You are here The New Grid Plugging into California’s clean-
energy future Take a look at the nearest light switch: is it up
or down? The answer means more than you think. When you flip a
switch — or run a washing machine, or plug in a space heater —
you’re creating demand. And on a vast, interconnected electrical
grid like California’s, supply must always meet demand.
Otherwise, it’s lights out. For more than a century we’ve taken
the balancing act between supply and demand for granted, and for
the most part, it’s worked. To accommodate sudden spikes in
demand, engineers overbuilt the grid with excess slack,
including wires that were thicker than they needed to be and
standby fossil-fuel power plants that could fire up at any
instant. “Renewables integration into the grid poses a
fundamentally new problem.” Sascha von Meier But today our 19th-
century grid is being inundated by 21st-century innovations —
among them the remote, large-scale solar and wind plants that
are leading the state toward its clean-energy