Transforming Electricity

The Coming Generation of Change

Walt Patterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134173976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This text reassesses the basic premises that have guided electricity development for more than a century in the light of new understanding, pressures and opportunities. It investigates the changes already in progress and those that may yet follow; their interactions and their implications for policy. As the world pursues sustainable development, what might sustainable electricity mean, and how can it be achieved?

1	INTRODUCTION: ELECTRIFYING CHANGES

Turn on the light.

You do it without thinking. You flick a switch and the room lights up. You’re not surprised. If you flick the switch and nothing happens, that’s the surprise. You take electric light for granted. So do some two billion other people. Electricity is just there; and so long as it is just there, how it gets there is no concern of yours. The government will keep the lights on. If they go off, you and millions more will be outraged.

Outrage is the wrong reaction. So is taking electricity for granted. More than half the population of the earth has no guarantee of electric light, or any other access to electricity. Moreover, within the coming quarter-century, even governments that now keep the lights on may no longer be able to do so. That does not mean that the lights will go off. But it does mean that governments may no longer have either the competence or the responsibility to keep them on. Something dramatic is happening to electricity.

In only a century, electric light and the systems that provide it have altered the course of human history. Electric light, electric motors, electronics and other manifestations of electricity make modern industrial society possible. Electricity systems may be the most spectacularly successful technology of the 20th century. They work so well that those who most rely on them hardly notice them. Nevertheless, anyone who relies on electricity systems had better start noticing what is happening to them. In the early years of the new millennium, the electricity system, the bloodstream of industrial society, is going to change almost beyond recognition. It will have to.

Noticing electricity

Electricity is invisible. Even when you’re using it you can’t see it. But you know it’s there. You turn on the light, the fan, the television, the computer or any of the other devices with wires attached; and you assume it will work. You pay no attention to the wires, where they go or what they are connected to, except perhaps to make sure the plug is in the socket. If, however, you follow the wires, you will find yourself caught up in arguably the most complex, wide-ranging and all-embracing industrial activity on the planet – an activity now plunged into a headlong process of change, whose outcome no one can clearly foretell.

Along the wires is an extraordinary assortment of specialized devices, all connected together. Some of the wires, called ‘transmission lines’, are strung from gangling towers in long loops across the landscape. Others are buried in trenches underground. Here and there, also linked by this intricate network of wires, are ‘power stations’ or ‘power plants’, including structures of enormous size – some with huge dams, others flanked by vast piles of coal, still others with massive concrete housings for nuclear reactors. The same network of wires is also connected to many millions of operating lights, motors, electronics and other equipment using the electricity produced in the power stations. When you switch on your reading lamp, it too becomes part of this active network, all interconnected, all operating in concert with one another. The wires may extend for thousands of kilometres, and cover millions of square kilometres. Following the wires everywhere they go will map out an electricity system.

You can take electricity for granted only because millions of others do not. Keeping your reading lamp on requires the combined efforts of a whole catalogue of organizations and their staffs. Someone has to design, build, operate and maintain the power stations, the transmission lines and the rest of the electricity system. Someone has to provide the fuel. Someone owns each part of the system. You may own the lamps and other equipment you use; others own the rest. Governments, electricity companies, engineering companies, fuel companies, equipment manufacturers and financiers must all work in concert to keep the system in stable, reliable operation, to ensure that your lamp does not go out. They are good at it. Within the past century, electricity systems have expanded to cover much of the globe – most of Europe, North America and Japan, cities everywhere, and even many rural areas in Asia, Latin America and Africa. The systems deliver services that have become essential to modern industrial society, including illumination, comfort, motive power, materials processing and information.

Nevertheless, despite their extraordinary variety and complexity, the staggering sums of money and numbers of people committed to them, and the crucial role of electricity in society, electricity systems used to be frankly boring. Everybody involved understood the ground rules, and they did not change much. Brief local flurries of controversy sometimes erupted, but when they subsided everything settled back into the same sedate pattern again. Shares in privately owned electricity companies were the quintessentially safe, reliable and unexciting investment for widows and orphans. They did not make much money, but they never lost it.

At the turn of the millennium, these comfortable old certainties have evaporated. Basic premises that everyone involved accepted without thought, which guided the evolution of electricity systems worldwide throughout the 20th century, suddenly no longer apply. Since the mid-1980s, governments in countries around the world have been changing the ground rules. Electricity companies that once knew their business thoroughly are now scrambling over unfamiliar terrain, seeking fresh footholds. New technologies and new fuels are entering the scene, bringing with them new risks and new opportunities. Financial pressures are mounting, as the sums involved range into not merely billions but trillions of dollars. Environmental constraints are tightening inexorably. Millions of old electricity jobs are disappearing, millions of new ones emerging. World electricity is in turmoil.

