A lively analysis of the challenges renewables present to the production and distribution of electricity.
A primer on the challenges facing a power industry in transition.
Electricity is like no other commodity. Because there is still no way to store it on a large scale, the electricity we draw from the grid must be produced at that very moment. Production was easy to control when all electricity came from large plants burning fossil or nuclear fuel, but the rise of renewable energy sources has thrown these arrangements into chaos since renewables provide "an inconsistent, unpredictable, variable power that nothing on our grid is prepared to adapt to, the grid itself least of all." In her debut, Bakke (Anthropology/McGill Univ.) describes the grid as far more than towers and wires. It is "a machine, an infrastructure, a cultural artifact, a set of business practices, and an ecology," the result of a Progressive-era combination of business incentives and government regulation, designed for the exact opposite of 21st-century needs. The author keeps the physics and tech talk to the minimum necessary as she leads readers through a history of the grid and a maze of financial, legal, regulatory, and environmental considerations with sprightly good humor. Bakke's analysis is confident and evenhanded; she delivers harsh judgments equally on myopic utility companies, uncomprehending legislators and regulators, and simplistic advocates of renewable energy production for poor planning, lack of vision, and failure to anticipate the consequences of their actions. She covers the causes of blackouts—most often trees and squirrels—and suggests that rather than hardening the grid, we need greater incorporation of microgrids to make it less susceptible to damage and minimize the impact on consumers when disasters happen. Finally, Bakke sketches a possible design of the "intelligent grid" of the future that uses widely distributed, small-scale generation and storage options to provide resilient and reliable sources of power.
A lively analysis of the challenges renewables present to the production and distribution of electricity.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60819-610-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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