The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

Today, we give little thought to how the power at our fingertips is delivered to us. We take for granted that it will be there when we press a button, flick a switch, or plug a cord into an outlet. This “normal,” as Bakke notes, is a “blind luxury.” Occasionally, in the street we catch sight of a notice—the photo of a missing cat, a flyer for yoga classes—stapled to one of the wooden poles that line our neighbourhoods, but seldom do our eyes follow the poles upward to the network of wires that criss-cross the urban landscape.

  What we do notice is when the power is suddenly gone.

  After the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant stopped producing power for the grid. When the quake hit, eleven of Japan’s fifty-four reactors shut down, leaving the nation with a ten-million-kilowatt shortfall in power. Tokyo was instantly put on an energy diet, as rolling blackouts carefully rationed the power being used in the city. In some prefectures, power was out for up to six hours a day. Having no choice but to accommodate, factories shut down, restaurants closed, as there was no power to refrigerate or cook the food, people sat in the dark, and up to half the trains stopped running. ATMs stopped working, escalators and elevators only ran sporadically, phones couldn’t be charged, and without traffic lights there were a lot more car accidents. Even Tokyo’s iconic illuminated billboards went dark in the heart of the city. In short, business could not go on as usual, because daily life relies so deeply on electricity. As NBC News reported, “one of the world’s most technologically advanced societies was transformed overnight into one of Third World hardship.” Without power, Japan simply fell to its knees.

  It’s not only large-scale natural disasters that can take out the grid. While our minds might leap to the threat of foreign hackers wreaking havoc on our power supply, a more innocent creature is responsible for most critical infrastructure blackouts. As John C. Inglis, former deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA), has stated, “I don’t think paralysis [of the electrical grid] is more likely by cyberattack than by natural disaster. And frankly the number-one threat experienced to date by the US electrical grid is squirrels.”

  Squirrel outages are typically short and limited to a single neighbourhood. A much bigger threat is trees. In 2003, the largest blackout in North America’s history was caused when three overgrown trees brought down power lines in different parts of the grid, causing other lines to pick up the additional burden. Like electron dominoes, the blackout spread over 240,000 square kilometres, and for two days fifty million people in Canada and the United States lost power. It led to over $6 billion in lost business revenue and a dip in America’s GDP.

  In response to this, the Transmission Vegetation Management Program was formed, basically a regional trimming service to ensure that trees and tree branches don’t come down on high power transmission lines. But to keep unsightly transmission lines and towers out of the way, they are often built over rugged and hard-to-reach terrain, which makes tree-trimming a difficult task. Covering the expansive territory by foot or ground vehicle alone is too slow, which is why today an incredibly dangerous occupation exists: the helicopter buzz saw operator. Officially known as “aerial side-trimmers,” the choppers are outfitted with a forty-foot-long buzz saw rigged with ten circular blades that dangles vertically below the cockpit. The pilot has to deftly fly a path alongside the lines and towers, trimming trees that are growing too close.

  This high-tech solution may solve one problem, but the much bigger challenge is that the grid itself is growing old and rickety. Today, 70 percent of the grid’s transformers and transmission lines are over twenty-five years old, and because of the inefficiencies built into the older infrastructure, power outages are not only increasing but the time to get back online also grows longer year by year.*2 According to one estimate, to upgrade and replace this integrated network in the United States would cost over $5 trillion.

  The mash-up of energy that goes into the grid is also a concern, because the infrastructure was originally built to deliver a steady output of energy from traditional nuclear, oil, coal, or gas powered plants. It was designed as a centralized form of energy delivery. But today, with the goal of adding renewables, we are hooking up many new ad hoc, decentralized sources of energy and feeding them into the grid. Wind, solar, and geothermal are some of the renewables we’re familiar with, but these days energy can be made from just about anything—even cheese.

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  SAVOIE IS A PICTURESQUE REGION in the French Alps. Known for its ski hills and cozy villages in the winter and lush alpine landscapes in the summer, it is also renowned for its Beaufort cheese. Two of the main by-products of the cheese-making process are cream and whey. The cream is transformed into products like butter and ricotta cheese, while the whey is skimmed to make whey protein powder for shakes and energy drinks. But the liquid leftover from the whey is not thrown out as waste; instead it’s used to generate the town’s electricity. In the town of Albertville, 1,500 people have their homes powered by cheese.

  The secret to this power is micro-organisms known as archaea, which are added to the liquid in an oxygen-free, or anaerobic, digester. Here, they feed on the sugars in the whey liquid for four days, releasing microscopic burps in the form of biogases: carbon dioxide and methane. The gas is then purified and burned much like natural gas to heat water to a near boiling temperature of 90°C, which produces steam. The steam drives a turbine, which has a shaft connected to a magnet that spins rapidly inside tightly wound coils of wire. The magnet causes the electrons to get stripped away from the atoms making up the wire, and it’s this magnetic force that physically creates electricity.

  If you don’t have a sufficient supply of cheese, you can always burn coal or oil to produce the steam that drives the turbine. Or boil water using the radioactive decay of uranium-235. (Or capture the kinetic energy of water rushing downhill, which, as we saw, is how the British power their kettles to make tea all at once.) But for the most part, the basic underlying mechanism is the same: we make electricity by turning a turbine.

