I'm excited to be back on my old home turf next week, with two speaking events in Kansas City, Missouri, and Lawrence, Kansas.

Both events are centered on Before the Lights Go Out, my book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy.

Thursday, August 30, 7:00 pm — The Raven bookstore in Lawrence
I'll be back in my college town to talk about the weird, messy history of electricity, and the ways that writing online can help build a better book. Join me at 6 East 7th Street, Lawrence, Kansas.

Friday, August 31, 7:00 pm — Prospero's Books in Kansas City
My event at Prospero's will cover a lot of the same ground as The Raven event, but will get more in-depth on the engineering of how our electric grid works and why this flawed system affects what we can and can't do to solve our energy problems. RSVP for the Prospero's event (and get address info) on Facebook.

It began with a few small mistakes.

Around 12:15, on the afternoon of August 14, 2003, a software program that helps monitor how well the electric grid is working in the American Midwest shut itself down after after it started getting incorrect input data. The problem was quickly fixed. But nobody turned the program back on again.

A little over an hour later, one of the six coal-fired generators at the Eastlake Power Plant in Ohio shut down. An hour after that, the alarm and monitoring system in the control room of one of the nation’s largest electric conglomerates failed. It, too, was left turned off.

Those three unrelated things—two faulty monitoring programs and one generator outage—weren’t catastrophic, in and of themselves. But they would eventually help create one of the most widespread blackouts in history. By 4:15 pm, 256 power plants were offline and 55 million people in eight states and Canada were in the dark. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 ended up costing us between $4 billion and $10 billion. That’s “billion”, with a “B”.

But this is about more than mere bad luck. The real causes of the 2003 blackout were fixable problems, and the good news is that, since then, we’ve made great strides in fixing them. The bad news, say some grid experts, is that we’re still not doing a great job of preparing our electric infrastructure for the future.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front: The North American electric grid is not one bad day away from the kind of catastrophic failures we saw in India this week. I’ve heard a lot of people speculating on this, but the folks who know the grid say that, while such a huge blackout is theoretically possible, it is also extremely unlikely. As Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute put it, “An engineer will never say never,” but you should definitely not assume anything resembling an imminent threat at that scale. Remember, the blackouts this week cut power to half of all Indian electricity customers. Even the 2003 blackout—the largest blackout in North America ever—only affected about 15% of Americans.

We don’t know yet what, exactly, caused the Indian blackouts, but there are several key differences between their grid and our grid. India’s electricity is only weakly tied to the people who use it, Gellings told me. Most of the power plants are in the far north. Most of the population is in the far south. The power lines linking the two are neither robust nor numerous. That’s not a problem we have in North America.

Likewise, India has considerably more demand for electricity than it has supply. Even on a good day, there’s not enough electricity for all the people who want it, said Jeff Dagle, an engineer with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Advanced Power and Energy Systems research group. “They’re pushing their system much harder, to its limits,” he said. “If they have a problem, there’s less cushion to absorb it. Our system has rules that prevent us from dipping into our electric reserves on a day-to-day basis. So we have reserve power for emergencies.”

None of this means the North American grid is a perfect, or even an ideal, system. The electric grids that exist today evolved, they weren’t designed by anybody. Every electric grid on Earth is flawed, but they’re all flawed in different ways. So we can talk about serious problems with the North American grid—but that doesn’t mean that you should be stocking up on home generators and canned peas in preparation for an India-like event. The scale is different, and the problems are different, too.

So what did cause the 2003 blackout? There were a couple key issues, but at least one is likely to surprise you. First Energy, the conglomerate that owned both the broken generator and the failed alarm system, had also been lax on trimming trees near their power lines. It’s an amazingly simple, non-techy, problem, but it mattered.

I like to say that the grid is a lot like a lazy river at a waterpark. It’s not a line, it’s a loop—power plants connected to customers and back to power plants again. And like the lazy river, it has to operate within certain parameters. The electricity has to move at a constant speed (an analogy for what the engineers call frequency) and it has to flow at a constant depth (analogous to voltage). In order to maintain that constant speed and constant depth, you have to also maintain an almost perfect balance between supply and demand … everywhere, at all times. So when one generator goes out, the electricity it was supplying has to come from someplace else. Like a stream flowing into a new channel, the load will shift from one group of transmission lines to another.

But, the more electricity you run along a power line, the hotter the power line gets. And the hotter it gets, the more it droops, like a basset hound in a heat wave. If nearby trees aren’t trimmed, the lines can slump too close to the branches—which creates a short circuit. When that happens, the loads have to shift again. All of this disrupts the speed and the depth on the river of electrons. The more lines you lose, the more likely it is that the remaining lines will, themselves, droop into something. The more lines that short, the more power plants have to shut down to protect themselves from fluctuations in frequency and voltage. The more times you have to shift load around, the more the grid starts to get away from you. In 2003, six transmission lines went down in a row, several of them major channels for the flow of electricity. Those losses were what turned a small series of mistakes into a catastrophe.

