Editorial Board
Carbon-Free Power Requires a Green Connected Grid
That will take federal investment and states willing to cede some authority.
It’s all about networks.
Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg
The sharing economy, from taking Uber rides to uploading our lives to the cloud, seems so 21st-century. But electricity has been all about networks since 1909. That’s when Thomas Edison’s protege Samuel Insull began tying farm towns into his nascent Chicago grid. He found that by serving different patterns of demand, shared generating stations could deliver more power, cutting the price of modernity for everyone.
This founding principle should be rediscovered — both to fight climate change and to make energy supply more resilient.