Free the Grid
Wednesday, July 7, 2010 at 11:53PM 
PNM is traveling around New Mexico hosting public meetings, complete with cookies and coffee, to discuss the future of electricity in the state. This past Tuesday’s meeting at the Santa Fe Community College drew about 30 members of the public, and although I could only stomach the first hour, that was enough to reach an important conclusion: Investor-owned utility companies such as PNM will never provide community benefits. They simply can’t.
Inherently, many of us know that we should be angry at PNM. We sense that something isn’t right with them, even if we can’t finger exactly what it is. We think they should burn less coal, stop raising rates, and give their executives a pay cut. These issues surface at public meetings, and although they may be true, they distract us from a much larger realization.
The real problem with electric utilities is that their business practices are every bit as dangerous as Wall Street banks flying high on derivatives or multinational oil giants hooked on deepwater drilling. Electric utilities continue to build central power plants connected to interstate transmission corridors – a practice so dangerous that it has taken the world’s climate to the ragged edge of instability. And, like the bankers and the oil barrens, they do it because it solidifies their power and ensures that we will continue to depend on them.
The ability of the electric power system to inflict great harm on communities and the planet is well established, but it’s ability to do the opposite – to yield enormous benefits – has barely been explored.
The electric power system is little more than a network of wires, connecting us all together so that we can exchange energy. Ignore the fact, for the moment, that these exchanges currently consist of you writing checks to the world’s biggest polluters, and imagine instead the best possible scenario. Imagine that all of your neighbors have generators of various types and sizes, and whenever one of them has a little more than they need, they can share it with you the same way you might share vegetables from your garden. This kind of trading is not just efficient or economical – it’s the kind of exchange that builds community.
Now for the part that took me a long time to see: There are no insurmountable challenges, technical or regulatory or otherwise, preventing us from operating our electric power system in ways that benefit communities. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges, but many of them have already been overcome. Denmark declared their entire network of wires to be a public asset dedicated to providing public benefits, and they gave every Danish citizen the right to generate electricity and use the wires to provide that electricity to others. The Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands showed that large numbers of distributed generators could interact in beneficial ways when connected to the electric network using a “plug-and-play” architecture similar to that used by the internet. So much of the heavy lifting needed to transform the grid has already been done.
Is the United States ready for a publicly owned power grid dedicated to public benefits? Mostly we still occupy ourselves with minutiae, setting standards for big, obsolete utilities and then requiring them to hold public meetings so that they can pretend to care about the communities and ecosystems they are busily destroying. But to paraphrase Al Sharpton, when asked whether America was ready for a black president, he shot back that Americans weren’t ready to let blacks sit down on the bus. But it didn’t matter, he said, because WE were ready.
So I guess the only question is, are we ready to free the grid? I know I am. Won’t you join me?
