Top Highlights

• Looking at its sleek lines and high towers, one might mistake the grid for an electrical transportation superhighway. But to those intimately acquainted with it, another image springs to mind—that of an old, beat-up, pothole-riddled, one-lane dirt road. The grid is worn down, it’s patched up, and every hoped-for improvement is expensive and bureauc...
• The first blow came in the early sixties, when it became clear that technological improvements no longer promised increased plant efficiency; this was primarily a problem of physics. The second law of thermodynamics, and its corollary Carnot’s theorem, dictate that temperature ratios limit the amount of work any given fuel can be expected to do in ...
• The closer a steam plant comes to 40 percent efficiency, the more routine maintenance it needs, the more often it breaks down despite the constant upkeep, and the more costly the high-tech alloys necessary to endure this onslaught. Sooner or later even these fancy crafted metals will fatigue and give way. By the mid-1960s it had become clear to uti...
• The truth of this has not changed in the fifty years since. In 2012, the best fossil fuel power plants in America ran at 42.5 percent efficiency—but this number is only for a few natural gas combustion (no-steam) turbines. The newest steam plants operating in the United States between 2007 and 2012, whether fueled by coal or plutonium or petroleum,...
• In many ways it is more correct to say that Samuel Insull, and not Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla or even George Westinghouse, made America’s grid. He normalized and rendered profitable the central stations without which we would have no grid at all, just a bunch of factories, municipal buildings, and homes with little electricity plants in their ba...