When electricity loses its buzz

Last Friday night, I found myself standing under a set of immense transmission lines in Coweta, Okla., listening to the buzz of traveling electricity. Some friends of mine own a piece of land blanketed by rolling hills dotted with transmission lines. In between a game of Capture the Flag and kickball, just before dusk, when everyone in northeastern Oklahoma flips on the lights, I listened to the buzz and soaked in the miracle of it all.

While the magic of electricity left me with that momentary tingly feeling, the reality of what’s missing in the power industry is enough to leave me with a migraine. The buzz of transmission towers, while still fascinating in the year 2011, was a 20th century development. For the most part, things in the power industry are as they’ve always been. The industry is aging, without much adaptation to the times at hand.

In the book “Perfect Power,” Robert Galvin, founder of the Galvin Electricity Initiative, and Kurt Yeager, former CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute, propone that it’s time for a breakthrough in the power industry. One of the questions posed: “Is the electrical industry stuck in a 20th century time warp?”

Over the last couple decades, the communications industry has undergone a dramatic change. Most of us grew up in homes where cell phones weren’t even on the radar scale, and we were content with our AT&T home telephone. Never did we imagine that we would someday carry a telephone in our pockets and have dozens of phone service providers to choose from.

“What consumers have today is the electrical performance and choice equivalent of the old analog, black rotary-dial telephone,” Galvin writes.

Just like the communications monopolies of times past, Galvin (former CEO of Motorola), asserts that monopoly utilities operate their base business on how much electricity they sell rather than on the quality, reliability and efficiency of service. Yet, consumers do not have a choice of where to get their electricity from.

While the American networks of electrification were heralded as the “the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century” by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the industry seems to have reached a place of complacency, dominated by aging equipment, blackouts and the aforementioned monopoly utilities.

One of the “Perfect Power” solutions for bringing the power industry out of the “20th century mindset” is the implementation of smart microgrids. “This approach will set the tone for comprehensive, creative solutions rather than timid patchwork answers.”

Are smart microgrids the key to launching the power industry from being an aging entity to becoming a progressive, developing system? I’ll be discussing “Perfect Power” in future blog entries, and would love to hear your thoughts on the Smart Grid and other concepts to advancing the power industry.