  Our civilization is powered by the invisible forces of electricity and magnetism. We all want it, we all demand it, but most of us don’t even know what exactly it is. When you turn on a light—say a 120-watt light bulb in your bedside lamp that’s drawing one amp of current through it—the equivalent of six quintillion electrons are zipping through a single point in the wire every second. But the electrons that run through your light did not make their way there in a flash direct from the power plant. The electrons themselves move slowly, it’s the energy that moves quickly.*3 That’s because electrons, as subatomic particles, do not flow down the wires like water in a pipe. The process works more like a wave. When you hear someone singing in the distance, the sound pressure that hits your eardrum isn’t from the air molecules that came out of the singer’s mouth. Sound is a compression wave. The air molecules bump into adjacent air molecules, rippling over the distance, and what you hear is like the last domino in a molecular domino effect, a reverberation of sound that comes from the singer.

  In the same way, electricity is a ripple effect. Driving through a city at dusk, you’ve likely seen the street lights come on all at once. That’s because the electricity doesn’t leave the switch and make its way down the street. As soon as you add one electron to the wire at one end, another will pop out the other end. That is, at the atomic scale, when the generator cranks the magnet over the copper coil, ripping electrons away from the copper atoms, the now “homeless” electrons have to go somewhere, and where they’ll go is over to the next available atom, joining its orbit. But in doing so, this will knock out the neighbouring atom’s electron, which then bumps over to the next atom, and so on. But not all atoms are welcoming. Some materials—like rubber, for instance—lock their atomic doors to outside electrons, making it harder for electrons to move through them. We call these materials insulators. Metals, on the other hand, tend to have an open-door po
licy. They are conductors. Here, electrons can move about freely, making the jumping process swift and easy as they go from proverbial door to door.

  And swift and easy it is. The average Canadian home uses about nine hundred kilowatt hours of electricity a month, to run the dishwasher, the dryer, the lights, the water heater, the air conditioner, the refrigerator, computers, televisions, and electronics. (Incidentally, that is one of the highest levels of consumption in the world, comfortably ahead of the United States.) But that still doesn’t tell us much. Astrophysicist Adam Frank worked out another calculation, breaking down how much “pedal power” it would take to create electricity for the average home. To give you an idea of how much energy (or how little) the human body can generate, it would take fifty people pedalling eight hours a day for a month to power the average house. And just one person? Pedalling eight hours a day, the average person could generate enough power to light a single lamp.

  While we’re very good at generating electricity, one thing we have not been good at, until very recently at least, is storing it. So the next time you charge your cell phone, you might want to thank the torpedo fish. It’s the reason your phone, and every other electronic gizmo you own, has a battery. The unusual fish, able to shock its prey with two hundred volts, fascinated an Italian physicist named Alessandro Volta, who in the 1790s set out to create artificial electricity to mimic its abilities. The fish, Volta noticed, had an organ with a particular pattern of chambers on its back: these four to five hundred columns were each filled with a stack of four hundred jelly-filled disks known as electroplaques.

  Ever the experimenter, Volta combined this observation with something he’d discovered by chance: the taste of metal coins. He knew that if he placed coins made of different metals on his tongue and put a silver spoon on top of the stack, he could feel the weak but distinctive tingling of electricity. He wondered whether, if he stacked more of these metals together, like the torpedo fish had done naturally, he could generate more of this strange power.

  His invention became known as the “pile,” because that’s exactly what it was: a pile of two different metals, copper and zinc, stacked up high like pancakes with a brine-soaked cloth in between each disk. By connecting a wire to the top and bottom of the pile and placing the ends again on his tongue, he found that a constant current, more powerful this time, was flowing through. He had invented the world’s first battery.

  Today, batteries are everywhere; we use them to power our electronics, which are so called because they are machines that run on electrons. And while we think about charging them every day, (consider the pangs of dread at the thought of a drained phone battery), few of us give much thought to how this power works.

  The lithium-ion batteries for our electronics, or zinc-carbon, nickel-cadmium, or lead-acid batteries, all in essence work the same way. A battery requires two different metals, one that likes to “give” electrons and another that likes to “receive” electrons, which give the subatomic particles a direction to move, from givers to receivers. And while batteries that fit in our pockets are commonplace, the big quest today is to create massive, building-sized batteries capable of storing far larger amounts of energy, to provide a boost, when it’s needed, on the grid.

  As in Britain, when everyone gets up off the couch during the commercial break for a spot of tea, there are predictable periods in city life when power use surges. On hot summer afternoons in Los Angeles, for instance, the whole city relies on air conditioning, but there still needs to be power available when people come home from work, turn on their televisions, and start cooking dinner and using other appliances. Not every city has a pumped-storage reservoir to create an artificial waterfall to generate power. In LA, the city prepares for high-demand times by turning on a “peaker,” a gas-burning power plant, to accommodate need. The fossil fuel plant dates back to the 1950s and is old and inefficient. So Los Angeles is switching things up, and by 2020 it plans to have the world’s largest storage battery: a building filled with eighteen thousand lithium battery packs that can turn on in minutes, rather than hours, and give LA a boost for an additional four hours. In Australia, Elon Musk’s big Tesla battery is already operational. Its first big test came in December 2017, when one thousand kilometres away a coal unit tripped, causing a slump in power. The battery kicked in within milliseconds, pumping 7.3 megawatts into the grid, much faster than a nearby coal generator could.