Even more important than the untrimmed trees, though, was the lack of communication.

The North American electric grid is a patchwork quilt, not a single entity. It’s made up of chunks controlled by different—and often competing—utility companies. Those chunks are aggregated into management districts. In the case of the Eastern part of the continent, all of the management districts are aggregated into a larger joint district. There are a lot of hands working to make sure the grid operates the way it should. But those hands don’t always know what the others are doing, at least not fast enough.

The issue is something that grid experts call situational awareness—basically, the big picture. In 2003, the people trying to stop the blackout didn’t have a clear view of it. Partly, that had to do with the faulty software program that wasn’t turned back on and the alarm system failure that apparently went unnoticed. But it was also just how the grid worked. The systems in place to tell grid controllers what the electrons were doing moved a lot more slowly than the electrons themselves.

In 2003, it took about 30 seconds for data about what was happening on the grid to be gathered, compiled, analyzed, and displayed in a way that grid controllers could use. That sounds pretty fast, until you consider the fact that changes on the grid happen much, much faster***. If a power plant goes offline in Arizona, it can create a measurable effect in Canada in about a second. If your view of the grid is updated only every 30 seconds, you miss important details. After the 2003 blackout, grid experts went back and essentially replayed the whole thing in a computer modeling program. The idea was to try to get a better idea of where things went wrong and how a similar event could be prevented in the future. They found that, about an hour before the blackout, the grid was showing signs of stress that controllers didn’t see at the time, said Carl Imhoff, manager of the Energy and Environment Sector at PNNL. It wasn’t the controllers’ fault. They simply didn’t have the technology to see the big picture.

Today, that technology exists. Phasor Measurement Units are kind of the opposite of sexy. Also known as PMUs, they’re just anonymous little boxes that sit on server racks in electrical substations. But phasors are linked into transmission lines. They see what’s happening on the line—how well supply and demand are balanced, whether voltage and frequency are stable and within the normal range. That’s just one point of data, recorded in one place. But a network of phasors can tell you a lot. It can show you, for instance, if the stability of the grid is changing as electricity moves from Cleveland to Columbus. And the phasors process that information far more quickly. Today, our grid can give controllers information about the big picture in less than 10 seconds. Researchers like Massoud Amin are working on getting that response time down to fewer than 3 seconds.

If we’d had a phasor network in 2003, grid controllers would have had that hour warning about the problem. There’s a good chance they’d have been able to fix it, or, at least, make the resulting blackout smaller and more localized.

When it comes to PMUs, 2003 was really a wake-up call. It led utilities and the government to team up to install a true phasor network throughout the United States. That effort is currently ongoing. In 2009 there were maybe 200 phasors in operation. By the end of 2013, there will be more than 1000 installed throughout this country. Over the last five years a partnership between federal Recovery Act funds and private industry dollars has invested $7.8 billion in upgrading the grid, Massoud Amin said.

The problem, he added, is that this isn’t nearly enough.

Our grid is old. The average substation transformer is 42 years old—two years older than the designed lifespan of a substation transformer. For the most part, our grid hasn’t been modernized—it’s largely mechanical equipment operating a digital world, Clark Gellings said. Perhaps most importantly, the grid isn’t being prepared for the future.

”From 1995-2000, the electricity sector put less than ⅓ of 1% of net sales into research and development,” Massoud Amin said. “In the following six years, that number dropped to less than 2/10 of 1%. We are harvesting the existing infrastructure more and investing less and less in the future.”

Phasor networks are a success story in the making. So are new national rules Gellings told me about, which put a much higher penalty on utility companies that don’t keep their trees trimmed. One untrimmed tree can cost $1 million in fines. All of this will help prevent blackouts of the size we had in 2003. But it doesn’t help deal with what’s coming 20-30 years down the road.

It’s not just that the infrastructure itself will eventually age out. Where we get electricity from, who uses it, and how much we use is all changing. In the future, we’re going to have more electricity production happening in the rural Midwest, where wind resources are most abundant, but the people will still live far away. We keep using more electricity, in general, and we’re more dependent on it now. We’re only going to become more dependent in the future. Jeff Dagle told me that improvements are being made, but they might not be moving fast enough if there’s a major change in energy use—for instance, if Americans start buying electric cars at higher rates than they do today.

The frustrating thing is that this isn’t simply a technology problem. It’s also social and political. Just like the national grid is really a patchwork of grids, it’s also a patchwork of regulatory systems. That uncoordinated mixture of regulation and de-regulation often fails to incentivize the investments the grid actually needs. Building transmission lines, for instance, is a job that crosses multiple states. Many of those states aren’t going to get a direct benefit from the line, even if that’s what’s best on the whole. Local regulators may understand that, but when they have to operate in the best interests of their state or county, they might still challenge the line, Gellings said. This is part of why it can take as long as 12 years to get a single new transmission line built. In another example, de-regulation in many states has created a confused system where there are now lots of stakeholders in the electric grid, but nobody has an incentive to think about, or invest in, the long term.