Where these developments may eventually lead, no one can say with certainty. But they will affect the lives of people all over the world, for better or worse. They will affect the way you use electricity, the way you pay for it and even the way you think about it. For those now without electricity the changes may bring them light, or deepen their darkness. In every sense of the old Chinese curse, electricity systems are now in interesting times. Taking them for granted may be the riskiest option of all.

Instant response

One reason you take electricity for granted is that nothing tells you directly that you are using it, or that it is costing you money. If, for instance, you live in Europe or North America, somewhere in your house, in a dim corner or a cupboard, is an electricity meter. You rarely if ever see it. The numbers on it indicate how much electricity is flowing through the wires in your house. They thus indicate, indirectly, how big your next electricity bill will be. If you were watching the meter when you turned on the light, you’d see the meter numbers speed up slightly. If you turned on the electric cooker the meter would speed up significantly, because it uses much more electricity. If each electrical device had a small meter attached, like the display on a video recorder, showing you how long it had been running and how much it was costing you, you might use electricity differently. Most of the time, however, you simply don’t get this information. All you get is the electricity – and, eventually, the bill.

You and most of your fellow electricity users are almost entirely passive participants on the electricity system. You have one key decision to make: whether and when to switch something on or off. As soon as you do, the rest of the system takes over and responds instantly. Switching on an electrical appliance connects it to the network. It starts taking electricity out and makes the pressure in the system drop slightly. Electrical engineers call this kind of pressure the ‘voltage’ of the electricity. They measure voltage continuously, throughout the system. On a large system, turning on one more appliance has almost no effect, because it represents such a tiny change for the entire system. Suppose, however, a popular television programme ends, and thousands of people get up from sofas and turn on lights and electric kettles all over the country at almost the same time. The consequent drop in electrical pressure or voltage on the system is so abrupt that it could cause the system to shut down. The operators have to be ready to pump more electricity into the system immediately, to maintain the voltage and keep the system in steady, stable operation.

That, indeed, is the key responsibility of the operators. They have to ensure that the electricity being used everywhere on the system is matched essentially exactly, moment by moment, by the electricity being fed into the system. This is harder than it sounds, for one crucial reason. Unlike, for instance, water or natural gas, electricity cannot be stored. Water and natural gas are actual substances; they can be stored in appropriate containers, anything from a plastic bag to a tank or reservoir. Electricity is not a substance. It is a physical effect happening throughout the wires or other materials that carry it. Electricity has to be made or ‘generated’ more or less at the instant it is used. When you turn on a light, some power station or ‘generator’ somewhere has to make just enough extra electricity to keep the light on. When you turn it off, some generator has to reduce its output by the same amount, at almost the same time.

Anything that takes electricity out is called a ‘load’ on the system. On a large system, people are switching electrical equipment on and off all the time, increasing or decreasing the total load. The overall effect is usually a gradual change, minute by minute and hour by hour. In Stockholm, for instance, the load on the system reaches its peak on cold winter evenings, when all the lights and heaters are on. In Tokyo, however, the peak load is on hot summer afternoons when all the fans and air conditioners are on. Whatever the load at a given moment, it must be matched essentially exactly by the amount of electricity being generated on the system at that moment. Generators come in many different sizes and kinds; a large electricity system will have many of them available. When you pay your electricity bill, you are paying to have generators somewhere out there respond instantly every time you turn something electrical on or off, at any time of day, all year round, year after year. The fact that you can do so at all ought to be astonishing. That you can do so without even thinking about it is more astonishing still.

Making electricity

Making all this possible in so many parts of the world involves a vast array of technology, breathtaking sums of money and elaborate organization. Until recently, however, electricity users themselves have had almost no role in this process except to switch things on and off. The legal and financial arrangements have been set up and supervised by governments, particularly national governments. The technical arrangements have been designed, manufactured and installed by engineering companies, including many of the largest companies in the world: General Electric, Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), Siemens, Mitsubishi and many other famous names. The electricity systems themselves have been operated by organizations that have grown with the systems, some well known – Electricité de France (EdF), Tokyo Electric Power, Ontario Hydro – and countless others known only to the locality they serve.

The activities of all these participants have been guided by a single basic idea. Large power stations generate electricity in large quantities and deliver it by wire to every user in the area, continuously adjusting the total amount being generated to match the total amount being used at any instant. This is a lot easier to say than it is to do, as Chapter 3 discusses in more detail. Nevertheless, throughout the past century this basic idea has been so successful that it has become what may be the world’s most vast and complex industrial activity.

Consider, for instance, the system whose wires come into your home. They may deliver enough electricity to light a dozen or more lamps; run a refrigerator, freezer, TV, video, vacuum cleaner, computer and other electrical equipment; and possibly operate a cooker and electric heating. Electrical engineers measure the amount of electricity being used in ‘watts’; a bright lightbulb may use 100 watts. For convenience they call 1000 watts a ‘kilowatt’, abbreviated kW, and 1000 kilowatts a ‘megawatt’, abbreviated MW.