  Whereas batteries of the past were big and clunky, too hefty even to put in cars, today they are light and small. We carry lighting in our pockets and have been able to miniaturize our cell phones and other electronics, while also making them more powerful, thanks to a new type of battery powered by a metal called lithium.

  Lithium is the lightest metal on Earth. It was discovered by Soranus of Ephesus, a Greek physician in the second century AD, who would treat manic patients in the alkaline waters in his town. Even today, the same lithium that we use to power electric cars is used as a treatment for depression and bipolar disorder. Scientists know that the element affects serotonin levels in the brain, but they still aren’t clear exactly how.

  One of the biggest deposits of lithium is hidden under the largest natural mirror on Earth. Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, the world’s biggest salt flat, covers ten thousand square kilometres and gleams a striking reflection back up to the sky when the salt is covered by a thin layer of water. The mirror is so big, it can be seen from space. As for the lithium, ancient volcanoes deposited the metal into prehistoric lakes that evaporated, leaving the white crust of salt, with a pool of blue-green brine containing the “grey gold” lying five metres beneath the surface. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the Salar contains 5.4 million metric tons of lithium, while the Bolivian government claims the number is much higher, at 100 million metric tons, or 70 percent of the world’s reserves. But because of Bolivia’s history, with foreign governments sweeping in and exploiting the country for its silver and tin, Bolivians are protective of their resource. Their goal is to start their own lithium mines, run by the people for the people, instead of letting big corporations in.

  That said, lithium mining in Bolivia has been slow to get going. The lithium in your phone most likely comes from Australia, Chile, Argentina, or China,*4 countries that have been working strategically to corner the market. The United States also produces lithium, from brine pools in Nevada. About one gram of the metal can be found per litre of brine. For perspective, a cell phone battery contains about five to seven grams of lithium carbonate—the powdered form of lithium—but a lithium car battery requires up to thirty kilograms. For high-end electric cars like the Tesla Model S sedan, the amount is sixty-three kilograms of lithium carbonate, or the equivalent of the amount for about ten thousand cell phones.

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  IN 1905, A TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD named Albert Einstein published the law of the photoelectric effect, essentially showing how light can create electricity. Two decades earlier, it had been observed that certain elements, like selenium, could generate an electric current when exposed to light, but nobody knew why or how this was possible.

  The prevailing theory at the time was that light was a wave. And if that were the case, then increasing the intensity of light should produce more electricity. But that’s not what happened. Even weak light could loosen electrons from their orbit. Einstein’s genius and insight was in postulating that light wasn’t only a wave; it was also a particle. And these particles, or photons, acted like an eight ball in pool: if you had enough of them—that is, if there was a high enough frequency rather than intensity—they could knock an electron out of an atom’s orbit and into space. At any given moment, there are a lot of photons hitting Earth. To get a sense of how many, consider that on a clear day a square metre of the planet’s surface receives about one thousand watts of solar energy. Now, consider that Earth’s area is over five hundred trillion square metres. There is plenty of solar power to go around.

  The sol
ar panels we use today are the direct result of Einstein’s Nobel Prize–winning discovery. Photovoltaic cells use particles of light to knock electrons free from atoms to create an electric current. But here the electrons don’t bounce out into their surroundings, they are kept inside of the semiconductor material. The current can then be used for power. As solar cells increase in efficiency and drop in price, they, along with lithium batteries to store the energy, are our greatest hope for humanity transitioning to non-polluting energy.

  Demand for solar energy is soaring and installations have jumped by 50 percent worldwide. While this is very promising, solar, for now at least, still only powers a minuscule amount of energy for the grid. According to The Guardian newspaper, even in Europe, where solar power is most prevalent, it provides only 4 percent of electricity. The problem is that the sun can’t be counted upon to be shine when everyone gets up to plug in their kettles. In fact, the sun shines when we tend to need it least. Particularly in northern climates, and particularly in winter, peak demand occurs when it is dark. Until we have batteries that can store the energy of sunlight—and until governments upgrade the grid (which was designed as a one-way system from power plants to homes) to a decentralized system that functions just as well with home solar installations feeding back into the grid—most of that clean solar power will continue to reflect back into space.*5

  A different way to harness the sun’s power is by tapping into the wind, something people have been doing since the first century AD. The Netherlands, for example, is famous for its windmill technology, and by 1850 there were over ten thousand windmills dotting the Dutch countryside. As the sun heats Earth’s surface, it creates warm air, which rises and leaves an area of low pressure. As a part of nature’s balancing act, this causes other air molecules to rush in from cooler high-pressure areas. This swirling interaction is the invisible force of the wind. Windmills harness this power as it sweeps by, and the modern wind turbine can convert it to electricity.