Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

       Introduction Confessions of a Petroleum Addict

      The trouble started on an August afternoon in a remote field in northern Ohio, miles from any town large enough to be marked on a standard road atlas. The field was empty except for scattered deciduous trees—maple, poplar, oak—thick with late-summer leaves. The ground was scrubby and parched. A nearby river rolled lazily in the summer heat. The only trace of humanity hung above the trees—an electrical cable known as the Harding-Chamberlin Line, carrying 345,000 volts of power.

      By three o’clock the air temperature had risen to 90 degrees, and the cable itself had reached nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit—roughly twice its average temperature. The aluminum core of the 3-inch-thick wire was expanding with the heat and beginning to sag.

      Five hundred miles due east of that meadow I was sitting at my desk in New York City when, at 4:09 p.m., my computer suddenly shut down. The lights, music, and air-conditioning died. I heard a strange lurching sound as the elevator in my building froze with passengers trapped on board. I rushed to the window along with my officemates and was amazed to see traffic snarling to a halt up the entire length of Broadway as street signals went black. The Verizon landlines were dead and our cell phones had no signals. We hurried down eleven flights of stairs, into streets already thickening with crowds of evacuees. Storefronts, groceries, and cafés were darkened. Subway stations were emptying of travelers as word spread that the trains had no power and hundreds of people were stuck underground. It was 2003, and like most New Yorkers, we initially jumped to the same conclusion—another terrorist attack.

      What had in fact happened to us, and to a majority of the residents of the metropolitan areas of New York, Newark, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto, was a blackout—larger than any other blackout in recorded history. One of the greatest achievements in industrial engineering, the 93,600 miles of electrical cable known as the Eastern Interconnection, had been brought to its knees. All because of unseen events in that distant Ohio meadow where an overloaded wire had drooped into high tree branches and short-circuited, triggering a massive cascade effect throughout the aging power grid.

      As night fell, I walked up to Times Square to see its flashing billboards snuffed out, leaving the commercial El Dorado quaint and sheepish. I passed the main post office building and Bryant Park, where thousands of stranded commuters were sprawled in a mass slumber party, using their suit jackets and briefcases as pillows. Candlelight flickered in apartment windows, and I looked up past the walls of darkened buildings at a sky so brilliant with stars I could make out the soft haze of the Milky Way and the faint pulses of orbiting satellites.

      Before-and-after satellite images of the event tell the story. In the first picture there is a thick streak of foamy white across the northeastern portion of the United States and southeastern Canada. In the second is just a scattering of faint droplets, the rest absorbed into the blackness of space. Fifty million Americans were without power.

      Up to that point, I had spent most of my brief career as a journalist trying to gain a better understanding of the causes of just such events—an understanding, more broadly, of the strengths and vulnerabilities of America’s complex energy landscape. The US is, after all, both a global leader in green innovation and the world’s largest energy consumer, struggling to cope with its huge appetite for fossil fuels and their by-products. We face a tremendous industrial dilemma and an extraordinary economic opportunity to develop a clean, independent energy system that could set an example to the other industrialized nations of the world. In the calm and darkness of the twenty-four-hour blackout I began to see this bigger picture. I began to understand how little I actually did know about the changes we face, and how much I still had left to learn.

      Just out of college in 1997, I had started out as a technology reporter, swept up in the exuberance of the dawning digital age—when stock prices jumped from 60¢ to $60 overnight, and business plans scrawled on cocktail napkins could get six-figure backing. I went on to write “Urban Upgrade,” a column in the Village Voice about how digital technology was transforming New York City—from Wall Street’s trading floor to the billboards of Times Square—into an intelligent, networked, high-speed metropolis.