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A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World
Joseph Henry Press
March 2007
On Sale: March 1, 2007
311 pages
ISBN: 030910260X
EAN: 9780309102605
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The electrical grid goes everywhere - it's the largest and
most complex machine ever made. Yet the system is built in
such a way that the bigger it gets, the more inevitable its
collapse. Named the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th
century by the National Academy of Engineering, the
electrical grid is the largest industrial investment in the
history of humankind. It reaches into your home, snakes its
way to your bedroom, and climbs right up into the lamp next
to your pillow. Relying on a sort of NATO alliance of
utilities pledged to help each other in time of need, vast
amounts of invisible resources are moved and exchanged on a
second's notice. At times, the grid almost seems alive, like
some enormous circulatory system that pumps life to big
cities and the most remote rural areas. Constructed of intricately interdependent components, it
operates on a rapidly shrinking margin for error. Things can
- and do - go wrong in this system and no matter how many
preventive steps we take are, failure is inevitable. Just
look at the colossal 2003 blackout, when 50 million
Americans lost power due to a simple error at a power plant
in Ohio; or a month later when 57 million Italians woke up
without cappuccino. Still, these two combined don't even
compare to the outage in 2001 that affected 226 million
people in India. As we get more and more dependent on electricity to perform
even the most mundane daily tasks - from infrared urinals
and sinks to automatic doors - the grid's inevitable
shortcomings will take a toll on populations around the
globe. As energy issues loom large on the nation's agenda
and our hunger for electricity only grows, The Grid is as
timely as it is compelling.
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