The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.74 (774 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 030910260X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 318 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-12-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
And these two combined don't even compare to the 2001 outage in India, which affected 226 million people.The Grid is the first history of the electrical grid intended for general readers, and it comes at a time when we badly need such a guide. The electrical grid goes everywhere -- it's the largest and most complex machine ever made. At times, it almost seems alive, like some enormous circulatory system that pumps life to big cities and the most remote rural areas.Constructed of intricately interdependent components, the grid operates on a rapidly shrinking margin for error. Things can -- and do -- go wrong in this system, no matter how many preventive steps we take. As we get more and more dependent on electricity to perform even the most mundane daily tasks, the grid's inevitable shortcomings will take a toll on populations around the globe. Just look at the colossal 2003 blackout, when 50 million Americans lost power due to a simple error at a power plant in Ohio; or the one a month later, which blacked out 57 million Italians. Yet the system is built in such a way that the bigger it gets, the more inevitable its collapse.Named the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century by the National Academy
F. M. Langner said THE GRID - a fascinating look at power -- and the power behind the power!. Ever since the first widespread east coast power outage, I've been interested in how the electricity gets to us. With continued outages here and there, all the government talk about a Smart Grid, and the dependance we place on electric power, this book perfectly informs the consumer about how power grids work, how they got started, the wheeling-and-dealing by wealthy interests, and the triumph of technology that today's electrical copper web presents.The story of the people is fascinating. learning can be just fun This is a terrific read about electricity, that invisible power that we are totally dependent upon and generally unconscious about. Schewe makes this lively and informative, a social history as well as a scientific primer for us novices, since he explains the scientific pieces so artfully (he is eminently qualified, check out his background), and gave us a great romp that I would highly recommend. Switch on your reading light, and pick up this book. Not sure who a science writer wrote for? Lawrence Stoskopf I expected to learn about how The Grid works. Why aren't all of the sectors phased to match across the country? Anything on how it works. Got instead a cut and paste type history with a lot a movie review type discussion of the history. Glanced at every page, but really couldn't get into it.
From Publishers Weekly With an appreciation of the technical ingenuity, human drama and cultural impact of the electrical grid, physicist and playwright Schewe illuminates how electricity has catalyzed both the best and worst of modernity since Thomas Edison devised the first electrical network in 1882. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. In the 1965 Northeast blackout, for example, New York shut down for lack of a product that barely existed half a century before. Even as the grid delivered light and mechanizat