Free the Grid
Wednesday, July 7, 2010 at 11:53PM 
PNM is traveling around New Mexico hosting public meetings, complete with cookies and coffee, to discuss the future of electricity in the state. This past Tuesday’s meeting at the Santa Fe Community College drew about 30 members of the public, and although I could only stomach the first hour, that was enough to reach an important conclusion: Investor-owned utility companies such as PNM will never provide community benefits. They simply can’t.
Inherently, many of us know that we should be angry at PNM. We sense that something isn’t right with them, even if we can’t finger exactly what it is. We think they should burn less coal, stop raising rates, and give their executives a pay cut. These issues surface at public meetings, and although they may be true, they distract us from a much larger realization.
The real problem with electric utilities is that their business practices are every bit as dangerous as Wall Street banks flying high on derivatives or multinational oil giants hooked on deepwater drilling. Electric utilities continue to build central power plants connected to interstate transmission corridors – a practice so dangerous that it has taken the world’s climate to the ragged edge of instability. And, like the bankers and the oil barrens, they do it because it solidifies their power and ensures that we will continue to depend on them.
The ability of the electric power system to inflict great harm on communities and the planet is well established, but it’s ability to do the opposite – to yield enormous benefits – has barely been explored.
The electric power system is little more than a network of wires, connecting us all together so that we can exchange energy. Ignore the fact, for the moment, that these exchanges currently consist of you writing checks to the world’s biggest polluters, and imagine instead the best possible scenario. Imagine that all of your neighbors have generators of various types and sizes, and whenever one of them has a little more than they need, they can share it with you the same way you might share vegetables from your garden. This kind of trading is not just efficient or economical – it’s the kind of exchange that builds community.
Now for the part that took me a long time to see: There are no insurmountable challenges, technical or regulatory or otherwise, preventing us from operating our electric power system in ways that benefit communities. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges, but many of them have already been overcome. Denmark declared their entire network of wires to be a public asset dedicated to providing public benefits, and they gave every Danish citizen the right to generate electricity and use the wires to provide that electricity to others. The Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands showed that large numbers of distributed generators could interact in beneficial ways when connected to the electric network using a “plug-and-play” architecture similar to that used by the internet. So much of the heavy lifting needed to transform the grid has already been done.
Is the United States ready for a publicly owned power grid dedicated to public benefits? Mostly we still occupy ourselves with minutiae, setting standards for big, obsolete utilities and then requiring them to hold public meetings so that they can pretend to care about the communities and ecosystems they are busily destroying. But to paraphrase Al Sharpton, when asked whether America was ready for a black president, he shot back that Americans weren’t ready to let blacks sit down on the bus. But it didn’t matter, he said, because WE were ready.
So I guess the only question is, are we ready to free the grid? I know I am. Won’t you join me?
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Reader Comments (5)
Electric utilities trash the environment: By operating their system at an abysmal 27 percent efficiency, utilities burn way more fuel than they need to, thereby releasing far more pollutants then they need to. In 1999 they finally reported to the EPA and were found to be emitting ONE BILLION POUNDS OF TOXINS ANNUALLY, more than the paper, plastics, chemical, and refining industries combined. Their emissions kill 30,000 Americans annually, according to an Abt Associates study, and contribute 40 percent of all U.S. GHG emissions.
Electric utilities suck money out of communities: In 2003, Local Energy hired economist Michael Shuman to estimate the economic multiplier of the dollars used to pay PNM utility bills. Shuman found that for every dollar handed to PNM, 85-cents leaves Santa Fe County immediately. Although our study was for natural gas, we have every reason to believe that their electric-side economic multiplier is the same or worse. The lost economic opportunity resulting from this exodus of dollars is hundreds of millions of dollars per year compared with having energy supplied by locally owned, independent companies in our community. Our report is available at www.localenergy.org
Electric utilities understand active grid architecture, but they don’t talk about it or implement it: I met a lot of very bright utility protection engineers while writing the national DG interconnect standard now known as IEEE 1547. Together, IOU’s in this country spend about $300 million annually researching the best means to generate, distribute, and use energy through the Electric Power Research Institute alone, so the notion that they don’t understand active grids is laughable. The reason they suppress this knowledge, and instead tell lies about the dangers and unreliability of distributed generation, is because active grids would decentralize electricity and therefore decentralize the control they hold over it and decentralize the money they make from it. So I don’t blame them for doing it, it just needs to stop. I’ve written about the power internet before...here’s an article that has a link to some technical info at the end:
http://www.marksardella.com/commentary/2008/5/22/creating-an-electric-power-internet.html
As far as practical ideas for action, the choices are quite limited as a result of highly strategic moves by utilities over the last 13 years (as long as I’ve been watching). That’s why I’m now advocating that we seize the grid and dedicate it to public benefit – it’s about all we have left!
