[...]... or plant it, grow it, harvest it, ship it, buy it, and eat it In the petroleum and natural gas industries, it could be extract it, refine it, distribute it, pump it, and burn it In electricity, it s burn it, convert it, transmit it, distribute it, and consume it More instructive for my purposes (we’ll come back to this idea many times), I think of the value chain in terms of the “left” being the production... energy Then the electricity is transmitted long distances and distributed to individual consumers, and finally each consumer uses and manages the electricity in various ways, including lighting systems, home entertainment, microwave ovens, home-heating controls, motors, compressors, and so on Burn It, Convert It, Move It, Distribute It, and Then Consume It In agriculture, you might call it “farm to market,”... of your mind You leave work early Even though the air-conditioning works fine at the office, the last time you slept without air-conditioning on such hot evenings was when you first got out of college and had no money You can barely type or write in between yawns At 3:30 in the morning of day four, you wake to the blaring siren of your security alarm The power’s on—at least on your side of the street Lights. .. and health care In the 1990s, under the banner of globalization, large swaths of the rest of the world also began to dismantle state-owned energy enterprises, such as electric utilities, and began to create market-oriented businesses Today, and for the last five years, the electricity industry is in what I’ve called in my speeches to the industry a “quasi-deregulatory quagmire.” Depending on where you. .. the lines, wires, and circuits between the power station and the electricity meter attached to your home In other words, it includes the transmission and the distribution functions In this book, we use it to refer to the latter—all transmission and distribution functionality and use the phrase transmission grid to mean only the transmission assets Thirty years ago, we in the industry described our... electricity Just-in-Time Inventory The number three vulnerability of our electricity system stems from a peculiarity of electricity as an energy form: It cannot be stored; at least, not as electricity Actually, it can be stored in tiny quantities as electrons in devices called capacitors, which, thanks to advancing technology in microelectronics, are getting larger (called ultracapacitors) and more... western parts of the U.S electricity system to falter We had a taste of this during the great Northeast Blackout of 2003 The root cause of the failure turned out to be tree limbs along important grid supply lines near one of the substations critical to the systems in the Northeast and Midwest Because electricity is the life blood that flows through the rest of the infrastructure, the security of these substations,... scenario theme and show how a system that is breaking can be fixed Chapter 1 Night of the Living Dead Y ou are into day three without electricity at your residence The heat wave is scorching and you have no air-conditioning Friends up the street who really can’t stand the heat booked what they claim was one of the last rooms available at a hotel still connected to the grid All the food in the refrigerator... energy sources needed to generate it, the long transmission lines needed to move it, the vast network needed to distribute it, and the emissions and discharges that result from the entire process I wrote this book to call attention to these other, less savory aspects, of electricity I am a consultant to the industry, and electricity has been my career I see our industry backsliding, rather than moving forward... is also a career-long mentor and friend Bob read and commented on the draft manuscript when he had far better things to do over Christmas Bob essentially gave me the opportunity to build the career that I enjoy today Finally, it is important for all of us to acknowledge the men and women who actually work on, in, and around the electricity infrastructure They are the ones who keep the lights on; our . OTE JWPR013 -Makansi May 4, 2007 23:6 Lights Out The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It Means to You Jason Makansi John Wiley & Sons, Inc. i P1: OTE/PGN P2: OTE JWPR013 -Makansi. Wiley products, visit our Web site at www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Makansi, Jason. Lights out : the electricity crisis, the global economy, and what it means to you /. real change in society, in the business world, and in the electricity sector specifically. Electricity is the largest business sector in the country, with larger-than-life characters and wild mood swings.