The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

Amazon.com Price: $16.20 (as of 11/10/2019 07:54 PST- Details)

Description

A revelatory look at our national power grid–how it developed, its current flaws, and how it will have to be completely reimagined for our fast-approaching energy future.

America’s electrical grid, an engineering triumph of the twentieth century, is turning out to be a poor fit for the present. It isn’t just that the grid has grown old and is now in dire need of basic repair. Today, as we invest great hope in new energy sources–solar, wind, and other alternatives–the grid is what stands most firmly in the way of a brighter energy future. If we are hoping to realize this future, we want to reimagine the grid according to twenty-first-century values. It is a project which forces visionaries to work with bureaucrats, legislators with storm-flattened communities, moneymen with hippies, and the left with the right. And though it might not yet be obvious, this revolution is already well under way.

Cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke unveils the many facets of The united states’s energy infrastructure, its most dynamic moments and its most stable ones, and its essential role in personal and national life. The grid, she argues, is an essentially American artifact, one which developed with us: a product of bold expansion, the occasional foolhardy vision, some genius technologies, and constant improvisation. Most of all, her focus is on how Americans are changing the grid at this time, every so often with gumption and big dreams and every so often with legislation or the brandishing of guns.

The Grid tells–entertainingly, perceptively–the story of what has been referred to as “the largest machine on the planet”: its fascinating history, its problematic present, and its potential role in a brighter, cleaner future.

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