From MIT's Technology Review, June 19:
Is this the electric grid of the future?
In Nebraska, a publicly owned utility deftly tackles the challenges of delivering on reliability, affordability, and sustainability.
One morning in the middle of March, a slow-moving spring blizzard stalled above eastern Nebraska, pounding the state capital of Lincoln with 60-mile-per-hour winds, driving sleet, and up to eight inches of snow. Lincoln Electric System, the local electric utility, has approximately 150,000 customers. By lunchtime, nearly 10% of them were without power. Ice was accumulating on the lines, causing them to slap together and circuits to lock. Sustained high winds and strong gusts—including one recorded at the Lincoln airport at 74 mph—snapped an entire line of poles across an empty field on the northern edge of the city.
Emeka Anyanwu kept the outage map open on his screen, refreshing it every 10 minutes or so while the 18 crews out in the field—some 75 to 80 line workers in total—struggled to shrink the orange circles that stood for thousands of customers in the dark. This was already Anyanwu’s second major storm since he’d become CEO of Lincoln Electric, in January of 2024. Warm and dry in his corner office, he fretted over what his colleagues were facing. Anyanwu spent the first part of his career at Kansas City Power & Light (now called Evergy), designing distribution systems, supervising crews, and participating in storm response. “Part of my DNA as a utility person is storm response,” he says. In weather like this “there’s a physical toll of trying to resist the wind and maneuver your body,” he adds. “You’re working slower. There’s just stuff that can’t get done. You’re basically being sandblasted.”
Lincoln Electric is headquartered in a gleaming new building named after Anyanwu’s predecessor, Kevin Wailes. Its cavernous garage, like an airplane hangar, is designed so that vehicles never need to reverse. As crews returned for a break and a dry change of clothes, their faces burned red and raw from the sleet and wind, their truck bumpers dripped ice onto the concrete floor. In a darkened control room, supervisors collected damage assessments, phoned or radioed in by the crews. The division heads above them huddled in a small conference room across the hall—their own outage map filling a large screen.
Anyanwu did his best to stay out of the way. “I sit on the storm calls, and I’ll have an idea or a thought, and I try not to be in the middle of things,” he says. “I’m not in their hair. I didn’t go downstairs until the very end of the day, as I was leaving the building—because I just don’t want to be looming. And I think, quite frankly, our folks do an excellent job. They don’t need me.”
At a moment of disruption, Anyanwu chooses collaboration over control. His attitude is not that “he alone can fix it,” but that his team knows the assignment and is ready for the task. Yet a spring blizzard like this is the least of Anyanwu’s problems. It is a predictable disruption, albeit one of a type that seems to occur with greater frequency. What will happen soon—not only at Lincoln Electric but for all electric utilities—is a challenge of a different order.
In the industry, they call it the “trilemma”: the seemingly intractable problem of balancing reliability, affordability, and sustainability. Utilities must keep the lights on in the face of more extreme and more frequent storms and fires, growing risks of cyberattacks and physical disruptions, and a wildly uncertain policy and regulatory landscape. They must keep prices low amid inflationary costs. And they must adapt to an epochal change in how the grid works, as the industry attempts to transition from power generated with fossil fuels to power generated from renewable sources like solar and wind, in all their vicissitudes.
Yet over the last year, the trilemma has turned out to be table stakes. Additional layers of pressure have been building—including powerful new technical and political considerations that would seem to guarantee disruption. The electric grid is bracing for a near future characterized by unstoppable forces and immovable objects—an interlocking series of factors so oppositional that Anyanwu’s clear-eyed approach to the trials ahead makes Lincoln Electric an effective lens through which to examine the grid of the near future.
A worsening storm
The urgent technical challenge for utilities is the rise in electricity demand—the result, in part, of AI. In the living memory of the industry, every organic increase in load from population growth has been quietly matched by a decrease in load thanks to efficiency (primarily from LED lighting and improvements in appliances). No longer. Demand from new data centers, factories, and the electrification of cars, kitchens, and home heaters has broken that pattern. Annual load growth that had been less than 1% since 2000 is now projected to exceed 3%. In 2022, the grid was expected to add 23 gigawatts of new capacity over the next five years; now it is expected to add 128 gigawatts....
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