Gradual change is often invisible. We have only recently recognized the dangerous but gradual climate changes caused by burning fossil fuels.
Invisible change isn't always bad. One happening right under our noses is construction of a grid connecting the world into a single electrical system. This is wonderful, because a universal grid will enable us to replace climate-wrecking carbon fuels with solar energy.
The principle problem with solar energy is that in any particular location it is undependable. We have nighttime, bad weather, and huge seasonal variations in available daily sunlight, especially as we move away from the equator.
We could possibly store enough electricity to get an area through the night, or even a few days of bad weather. But the PV panels on my roof produce only one fifth as much monthly electricity mid-winter as they do in the summer. There is no way we could store enough electricity to get us through a winter.
The worldwide grid will allow importation of electricity from elsewhere in the world when local conditions are unfavorable, eliminating most need for batteries.
The people gradually building this universal grid apparently do not have this goal in mind. They are just building increasingly big grids in various countries and between countries to take advantage of profitable opportunities offered by new high voltage direct current (HVDC) technology.
But when these smaller grids are connected to each other, we will have a universal grid.
These opportunities are profitable because generating facilities become more valuable when they are connected to larger networks.
By analogy, computers connected to the Internet are vastly more useful, and therefore valuable, than those that are not connected. They cannot just compute. They can also help us communicate.
A century ago my grandparents had a phone from a company with only a few hundred customers. They had a limited number of people with whom they could communicate. Long distance calls to other phone systems were impossibly expensive.
Today my smart phone allows inexpensive contact with billions of other people, thanks to today's telephone networks. Most of my phone's value comes from its ability to connect me with so many other people.
The value multiplying effect of larger networks is also illustrated by the electricity industry itself. Edison's original generators in New York City could only send electricity a few blocks, each serving only a few customers. As technology improved it soon became possible to send current dozens of miles, then hundreds, and ultimately, thousands.
Larger systems allowed electricity to be produced and distributed more cheaply. Unlike Edison's original system, they used a small number of highly efficient generators — including hydropower — rather than a large number of less efficient generators.
Probably sooner than we might think, most of the world's electrical networks will be combined into a single system. But the invisibility of this progress has one big disadvantage.
If more people and more governments understood what is going on, they could plan together to bring the worldwide grid online more efficiently and quickly.
Repressive regimes often disconnect from international phone lines and the Internet because they can convey politically awkward information. But power cables convey no messages. So even repressive governments will not be afraid to connect with this universal grid.
The worldwide grid will not only eliminate the problems caused by solar energy's local intermittency. It will also eliminate the current need to "curtail" the output of existing PV panels because they are producing more electricity than is needed locally. Curtailment reduces the value of those PV panels.
Once again, the worldwide grid will make those PV panels more valuable because the power not needed locally can be exported to other parts of the world rather than wasted.
Nearly a century after Buckminster Fuller proposed it, the critically important construction of a worldwide electrical grid is happening, whether we notice it or not. But it would be better if we noticed.
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and has been a National Merit Scholar, an NDEA Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a Fellow in Law and Political Science at the Harvard Law School. His college textbook, "Thinking About Politics: American Government in Associational Perspective," was published in 1981. His most recent book is "The Case of the Racist Choir Conductor: Struggling With America's Original Sin." His columns have appeared in newspapers in Michigan, Oregon, and other states. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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