The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

This book describes the history of the US power grid and how technology, regulation, politics and demand shaped it into what it is today. In general, the book is well researched and informative. The author, a cultural anthropologist, gives a much broader view of a subject that others treat as merely a technological or industrial topic. The grid shapes and is shaped by many social, cultural, economic, political and technical forces, and Bakke does a good job of explaining how these forces interact.

My only knock against the book is that the last two chapters, which attempt to look forward at how the grid may evolve in coming years, didn’t really hold my interest. This was due in part because I’ve already researched on my own much of what Bakke covered, so none of what she said was new to me. It may be good info for other readers though, those who don’t read energy tech news in their spare time and would just like a good overview of high-level trends.

One other issue with those final chapters is that much of what Bakke sees in the future has already come to pass in the eight years since this book was published. The movement toward renewables and locally generated power has accelerated faster than most people could have predicted, for the exact reasons Bakke lays out: people don’t want to rely on an increasingly fragile and expensive grid, and technologies like rooftop solar keep getting cheaper.