If we want the grid to work as well three decades from now as it does today, we need to put some money into it. Massoud Amin has estimated the cost of grid improvements. To make the grid stronger—adding more high-voltage lines and upgrading the existing ones—he says we need to spend about $8 billion a year for 10 years. To make the grid smarter—digital, centralized, automated, and with the kind of big-picture communication that helps us stop blackouts before they happen—it’ll take an investment of $17-20 billion a year for 20 years.

That sounds like a lot of money. That sounds completely undoable. And maybe it is. But Amin says you have to think about what you’re saving, as well. Remember how much the 2003 blackout cost us? Most blackouts that happen aren’t that big. They’re local things, that happen to your neighborhood, or your town, or your county. But they happen a lot. Depending on what part of the United States you live in, the grid averages 90-214 minutes of blackout time per customer, per year*. And that’s not even counting the blackouts that happen because of extreme weather or other disasters, like fires. All that downtime adds up. Amin says the average cost is more than $100 billion per year.

And that’s the difference between an expense and an investment. Over time, the investment pays for itself.**

READ MORE
Learn about how the grid works and what grid controllers do by reading a free chapter from my book, Before the Lights Go Out.
Read the full report on the 2003 blackout

Power was restored today in India, where more than 600 million people had been living without electricity for two days. That's good news, but it's left many Americans wondering whether our own electric grid is vulnerable.

Here's the good news: The North American electric grid is not likely to crash in the kind of catastrophic way we've just seen in India. I'm currently interviewing scientists about the weaknesses in our system and what's being done to fix them and will have more on that for you tomorrow or Friday.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a chapter from Before the Lights Go Out, my book about electric infrastructure and the future of energy. If you want to understand why our grid is weak, you first need to understand how it works. The key thing to know is this—at any given moment, in any given place, we must have an almost perfect balance between electric supply and electric demand. Fluctuations of even fractions of a percent can send parts of the system towards blackout.

More importantly, that careful balance does not manage itself. Across North America there are people working, 24-7, to make sure that your lights can turn on, your refrigerator runs, and your computer works. They're called grid controllers or system operators. Most utility customers have never heard of these guys, but we're all heavily dependent on them. They keep the grid alive and, in turn, they keep our lives functioning—all without the benefit of batteries or any kind of storage.

Joel Mickey has worked behind the curtain for twenty-five years, controlling the flow of electricity first for the Houston Light and Power utility company and now for ERCOT, where he’s the director of market operating systems ... Like a lot of controllers, he worked his way up the pole, literally, starting out as an eighteen-year-old lineman —one of the people who show up on your block whenever a rogue tree branch takes out an electric wire. On Mickey’s desk at ERCOT, there’s a black-and-white photo of a very young kid in a hard hat, with a leather harness cinched around his hips. Linemen are a noticeable part of the electric system, but, at least when Mickey started working, they weren’t considered terribly special. Along with maintenance workers at substations and power plant operators, entry-level jobs such as this were lumped together under one bad pun—“Plant Life,” the single- celled algae at the bottom of a Great Chain of Being, which regarded the wizards of system control as the epitome of creation. It was pos- sible to evolve your way up the chain, but it wasn’t easy.

To become a system controller, Mickey had to vie against a hundred-odd applicants for one single job. His first year, he mostly just traveled from place to place throughout the utility’s territory, learning a controller’s craft by watching what the experienced guys did. In fact, Mickey didn’t get to touch much of anything for the first five years. It was an almost-medieval apprenticeship, designed to produce a feudal lord of the electric grid, who would be all-knowing and always right.

That last part was especially important. Back then, each utility company generated its own power, owned its own lines, and controlled its own chunk of the grid, which was still, at that point, mostly walled off from other chunks. A system controller had to make sure there was enough generation to meet demand, but he was also in charge of turning individual power lines on and off for maintenance. At a big utility such as Houston Light and Power, that could mean fifteen or twenty lines in flux during the course of a single day. The controllers had to keep electricity flowing to customers, make sure certain lines were deactivated and reactivated at the right times, and do both of those jobs while simultaneously managing everything else going on in the system. It was a lot like being an air traffic controller, Mickey says. There were lives in his hands.

“A thunderstorm would come through, and a lot of the distribution circuits would trip off from the weather,” he says. “And we had to make decisions on closing the connection back down or not. I mean, occasionally, those lines go down in someone’s backyard and a kid goes out to play. You know, you always have that in the back of your head while you’re just pushing these little buttons. It’s scary sometimes.”

Read the rest of "The Emerald City" — chapter 4 of Before the Lights Go Out

Where did our electric grid come from? It's a complicated question to answer. That's because the grid we have today didn't come from any single place. Instead, its origins are scattered, distributed geographically, technologically, and philosophically.

Different people built different parts of the grid in different ways and for different reasons. For many years—up until the 1970s in some places—individual towns and cities were independent grids that weren't connected to anything else around them. They functioned as little islands, incapable of reaching out for help when things went wrong.

