Open Serendipity

I just finished reading The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World. It is an odd book.  I am picky about writing style, and at first the somewhat flippant voice of the author annoyed me.  But after a while I got used to it.  Then at one point, I wondered, who is this guy?

The inside jacket blurb explains everything.  A science writer – duh – Ph.D. in particle physics, landmark research at Fermi, etc. ok, written for a bunch of papers and magazines, and then: “He is also a playwright whose numerous productions have appeared at theaters in New York and Washington, D.C.  Schewe might be the first person to hold simultaneous membership in the American Physical Society, the Dramatists Guild, and the National Association of Science Writers.”

That explains the way the book is written, perfectly!

It reads like the kind of play that has a playful narrator who is a bit in your face, and also a vocal peanut gallery (or Greek chorus) always piping up with their philosophical digressions that are commentary on the plot, rather than part of the plot itself.  The peanut gallery in this book includes Thoreau (yes, Henry David), Lewis Mumford and Henry Adams.  Their commentary is usually worth reading, and it does make up only a small part of the book.  The rest of the story includes all the characters one would hope to meet in this story (not a formal history, we are warned) of the grid: Edison, Farraday, Henry, Tesla, Westinghouse, Insull, Lilienthal, with nods to Watt, Volta, Ohm, Hertz, Marconi, and other famous people who had interesting roles in the development of the electric grid, like Lenin.

I was pleased that he included Amory Lovins and surprised that he did not mention the Rosenfeld Effect explicitly.  I listened to a podcast of a recent talk by Amory Lovins in which he said something like: rewarding utilities for selling more electricity is dumb as a possum and we should stop doing that.  Some states have stopped, hence the Rosenfeld Effect, but most are still using the supply/demand equation like you might use for apples.

Why did I read this book?  A friend at work recommended it after I discovered that much as I want to learn about energy efficiency, I do not want to learn about it enough to study worthy texts like Unlocking energy efficiency in the U.S. economy on my own time.  Even though the data is rather fascinating, e.g. every single tiny column in the eye-chart graph of the energy efficiency supply curve in the U.S. looks like a business opportunity to me… it just puts me to sleep!  On my own time, I’d rather read something more entertaining (fiction, historical fiction, biographies) or creatively technical (Python Web Development with Django).

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Books by marla