Even without switching on everything electric at the same time, your home may use several thousand watts – that is, several kilowatts – of electricity from the system. If you operate a cooker using a kilowatt for an hour, the total amount of electricity you use is a ‘kilowatt-hour’. This quantity, abbreviated kWh, is called a ‘unit’ of electricity. The meter in your home measures the number of units you use; you will be billed accordingly.

TYPICAL ELECTRICITY USE IN HOUSEHOLD EQUIPMENT

Traditional incandescent light bulb:	40W, 60W, 100W
Compact fluorescent lamp (‘energy-efficient bulb’):	11W, 15W, 20W
Electric heater (‘electric fire’):	1000W (1 kW), 2000W (2 kW)
Hair dryer:	2400W (2.4 kW)
Television:	50W
Coffee grinder:	50W
Electric drill:	350W

(Refrigerators and cookers vary widely in the amount of electricity they use, depending on design and size, from several hundred watts to more than a kilowatt)

A moderate-sized city, with 100000 homes, plus offices, shops, schools, hospitals, factories, public buildings and street lighting, all connected to the electricity system, may use more than 1000 megawatts of electricity. Electrical engineers call 1000 megawatts a ‘gigawatt’, abbreviated GW. A single modern power station may be able to generate more than 1GW of electricity, enough for an entire such city. In 1996, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the power stations of the world could generate 3001GW. The total amount of electricity delivered to users was 12 053 billion units. That sounds like a lot of electricity. But the population of the earth is now some six billion people. On average, that would mean about 2000 units per person per year – only enough to keep ten 100-watt light bulbs burning six hours a day. If you live in Europe, North America or Japan, you probably use more than that for domestic lighting alone, not to mention all the other electrical equipment in your home, your workplace and almost everywhere else you go. Across the world, some people use much more electricity than the average, others much less. The gap between those with easy access to electricity and those without is wide, and getting wider.

At the end of the 20th century most of the 3001GW of power stations around the world generate electricity in one of three ways. So-called ‘hydroelectric’ stations use ‘water turbines’, spun by flowing water, to turn the generators. So-called ‘thermal’ stations use ‘steam turbines’, spun by hot high-pressure steam, produced either by burning fuel, most commonly coal, or by the heat from nuclear reactors. In 1995, according to the US Energy Information Administration, hydroelectric stations produced 2487 billion kilowatt-hours (‘terawatt-hours’ or TWh), fuel-fired thermal stations, 7833TWh and nuclear stations, 2203TWh. Throughout the past century, hydroelectric, fuel-fired and nuclear stations have determined the shape of the world’s electricity systems, as Chapter 3 describes more fully. As stations have grown ever larger, they have been sited in ever more remote locations. Carrying electricity from remote sites to users, in turn, has necessitated high-capacity long-distance transmission lines, stretching hundreds and even thousands of kilometres. A single electricity system, all interconnected, may now extend over an area of a million square kilometres or more, delivering electricity to more than 100 million people. Managing a system of such a size, ensuring that it remains in stable operation, responding instantly to its vast constituency of individual users, is by any criterion an extraordinary achievement. Yet it may not be good enough.

Electric dilemma

The picture of world electricity at the turn of the millennium appears impressive. But it lies under two lengthening, overlapping shadows. Despite the extraordinary expansion of electricity systems in the past half-century, nearly half the population of the earth is still beyond their reach. At the same time, the technologies and fuels hitherto so spectacularly successful now face increasing challenge for environmental reasons. The dilemma is daunting.

According to the World Bank, more than two billion people still do not have access to electricity. Despite the impressive expansion of electricity systems in developing countries between 1970 and 1990, an estimated 67 per cent of the population of rural areas of Africa, Latin America and Asia were still not connected. Worse still, population growth in many areas is far outstripping expansion of electricity systems; the percentage of people with access to electricity is not increasing but decreasing. More than a billion people live in millions of small, scattered settlements that have never been served by electricity transmission lines, and may never be. The capital cost alone of installing traditional electricity systems in these areas would be insupportable. A single connection may cost from US$20 to US$1000; poor rural villagers can afford neither the cost of the system, nor the cost of the electricity, nor indeed the cost of equipment to use the electricity. At the turn of the millennium, however, many of these rural poor are no longer complete...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Electrifying Changes
• 2. Turmoil in the Foreground
• 3. Historical Reasons
• 4. Changing the Ground Rules
• 5. Untangling the Issues
• 6. Bumpy Transitions
• 7. Electric Futures
• 8. Getting There
• Appendix A: Electric Jargon
• Appendix B: Electricity Generating Technologies
• Appendix C: Electric Reading
• Appendix D: Electricity on the Internet
• Index