The Case Against The Grid

The Case Against The Grid…

Not sure where everyone might stand on this subject, but it is most definitely one of those Wooly-Mammoth-in-the-room nobody is really talking about kind of things.

Some background-

Electrical power is (usually) generated in one location and then transmitted across power lines to where it is used.

There are laws of physics involved that make it advantageous to produced that electricity at very high voltages for transmission and then convert it to the lower voltage that is required for it to be used.

Generally speaking, most of our appliances in a home are running on ~110/120 volts with a few of the more electrically demanding ones running at ~220/240 volts.

Also, generally speaking, the voltage coming out of the power plant is extremely high- on the order of hundreds of kilo-volts… Hundreds of thousands of volts.

One of the reasons for this is there are power losses associated with transmission of that power across those lines- and doing it at higher voltages makes it more ‘efficient’

(I know, sparky’s… that’s a very basic view and there’s plenty of science and physics we could go into but this isn’t a college paper for an electrical engineering degree).

The biggest point here is that power is generated in centralized locations at very high voltages (and sometimes stepped up in voltage), distributed across transmission lines, and then stepped back down to a lower voltage near the location the power will be used.

This conversion from higher voltage to lower voltage is done through the use of transformers. We’ll come back to these workhorses of the grid in a moment- but for now just understand that these are a critical item in the grid.

A local power plant will (often) send out power at very high voltages and step it down in strategic locations to a lower (but not yet ‘usable’) voltage and then distribute to more locations and eventually to a sub-station.

The power from your local sub-station comes out at a useable voltage or (in the case of many homes) at a slightly higher voltage and is stepped down with a transformer on a pole near the home.

It is kind of like a pyramid with the power plant at the top supplying just a few stations that then supply a few stations each- and so on all the way down to a local customer.

The station that feeds your home also feeds several other homes and businesses right there in your location. This is a local circuit (load center) that everyone is dependent on. If it goes down- every home and business it feeds goes down.

As we go higher in the distribution chain, if there is an issue that causes an outage- the end users affected by this outage grows very rapidly. If a load center could supply say 10 homes and is fed by a substation that powers 10 load centers- a problem with that substation affects 100 homes.

Enter the grid- imagine thousands of power plants across the country. Each makes power and sends it over the wires to the different locations it serves. Then, interconnect those distribution networks so that if a power plant were to go down, that local network could be supplied with the power plants nearby.

This is kind-of sort-of what we have going on in the country. The ‘grid’ is more or less a giant web of interconnected power plants spread across the country. It is broken down into sectors- and that’s too complicated for this discussion. Just know that the ‘grid’ can be manipulated to route power via different lines and it adds some reliability if there’s one line that goes down, another path might be available.

Ok, enough background… Remember those transformers?

Well, the really big ones are really big. They are very expensive. They have a very long lead time for manufacture and there’s not much of a supply sitting on the shelf ready to install if the need crops up.

These things are so big, they often can’t just be delivered to the location for installation without moving local power lines, traffic lights, etc. They’re that big- so even if there were a few sitting ready to go, it would take quite a while just to move it to the location.

This is also very high up on the distribution chain where if one of these bad boys goes down, it could take thousands of end users down with it.

These big-dog transformers are all over the country and are in various stages of age/condition- and are all vulnerable to some extent. And we all rely on them, unless…

We don’t rely on them.

We can do that by installing a disconnect switch, solar with batter back up (or a diesel generator?) on our home…

If (when?) one of these transformers goes down, it might take days or even weeks to replace it. If several go down at the same time? Chaos. There’s a great movie one might watch on the subject…

“Grid Down Power Up” might be a little scary for some folks, but I think it is a great educational video that every homeowner should be aware of. Scope it out here while it is available:

https://vimeo.com/760108157

Phew! That was a bit long, but I hope it was worth it!

That book I am writing to help folks learn more about solar and if it is right for their home is nearing completion- click here to get notified when I release it.

Be Good!

Curtis