A review by mchester24
The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

4.0

This is another book I’ve had on my shelf for far too long before getting to it, which I blame on the fact that my everyday job encompasses reading, writing, and thinking about the grid so diving into a book about it in my free time sometimes felt like more work. But I’m glad I eventually dove in, and reading it nearly a decade after it was published provided for some fun opportunities to see what early pilots and thought experiments had come true and which still fell under the vague “we’ll all be using this in 10 years” trope. 

Bakke does a great job contextualizing the history of electricity and the grid in the United States— technologically as well as culturally and in terms of regulation, which helped inform  why some of the status quo I read about today is the way it is. 

I wouldn’t let the ‘age’ of the book thus deter anyone who is interested from picking up this great overview. In the end, the takeaways I think I got that will help inform future readings on this topic will be those Bakke covered regarding the cultural way everyday people think about and use power, the lobbying-heavy way in which the power sector wants and forced grid improvement to take a baby step approach rather than revolutionarily rethinking how/why/what type of electricity we may be best suited for, and how it’s these ‘soft’ frictions rather than the lacking of technology that really creates today’s major grid shortcomings.