By Amanda Durish Cook

CARMEL, Ind. — MISO presented a different perspective at its Oct. 25 Informational Forum, inviting cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke to talk about shifting attitudes toward electrical infrastructure.

Bakke, assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University in Montreal and author of “The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future,” has studied failing systems in Cuba, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. She said the grid is as much of a cultural creation as a technical one. “As such, it moves with us. We think of it as solid and rebar, [towers] and copper, but the truth is it grows with us.”

The current grid is a poor fit for a new generation of customers who want carbon-free electricity, Bakke said. The grid’s reliability becomes more “fragile” with increasing investment in intermittent renewables, and Bakke calls for “a serious reimagination of the grid” beyond simply repairing aging infrastructure.

“People right now are moving against the grid,” Bakke said. She pointed to the development of phones with ultra-low power transistors that can function for years without a battery, Elon Musk’s self-driving cars, Iceland digging a 3-mile hole into magma to tap geothermal power and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s push for 500 million solar panels in the U.S.

Bakke said regulators have made electricity so reliable and so cheap that consumers can “unwittingly” ignore it. Consumers tend to think that energy storage is a panacea, forgetting that producing batteries causes pollution and batteries cannot be charged by renewable power alone, she said.

“The way that solar PV has been presented is as this free power source that you can get money back on. And that contributes to this 21st century [attitude],” Bakke said.

Customers’ desire for more local distributed energy resources are at odds with their preference for renewable generation, which often requires tapping remote sources via transmission.

“All of these dreams rely on a deep ignorance of infrastructure,” Bakke said. “It’s this upswing in wanting to eat food grown from a local farmer,” Bakke explained. “Iowa wind is fine to power the Twin Cities.”

Bakke said MISO stakeholders are the edge of the consumer “push and pull,” but she said resource owners should nevertheless pay attention to what consumers are demanding.