More importantly, the grid wasn't designed. It evolved. Nobody ever really sat down and thought about how to build the best grid possible. The grid as we know it was assembled from bits and pieces, from mini-grids that were often built to be cheap and to go up quickly. Quality wasn't always priority number one.

I think the story of the electric grid in Appleton, Wisconsin—the second centralized electric grid in the world and the first hydroelectric power plant in the world—is a great example of all of this history in action.

Last month, I got to talk about Appleton at a Barnes and Noble in the Bay Area. The video of that talk went up on CSPAN Book TV yesterday. It's not available for embedding, unfortunately, but I encourage you to give it a watch. The talk covers not only history, but also the importance of writing about science online, rather than in print. You guys, as commenters at BoingBoing, have made my writing better—and for that you get a shout-out. (Plus: At the 5 minute mark, you can see a little cameo of Dean and Pesco in the audience.)

Watch the video at Book TV

Learn more about the history of the electric grid, and how the grid works today, by reading my book, Before the Lights Go Out.

When we talk about energy, we often talk about it in very disconnected ways. By that, I mean we talk about new renewable generation projects, we talk about cleaning up dirty old power plants, and we talk about personal decisions you and I can make to use less energy, or get more benefits from the same amount.

What we fail to talk about is how all those ideas fit together into a coherent whole. And that matters, because our energy problems (and our energy solutions) are about more than just swapping sources of power or making individual choices. We have to fix the systems, not just the symptoms.

Back in April, I got to go on Minnesota Public Radio's "Bright Ideas" to talk about my book, Before the Lights Go Out. Now MPR has the entire hour-long interview up on video. You can watch the whole thing if you want. But, if you're short on time, I'd recommend the stretch from about minute 8:30 to 10:50. That's where I explain in more detail why systems—infrastructures—are so important and why we can't solve our energy problems without focusing on how choices and sources fit into those larger issues.

Watch that clip, then read this Minneapolis Star-Tribune article about how investments in transportation-oriented bicycle infrastructure have changed the way Minneapolites think about biking and dramatically increased the number of people who choose to bike. I think you'll see some thematic connections.

Learn more about how our energy infrastructures shape our choices and our lives by reading Before the Lights Go Out.

Video Link

Electricity is generated at power plants. You know that already. But to really understand how it gets to your house—and why you can count on it getting there reliably—you have to understand that our electric system is more complicated than it looks. The electric grid isn't just about you and your connection to a power plant. There are lots of thing that have to happen behind the scenes to make sure your refrigerator stays cold and your lights turn on.

One of the key components in the system are grid control centers—places where technicians manage electric supply and electric demand. This is important. In order for the grid to operate without blackouts there must always be an almost perfect balance between supply and demand. The grid doesn't really include any electrical storage, so that balance has to be maintained manually—on a minute-by-minute basis—by grid controllers who work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This isn't the best way to make a grid work, but it's what we've done since the earliest days of electricity.

In the April issue of Discover, I take readers on a tour of one of these grid control centers.

1. A River Runs Through It
 Power plants generate electricity, but they do not create anything from scratch. Instead, generators take electrons, which normally orbit the nucleus of an atom, and force them to move independently through the grid’s closed path. When too many electrons build up or their numbers in the system (monitored here) fall too low, you get a total loss of power: a blackout.

Read the rest of story at Discover

Meet the grid controllers and learn more about the inner workings of our electric system in my book, Before the Lights Go Out.

In the left-hand corner of this photo, towards the back of the shot, you can see what researchers at Colorado State University jokingly call "the dirtiest wind power in America."

In reality, it's a diesel-powered electric generator—just a smarter version of the kind of machine that you might kick on at your house during a blackout. But this dirty diesel is actually helping to make our electric grid cleaner. This room is a smart grid research laboratory, a place where scientists and engineers learn more about how wind and solar power affect our old electric infrastructure, and try to develop systems that will make our grid more stable and more sustainable.

They use this diesel generator to model wind power on a micro-grid. The electricity produced by a wind farm doesn't enter the grid as a steady, flat signal. Instead, it fluctuates, oscillating up and down with shifts in wind currents. The diesel generator can mimic those patters of electricity production. With it, Colorado State researchers can study the behavior of wind currents all over the United States without having to have labs in all those places. They can also recreate wind events that have already happened—like a major storm—to find out how that event affected the grid and learn how to better adapt the grid to future situations.

The Energy and Engines Conversion Lab at Colorado State University

Learn more about how the grid works and how renewables fit into our existing infrastructure in my book, Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us.

Today, most of our electricity is made by facilities that can power millions of homes at a time, and which are located a long way away from the people who use that power. For instance, the Kansas is currently embroiled in a long-drawn-out controversy over whether or not to build a new coal power plant in the far southwest corner of the state. If it gets built, that power plant will be 200 miles, in any direction, from the nearest town with a population greater than 30,000 people. But the power plant could produce enough electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes—an earlier version of the design could have powered millions.

