On February 7, 1967, Homer Lutzenheuser flipped a switch in Nebraska and more than five decades passed before a dream came true.
The power grids of the United States were interconnected, creating an interconnected machine that stretched from coast to coast.
Today, the American power grid is the largest machine in the world.
It has more than 7,300 power generating plants, connected by about 11 million kilometers of power lines, transformers and substations.
Power grids span Earth's continents,
delivering electricity around the clock. They're major engineering feats—but making them work depends on a delicate balance.
Their components must always work in harmony,
maintain a constant frequency across the grid, and match energy supply with demand. If there is too much power in the system, you get unsafe power spikes that can overheat and damage equipment.
Too little power and you get a blackout. Therefore, to eliminate this imbalance, power grid operators monitor the grid from sophisticated control centers.
They forecast energy demand and adjust which power plants are active, signaling them to raise or lower their output to accurately meet current demand.
By considering factors such as the availability and cost of energy resources, grid operators create a "dispatch curve," which maps the order in which energy sources will be used. The grid defaults to using energy from the beginning of the first curve.
Generally, resources are sorted by price.
Initially they are renewable because their production costs are very low. Some grids, such as those in Iceland and Costa Rica, run on more than 98% clean energy. But most dispatch curves have a greater mix of carbon-free and carbon-emitting energy sources.
That means where your electricity is coming from — and how clean it is — varies throughout the day — as often as every few minutes. Take the state of Kansas. Despite being an abundant wind resource, it regularly relies on carbon-emitting power plants.
This is because wind energy is especially high at night.
But, this happens even when demand is low. Therefore, Kansas wind energy is actually regularly harnessed to prevent excess electricity from damaging the grid.
And comparable scenarios add up to a bigger problem around the world. Thankfully, reliance on renewables is increasing. But power grids are often unable to make full use of them.
Many were not designed around only intermittent energy sources and cannot store large amounts of electricity. Researchers are experimenting with unique storage solutions.
However, it will take time and considerable investment. But hope is not lost. We have an opportunity to work with our existing power grids in a new way: by shifting some of our energy use to times when clean electricity is available.
By leaning into this concept,
called "load flexibility," we can help smooth out peaks in demand, which will put less stress on the grid and reduce the need for non-renewables.
So researchers are developing automated emissions-reduction technologies that tap energy-use data and ensure that appliances get power from the grid at the cleanest times.
In fact, such smart devices already exist. So, how big of an impact can they have?
If smart technologies such as air conditioners,
water heaters and electric vehicle chargers are implemented in the Texas power grid, the state's emissions could be reduced by nearly 20 percent.
In other words, when some devices tap into the grid, synergistically, 6 million fewer tons of carbon are emitted annually than Texas alone. Now, imagine what it looks like on a global scale.
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