Download The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future AudioBook Free
The grid can be an accident of background and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and take in electrical energy. Yet this is actually the system the United States were left with, a jerry-built composition now so rickety and next to collapse that a strong blowing wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under menace from a new source: green and adjustable energy, which sets stress on its logics around its components. In an amusing, perceptive and deeply researched fashion, social anthropologist Gretchen Bakke uses the history of an extremely outdated infrastructure showing how the United States has truly gone from seemingly infinite technological prowess to a land of structural instability. She brings humor and a smart eye to modern day solutions and also to the often surprising ways that these do well or are unsuccessful. And the results of inability are significant. Our national electrical grid grew during an era when monopoly, centralisation and standardisation meant durability. Yet as we've more and more become a country that caters to local needs, as various new green energy resources comes online, our considerable system is dangerously out of step. Charting the history of our electrical grid, Bakke helps us see what we all neglect, shows it as central to your culture and id as a people and reveals it to be the linchpin inside our aspirations for a clean-energy future.