It works that way because, like most things, it's both cheaper and more resource efficient to produce electricity in bulk, rather than a little bit at a time here and there. That Kansas coal plant is meant to produce electricity for seven different Western states. Not just Kansas.

For a number of reasons—but particularly because of the high, NIMBY-influenced costs of building the transmission lines that bridge the gap between these big power plants and the people who use them—we now have some opportunities to produce electricity at a smaller scale and still have it make sense. But what exactly does "small" mean? Depending on who you talk to, you'll get a different answer. And that answer has big implications for electric reliability and how our grid infrastructure operates.

At the Atlantic.com, you can find an excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out, my new book, that discusses this difference, and the benefits and detriments of shared systems vs. energy independence.

When I talked to scientists and utility industry experts about decentralized generation, what they pictured was power production on the scale of Verdant Power's hydroelectric turbines beneath the East River or a gas-fired cogeneration plant that produced heat and electricity for a university campus. They thought of biofuels, and imagined a stationary central refinery, much smaller than the facilities that process oil into gasoline for the entire country but large enough to be industrialized. Electric capacities would be between 1 and 100 megawatts--enough to power hundreds or thousands of homes at a time. Economies of scale would still apply. The energy would still have to travel--whether by tanker truck or power line--to reach the people who wanted to use it.

Yet when I talk to my friends and family about decentralized generation, their minds immediately jump to something very different. To them, decentralized generation isn't only a somewhat smaller version of a system that already exists, like a scale model in a toy train set. Instead, they thought of decentralization as the creation of an entirely new, entirely separate system. They imagined a world where they didn't have to pay the electric company every month, because a one-time investment would allow them to make all of the electricity they needed with the help of the sun or the wind. No more rate hikes. No more ugly electric power lines threaded through their lives. That's what my friends and family were excited about. They wanted energy on site, something they could feel that they made by themselves. They loved the idea of the Madelia Model's traveling biofuel machine. Cogeneration plants bored them.

I think that this disconnect boils down to an issue of control. Scientists and utility experts have always been at the helm, guiding energy production. At least, they have been for as long as energy has been a scientific industry, for about a hundred years or so. When the rest of us turned energy production over to this small group, we got some benefits out of the deal.

Read the rest of the excerpt at The Atlantic.

Learn more about decentralized generation, and how the grid works, by reading my book Before the Lights Go Out.

If you only have the vaguest notion of what a "smart grid" actually is, don't feel bad. This is one of those energy buzzwords that confuses a lot of people. Part of the problem is that utility companies don't often do a very good job of communicating this stuff. They tell you it's good. They say something hand-wavey about the Internet. And then they pretty much leave you to fend for yourself.

The other part of the problem: "Smart grid" is one word that refers to more than one thing. A smart grid is actually lots of different technologies. They're related. But they do different jobs in different ways, and even one tool might have different levels of functionality that apply to it. That fact is really clear when you visit a smart grid research laboratory, as I did earlier this week at the Colorado State University.

The school's Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory houses a little micro-grid, where electricity can be generated, used, and stored in ways that model the workings of the real-life grid. The smart grid technologies the laboratory is used to study apply to every part of that system—smart grid is part of generation, it's part of how electricity is moved around, it's part of how we consume electricity, and it's part of how we balance supply and demand and avoid blackouts. In other words: This seemingly vague and esoteric concept is actually closely tied to practical, day-to-day realities.

Yesterday, I got to go on NPR's Marketplace Tech Report to talk about two smart grid technologies that you're likely to get some hands-on experience with in the near future.

Today’s electrical grid, [Koerth-Baker] says, is something of a high-wire act. “The grid, in order to function, has to have an almost perfect balance between electric supply and electric demand,” says Koerth-Baker. “And, there are people that work in these centers all around the U.S., working 24 hours, seven days a week to make sure that happens, and they have to work on a minute-by-minute basis, so the smart grids are really about helping them maintain that balance.”

Listen to the whole interview at Marketplace Tech Report.

Learn more about smart grids and how our electric system work by reading my book, Before the Lights Go Out.

We grow a lot of corn in the United States, much of which never sees the inside of a human stomach. In fact, in 2010, something like a quarter of all the corn grown in this country went to ethanol production. That's a massive amount of corn grown for gas tanks. And it's a problem.

The process of growing corn is tremendously energy intensive, and it has some far-reaching drawbacks that threaten the future of vital farmlands in the Midwest. Corn crops provide steady, reliable income for farmers. But the risks likely outweigh those benefits, at least at the quantities in which we now grow corn.

In the spring of 2009, I experienced some of those risks first hand. At Smithsonian.com, you can read a excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out, my book about the future of energy. The excerpt is about Madelia, Minnesota, a small town where local farming advocates are trying to promote a more sustainable cropping system, and a better way to grow biofuels—one that provides incentives for farmers to grow less corn, not more.