Thanks for your feedback, and I hope that satisfies some of your need for supporting info. Be sure to get in touch if you’d like to discuss this further, and I hope you will continue reading and commenting!
All the best, - Mark
I agree whole heartedly that there are things that could be done differently but to say that PNM "will never provide community benefits" is a gross misstatement. Like it or not, we need utility companies. And, in New Mexico, they are regulated by the government so do little without approval of elected officials. If you don't like they way they are operated, consider running for office to change legislation.
While it’s certainly possible that I’m just unfamiliar enough with the issue that I’m overlooking something obvious, taken alone, your statement and you argument appear to me to combine two issues that can be – and perhaps need to be – addressed separately: the concept of the central station model, and environmental and social benefit.
I’d argue that, strictly speaking, the central station model is not responsible for climate change – fossil fuels are. So while it is absolutely true that the electricity grid in this country that’s been evolving for over a hundred years did (and does) indeed rely on coal-fired central stations, it doesn’t have to. For example, we could conceivably replace coal-fired generation with utility-scale wind and solar plants.
Further, distributed generation does not imply – or necessitate – clean. Unless we’re careful, we’d see people hooking up diesel generators because they’re cheap and proven. And could get that electricity revenue flowing to my local family quite quickly. …Enough of those and we’re in 19th century London breathing air to thick to see through.
My main point here is that it seems to me we can achieve clean and environmentally responsible under the central station model, and that conversely, decentralization does not automatically mean environmentally sound.
On the social benefit side, I think we have to be really careful that we don’t trade one tyranny for another. When people talk about local for local’s sake, it evokes images of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life defending the Savings and Loan from the greed of the insidious Mr. Potter. Take Hutton Broadcasting, for example. There are those in this town who would (and have and do) argue that they’re a monopoly. Because they are. A local monopoly, but a monopoly nonetheless. Is that necessarily better than a monopoly owner who lives somewhere else? (After all, even PNM can be argued to be local from a regional resource perspective.) So here comes Mr. Potter (or Mr. Hutton or Mr. Peters as the case may be) financing and owning a wind farm in Galisteo that provides more than enough power for Santa Fe…and renting every rooftop in town via “partnerships” and voila! – a local power monopoly.
So my point here is that I don’t quite buy that local=socially benign (or not even better than not local in many cases). And again I’d argue that it doesn’t mean we don’t work for local – just that we do it carefully.
I’m getting off track…I absolutely support the idea that we paid for it and that denying us access to protect corporate profits is unethical and indefensible. I guess my broader point, though, is that it’s a separate issue from getting clean. Simply taking over the grid and handing it to the masses doesn’t automatically fix things. Until mindsets change, we risk (in fact I think it’s inevitable) doing all same damage we’ve been doing. While we embrace a system of debt-based money and hocus pocus greed facilitators like interest (interest on money, I mean), we’ll continue to worship growth, which will lead to resource depletion and pollution whether we’re doing it “locally” or not.
I guess the one thing that confuses me is why people complain so much…and then throw up their hands and carry on and pay those monthly PNM bills. How about before advocating for “nationalizing” (or whatever the state-level equivalent would be) the New Mexico grid, we call for one of the most effective tools for social change that’s been employed historically – the boycott. Boycott PNM. Go to your breaker box, open it, and *click* turn off the big switch that says “Main.” Then learn how to live according to what you need and not what you’re used to. Form support groups to help people manage…to install solar panels…to figure out how to reduce loads. Or put those organizations in place first if you're the planning type.
In fact, let’s call it something more dramatic, more accurate – our job is to be consumers, so let’s go on strike! (Although we might want to hype it up until May or so to avoid catching people with their pants down on short notice before winter.) Let’s organize a strike. If you’re not going to behave responsibly, PNM, I won’t show up to work as your dutiful consumer anymore. What would our demands be?
Buy green power
Allow free access for residential electricity systems at a fair rate
Reduce executive salaries
What are they gonna do – shut our power off? Come on, Mark. It'll be fun.