’t let go. These knotted bodies of wires hint at the exponentially more complex system of which they are a part. In The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, Gretchen Bakke dives deep into the history of the electric power grid. Bakke, a cultural anthropologist, also shows how the social sciences help us understand infrastructure and technological manage- ment as deeply social qualities. The American electric grid is the largest machine in the world. But bigger is not nec- essarily better. Huge infrastructures tend to last a long time and yet often fail to keep pace with the way we live our lives. While other technological innovations sprint ahead of social change, when it comes to deeply insti- tutionalized systems, we often neglect urgent maintenance and delay critical upgrades. Our grid is a technological system. But it is also prone to the fragility of biological systems, unpredictable meteorological phe- nomena, and the vagaries of legal and bu- reaucratic decisions. Ironically, this massive machine is often vanquished by overgrown trees and overzealous squirrels. The United States has more outage min- utes than any other developed nation. Black- outs are getting longer and are expected to increase with the erratic weather associated with global climate change. Despite legislation that efectively equates the two from a market standpoint, electricity, Bakke writes, is not a banana. It is a unique commodity that, once produced, must be used in a millisecond. However, even though the grid must be everywhere at once, local authorities are now also faced with inte- grating variable electricity, as derived from renewable sources like wind or solar—a tall order for an aging system. Untangling the grid means looking to its past. In The Grid, we learn about the early electric turf wars and the triumph of AC power over DC. Bakke reveals that San Francisco actually hosted the first opera- tional grid in 1879, a full 17 years before the better-known Niagara Falls plant went live. She also shows how Niagara’s 19th-century renewable hydropower paved the way for the accelerated use of fossil fuels. (The Niagara plant made aluminum manufacturing profit- able, which, in turn, facilitated the rise of the automobile and the airplane.) In the 20th century, utility companies pro- moted the idea of endless growth and energy consumption, but Jimmy Carter encouraged us to dial down the thermostat and put on a sweater instead. His 1978 National Energy Act and, later, the Energy Policy Act, which deregulated the electricity industry, forever changed its business model. In the past, util- ity companies made money by generating and selling electricity. Now they earn prof- its by transporting power and trading it as a commodity. This leads to a conundrum: Companies can’t upgrade existing technol- ogy without putting themselves out of busi- ness, but they also can’t aford not to. The Grid is full of rich detail across a wide range of energy-related topics. We hear about the woman who, worried about undue surveillance of her activities, pulled a gun on a utility worker sent to swap her analog me- ter for a smart one, and we learn how wires are “smartened” to transmit information as well as electricity. Microgrids (local grids that can operate autonomously), nanogrids (microgrids that serve a single building or entity), and “soft energy technologies” (sim- ple, efcient, renewable energy devices) all appear, along with their possibilities and limitations. We glimpse Powerwalls (home batteries that charge via solar panels) and cars that act as distributed storage for elec- tricity generated by the wind or sun. One of the book’s most surprising revela- tions is the commonality shared by stereotypi- cal “of-the-grid” communities—hippie collec- tives and militia survivalists—and the U.S. military. Like these groups, the military needs to have power in gridless places. One estimate that Bakke cites says that fully 70% of gasoline used in military field operations currently goes toward transport- ing other gasoline around. However, in the next 5 years, the military will more than double its use of (partly) renewable sourced microgrids—a major step forward. At times, especially early on in the book, renewable energy sources are cast as forces that threaten to upset the grid, which could be read by some as a reason to cling to car- bon. However, the book ultimately makes very clear that the frailty of our grid calls for a rev- olutionary retooling of this grand machine. 10.1126/science.aaf9323 INFRASTRUCTURE Power to the people A cultural history of the U.S. power grid reveals the system’s current failings and its potential The Grid The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future Gretchen Bakke Bloomsbury, 2016. 384 pp. The reviewer is at the Department of Anthropology, Rice University, Houston, TX 77521, USA. Email: cymene@rice.edu BOOKS et al. The electric power grid, hailed as the world’s largest machine, is all but invisible to most Americans. Published by AAAS on July 21, 2016 http://science.sciencemag.org/ Downloaded from