In the course of reporting that story, I ran into a dust storm—a phenomenon that is related to the way corn grows and what we have to do to the soil to keep producing massive corn crops year after year.

The wind had started the day full of bluster, and it was positively furious by the afternoon, while the open, empty fields that flanked the highway offered nothing to slow the wind down. This alone wouldn’t have been a big problem. I grew up in Kansas, and I know how to steer a car through a windstorm. The issue was what I could see ahead of me—or, rather, what I couldn’t see. Out of nowhere, a gray cloud rose up to hover over the highway, swallowing semi-trucks and digesting them into sets of disembodied tail lights. I had barely enough time to realize I wasn’t looking at fog before I plunged into the thick of it.

The sun disappeared. Gravel pinged against the car windows. I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t artificially lit. In a panic, I turned on my headlamps just as I drove out the other side of the gritty haze, back into a normal, windy spring day. The “cloud” was made of dirt, and a mile or so up the road, another gray ribbon of it stretched across the horizon. I went through three or four of these dust clouds before I reached the exit for Madelia.

Even in town, the dust was not easily vanquished. I parked my car downtown, beneath the prow of a movie theater awning, and stepped out into air so texturized you could almost gnaw on it. Flecks of dust stuck in my sun block. When I opened my mouth, grit came in.

I had traveled to Madelia to meet with Linda Meschke, the woman who had become the driving force behind the Madelia Model, and I’d left my house dressed for the occasion, wearing the tidy business-casual wear of a young reporter. Those dust clouds knocked me down a peg. By the time I’d walked two blocks through downtown Madelia, my skin was turning pink, and my hair was a winded red whirl glued into place under a layer of grime. Meschke didn’t seem to mind my sorry state. Instead, she just nodded slowly and said, “It’s a little windy out here today.”

At that point, I still didn’t quite understand what I had seen. Dust clouds such as this, I knew, were related to soil erosion, but it wasn’t until I talked to Meschke that I was able to connect the dots between the dust in my hair and the goals of the Madelia Model.

Read the full excerpt at Smithsonian.com.

Read my book, Before the Lights Go Out, to learn more about efforts to localize energy generation.

Two years ago, if you'd asked me what I thought about something like cap and trade, or a carbon tax, I would have said that they were interesting ideas, but probably not worth the trouble of fighting for. I didn't think a price on carbon was necessary and, in fact, I was worried it could do more harm than good.

Doing the research for my book, Before the Lights Go Out, changed my perspective. There are risks to any mechanism you use to put a price on carbon (there are risks to everything we do), and it's still not something we could institute easily (thanks, politics!), but I've come to think that this one thing could be the easiest method to change the way we make and use energy. Energy—and more importantly, reducing fossil fuel use—isn't intuitive. It's often hard to see how we're using fossil fuels, and make decisions about how to use less of them. A price on carbon, however you do it, takes some of the guesswork out of that. Instead of having to become some kind of Super Green Living Expert, all you have to do is do what's cheapest.

Grist.org posted an excerpt from my book this week, and they also did a short interview with me. One of the things they asked about was carbon pricing:

We’ve become dependent on fossil fuels for a reason — not because of any evil plot, but because these fuels are just that much more powerful than anything that came before them. The power of coal, the portability of liquid gasoline: There is amazing value there. At the same time, we’re also talking about fuels we have limited supplies of. And those fuels, when we use them, also cost us money in the form of health-care costs and climate change adaptation costs.

Right now, the price we pay for those fuels doesn’t really account for either the amazing benefits or the awful limitations. It’s an artificial price, based on simple, direct supply and demand. It doesn’t take the long term into account. It doesn’t take economy-wide effects into account.

If we valued fossil fuels at what they are really worth to us, then a lot of the other stuff would fall into place. That mixture of technologies and policies would happen faster, and more naturally, because it would be based on a natural incentive.

It’s reasonable for people to not want to spend half their paycheck on a fuel that is absolutely necessary to their life. But paradoxically, if we had a price on carbon, and the cost of those fuels went up, then businesses and governments and individuals would find ways to get people the services they needed at a lower cost. Right now, there’s not enough of an incentive for that.

Read the rest of the interview at Grist.org

Read more about why I think carbon pricing matters in Before the Lights Go Out.

Paul Douglas is a Minneapolis/St.Paul meteorologist. Meteorologists don't study the same things as climate scientists—remember, weather and climate are different things—but Douglas is a meteorologist who has taken the time to look at research published by climate scientists and listen to their expertise. Combined with the patterns he's seen in weather, that information has led Douglas to accept that climate change is real, and that it's something we need to be addressing.

Paul Douglas is also a conservative. In a recent guest blog post on Climate Progress, he explains why climate isn't (or, anyway, shouldn't be) a matter of political identity. We'll get back to that, but first I want to call attention to a really great analogy that Douglas uses to explain weather, climate, and the relationship between the two.

