The Grid: Examining the Strained Relationship Between People and Our Energy Future

Ama Zoner: Still reading it. I also bought a Kindle edition so I could pass on the print version to my son before I’m finished reading

Canada on Aug 08, 2021

Amazon Customer: Interesting book that explains how the grid's history and how it works. Wish someone would write the same for the UK - where our creaking system seems to be completely unready for any significant decarbonisation

United Kingdom on Apr 27, 2021

Kshitiz Goliya: I am writing this review a day after a blackout happened in India's financial capital, Mumbai, due to grid failure. There are very few books out there which talk about electricity grid, an omnipresent but complex infrastructure without which life in a city (and increasingly villages) will be unimaginable. The book begins by attempting to explain the basic concepts of electricity and the grid in very simple manner. Electric current doesn't behave like other commodities such as oil, coal etc, and works on different principles. The author mostly succeeds in helping the reader see the various moving parts and multiple systems at play in keeping this complex machine stable. However, when that stability is impacted, we see familiar events like blackouts. A failure in one part of the grid can bring down the whole system even after having multiple built in safety nets. In fact, blackouts might be the result of the triggering of one of those safety systems built within the grid. The book uses real world examples and case studies to help demonstrate how a tree branch can trigger a state wide blackout.
It also highlights that instances of these failures might increase as goverments push...

India on Oct 14, 2020

Amazon Customer: Everyone should read this book that cares about the the past and future of technology in the world. Surprisingly, it is a page turner through most of it. This is surprising, considering the dry subject matter.

Canada on Aug 27, 2017

Liam Kelleher: One suspects that this book has been propelled into the limelight from a recommendation by Bill Gates. Indeed, such an important topic- with its impending problems on the horizon - has been covered so little in hardback print that it warrants said propelling into the limelight. However as a book, I am beginning to question if Bill Gates might just have made the right choice when started Microsoft instead of becoming a literary critic.

Gretchen Bakke has a PhD in cultural anthropology, which doesn't matter so much as this is a scientifically a very high level book. The problem begins to arise when she starts swaying between aiming the book towards those who don't know their AC form their DC, and aiming the book towards those interested in the statistical details. At times we are given paragraph upon paragraph of fascinating statistics on blackout occurrences and the danger it poses to the military and worse - Facebook. Only for this detail to be shortly followed by page upon page of opinion, such as the the enjoyment we would have in life if there were more blackouts and less computer time. The chapters seem to lack direction and sometimes paragraphs are oddly disconnected...

United Kingdom on Apr 06, 2017

Book Shark: The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

“The Grid” is an insightful yet verbose book on America’s grid technology; it’s history together with the laws, people and logic that brought it into existence. Author Gretchen Bakke holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and is currently a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada brings us this seldom told story of the evolution of an essential infrastructure. This interesting 364-page book includes the following nine chapters: 1. The Way of the Wind, 2. How the Grid Got Its Wires, 3. The Consolidation of Power, 4. The Cardigan Path, 5. Things Fall Apart, 6. Two Birds, One Stone, 7. A Tale of Two Storms, 8. In Search of the Holy Grail, and 9. American Zeitgeist.

Positives:
1. A well-researched, accessible book.
2. The seldom-told story of our electrical-grid infrastructure.
3. Does a good job of describing the grid and its problems. “America has the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation—coming in at about six hours per year, not including blackouts caused by extreme weather or other “acts of God,” of which there were 679...

United States on Jan 28, 2017

Paul F. Ross: Review of Bakke’s "The grid" by Paul F. Ross

Gretchen Bakke presents a very interesting, very readable look at the history of electric power in the United States from Thomas Edison until now in order to assist us, the readers, in understanding and helping shape the still uncertain details affecting the future of electric power. The ubiquity of electric power in human affairs is certain. Just how that power will be provided, its fuel sources, and its
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Bakke, Gretchen "The grid: The fraying wires between Americans and our energy future" 2016, Bloomsbury, New York NY, xxx + 353 pages
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distribution methods are far from certain although they have been finding their unguided way to the present throughout the last century. The stunning contribution of Bakke, not an electrical engineer, is that she has the freedom to see what history, new technology, new uses, social expectations, and legal and economic structures have done to shape what we have and determine what we will have in the future. The...

United States on Aug 29, 2016