Word: grid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's just one of countless questions that needs an answer before plug-in cars can truly take their place on American roads. Certainly, electric cars have at least one built-in advantage: The electrical grid already exists. Other auto alternatives, like hydrogen fuel cells, would require the development of an expensive new infrastructure to deliver the gas to fueling stations around the country. But to make plug-ins a truly viable alternative - one that could kill petroleum - we will need to make changes to the way we supply and use electricity, both small and large. "Electricity is everywhere...
...It’s possible, with the assistance of a good backroad atlas and a knack for knowing which turns are more interesting than others, to spend a lot of time seeing America. A century of inspired roadbuilding blessed this country with an impressive asphalt grid begging for travel. There are no passport tangles to worry about, the currency exchange is easy, and the language barrier—excepting a few regional absurdities—is nonexistent...
...Gloucestershire housed in converted World War II airplane hangars. Not all of his people work on the manufacturing end, but scores of assistants execute his product-lines-on-canvas, which are hugely profitable but for the most part aesthetically negligible. Those include hundreds of "spot paintings," each a multicolored grid of little circles and named after a pharmaceutical product; "spin paintings" made by pouring paint onto a whirling disk; and "butterfly paintings" made by embedding dead butterflies in pigment and resin, sometimes in elaborate stained-glass-window formations, sometimes just attached here and there on the canvas. At Sotheby...
...utility reliability depended on little more than "peer pressure." That's been beefed up in the years since, with tougher audits of utility systems and steeper fines for failures. But more importantly, we need to enhance what Daigle calls "situational awareness," or, in other words, the intelligence of the grid. The system failed in 2003 not so much because of unkempt trees and a few sagging lines, but because no one knew what was going on until it was too late. Utilities can't talk to each other, and often can't even talk to themselves. Most utilities...
Making the grid smarter will take real investment, but that's been lagging, and like much of our infrastructure, the grid is overdue for an overhaul. "Government funding has been pretty modest in scale," says Daigle. He notes that last year's federal energy act contained authorization for smart grid investment - but no money has been appropriated yet. That needs to change. As electricity demand increases in the U.S. and we become ever more networked, the consequences of a major power loss worsen as well. The blackout of 2003 cost some $6 billion, but it could have been far more...