You can’t point to any one weather extreme and say “that’s climate change”. But a warmer atmosphere loads the dice, increasing the potential for historic spikes in temperature and more frequent and bizarre weather extremes. You can’t prove that any one of Barry Bond’s 762 home runs was sparked by (alleged) steroid use. But it did increase his “base state,” raising the overall odds of hitting a home run.

Mr. Douglas, I'm going to be stealing that analogy. (Don't worry, I credit!)

A few weeks ago, I linked you to the introduction from my new book, Before the Lights Go Out, where I argue that there are reasons for people to care about energy, even if they don't believe in climate change—and that we need to use those points of overlap to start making energy changes that everyone can agree on, even if we all don't agree on why we're changing.

But there's another, related, idea, which Paul Douglas' essay gets right to the heart of. Just like there's more than one reason to care about energy, there's also more than one way to care about climate. Concern for the environment—and for the impact changes to the environment could have on us—is not a concept that can only be expressed in the terms of lefty environmentalism.

You and I can think about the environment in very different ways. We can have very different identities, and disagree on lots of cultural and political issues. All of those things can be true—and, yet, we can still come to the same, basic conclusions about climate, risk, and what must be done. Here's Douglas' perspective:

I’m a Christian, and I can’t understand how people who profess to love and follow God roll their eyes when the subject of climate change comes up. Actions have consequences. Were we really put here to plunder the Earth, no questions asked? Isn’t that the definition of greed? In the Bible, Luke 16:2 says, “Man has been appointed as a steward for the management of God’s property, and ultimately he will give account for his stewardship.” Future generations will hold us responsible for today’s decisions.

This concept—Creation Care—is something that I've summed up as, "Your heavenly father wants you clean up after yourself." It's not a message that is going to make sense to everybody. But it's an important message, nonetheless, because it has the potential to reach people who might not otherwise see a place for themselves at this table.

Too often, both liberals and conservatives approach climate change as something that is tangled up in a lot of lifestyle, political, and cultural choices it has nothing to do with. Those assumptions lead the right to feel like they can't accept the reality of climate change without rejecting every other part of their identities and belief systems. Those same assumptions lead the left to spend way too much time preaching to choir—while being confused about why people outside the congregation aren't responding to their message.

That's why essays like Douglas' are so important. We look at the world in different ways. We come by our values for different reasons. But even though we might take different paths, we can come to some of the same places. Let's respect that. And let's have those conversations. Climate change is about facts, not ideologies. It's about risks that affect everyone. We need to do a better job of discussing climate change in a way that makes this clear. And that means reaching out to people with language and perspectives that they can identify with.

Read Paul Douglas' full post on Climate Progress.

Read more about energy, climate, and what we can do to make the message of climate science more universal in my book, Before the Lights Go Out.

Today, most of the electricity in the United States is generated in very large facilities—capable of serving millions of homes—far away from the people who will actually use that electricity. We do it this way because it makes financial sense. It's cheaper to produce electricity in bulk and ship it over transmission lines, than it would be to produce a little electricity in a lot of places.

Or, at least, that would be the case if NIMBYism didn't keep getting in the way. Not In My Backyard movements don't just affect the construction of the actual power plant. And they don't just affect fossil fuels. Transmission lines serve both clean and dirty generation and they have to cross hundreds, or even thousands, of miles to reach their destinations. Along the way, they cross lots of people's property, skirt dozens of towns, and maybe even cut through federal lands. All of that means added cost. Today, experts have told me, it's often more expensive to build the transmission lines to feed a power plant than it is to built the power plant itself.

And that opens some opportunities.

Across the United States, there are pockets of sustainable energy resources not quite large enough to support a big power plant, but potentially very useful to us, nonetheless. And the high cost of transmission means that these resources are starting to make more financial sense. Chief among these is small-scale hydropower. At Txchnologist, I wrote a piece about small-scale hydro—how it works and what we stand to gain by thinking about the scale of electricity generation in a different way.

Kansas is not a state that’s known for its water resources. In fact, when European settlers first reached this region, it was a semi-arid, treeless plain of grass. In 1931, when historian Walter Prescott Webb wrote about the settlement of Kansas, and other Great Plains states, he described “the search for water” as a “continuous and persistent” issue.

It’s not terribly surprising then to learn that Kansas has only a trifling supply of hydroelectric power. Throughout the whole state, the annual mean in production is just 1 megawatt—enough to power fewer than 800 homes, or roughly 0.01 percent of the Hoover Dam’s nameplate capacity.

But Kansas has the potential for much more. In fact, the state could be getting almost 300 megawatts of electric capacity from water power – enough electricity for 240,000 homes. The key: That potential is only accessible if you’re willing to think local.

Read the rest of the story at Txchnologist.

Learn more about decentralized electricity generation by reading my book, Before the Lights Go Out.

The book comes out on April 10th and pre-orders have already started shipping. Between now and the end of April, you can earn a fun prize for telling other people about my book.

1) Tell people on your social networks that you're reading Before the Lights Go Out. This applies to Facebook, G+, or Twitter. When you talk about it, be sure to tag me in the post—@maggiekb1 on Twitter, Maggie Koerth-Baker on Facebook and G+—so I know that you mentioned the book.

In return, I'll send you a sticker with my signature and personal thank-you. You can put it in your printed book and create an instant signed copy. Or, if you're an e-book reader, you can put the sticker on ... something else. Maybe your e-book reader. Maybe your pet/baby. Either way, it's yours!

Here are two myths you need to let go of:

The solution to high gas prices is more oil.

Climate change is something that happens to polar bears and people from Kiribati.

The truth is that fossil fuels are extremely useful and valuable. And, by their very nature, the supplies are limited. Likewise, climate change isn't just something that's going happen—it's already taking place, and you can see the effects in your own backyard.

Too often, I think, we talk about the risks of fossil fuel dependence and climate change in ways that make them seem abstract to the very people who use the most fossil fuels and create the most greenhouse gases. That's a problem. There are lots of reasons to care about energy. But I think that fossil fuel limits and climate change are the most pressing reasons. And I think it's incredibly important to discuss those very real risks in a way that actually feels very real.

This isn't about morality, or lifestyle choices, or maintaining populations of cute, fuzzy animals. (Or, rather, it's not just about those things.) Instead, we have to consider what will happen to us and how much money we will have to spend if we choose to do nothing to change the way we make and use energy.

Over at Scientific American, you can read an excerpt from my upcoming book, Before the Lights Go Out. In it, you'll read about the energy risks hanging over the Kansas City metro area—a place that, in many ways, resembles the places and lifestyles shared by a majority of Americans. You've probably never been to Merriam, Kansas. But you can look at Merriam and see what could happen in your hometown.

Merriam isn't a small town. There's nothing really recognizable as a small town central business district. Instead, Merriam's stores and offices are mostly concentrated along two major thoroughfares—Shawnee Mission Parkway and Johnson Drive. These wide, multilane roads are dotted with clusters of shopping centers and big box stores, like necklaces strung with fat pearls. The municipal building and the police station are a couple of nondescript offices that sit off the frontage of Shawnee Mission Parkway, on a ridge overlooking the Interstate. Nothing about that says, "Classic Americana."

Yet Merriam isn't a suburb, either—or an urban city. It's too dense to be the first and not dense enough to be the latter. Merriam has a mixture of house styles. Drive down one street, and you'll see a 1930s bungalow standing shoulder to shoulder with a spare little 1950s Cape Cod. Next to that, there's a 1980s split-level with windows on the front and the back but none on the sides. More than three generations of the American Dream are living here.

It's ironic that Merriam doesn't really fit any of the classic American paradigms, because, quite frankly, most of us have already left those paradigms behind. We talk about this country as if it's full of neatly defined small towns, big cities, and tidy suburbs. In reality, the places where we live are lot mushier than that. Merriam isn't the exception. Merriam is the rule.

Read the rest of this excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out at Scientific American.

How many batteries have you used today?

Energy storage devices have become an integral part of our lives, but they still aren't really a part of our electric grid. There are some good reasons for that—at that scale of storage, batteries become gigantic and extremely expensive. But the lack of storage on the grid has some distinct drawbacks, putting the stability of our electric system at risk and making it harder to add in lots of renewable energy generation.

Because of that, researchers are looking for ways to get the benefits of batteries without some of the detriments. There are lots of different ways to do this, but one solution is particularly awesome to describe. Hint: It involves caves.

Last Friday, I had a guest post on i09 explaining Compressed Air Energy Storage, an old technology that could be one of the most cost-effective ways to store energy at a grid scale.

At any given moment, there must be almost exactly the same amount of electricity being produced as there is being consumed. If the balance tilts either way-even by a fraction of a percent-it could lead to a blackout. To simply keep the lights on, the grid has to be constantly monitored, with controllers predicting demand and making small adjustments, minute-by-minute, to supply. This happens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

... That's where CAES comes in. CAES systems store energy underground in the form of compressed air, but to make it work you have to start with the right kind of geology. In particular, you need a space that's airtight. This means that you can't just pump air into the sort of cave you've toured while on vacation. Instead, you have to find a hollowed-out space underground that used to hold something naturally-such as a natural gas reservoir that's had all of the gas pumped out of it.

Read the rest at i09

Learn more about how the grid works and why storage is so important by reading my book, Before the Lights Go Out.

Join me tomorrow at 11:00 am Eastern for a live chat with editors from Treehugger.com.

They'll be talking with me about my new book, Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us.

The key message I want people to take away from this book: Our energy problems (and our energy solutions) are about more than just swapping out fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable resources. Instead, what matters more is the infrastructures we live with, which dictate how we use energy, where we get it from, and how much we consume. If you want a more sustainable energy future, you'll need to focus on infrastructure. This isn't just about sources—it's about systems.

The chat will be embedded on Treehugger.