Sioshansi F.P. Smart Grid: Integrating Renewable, Distributed & Efficient Energy
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January 1882, which was followed some months later by the
first American power plant in New York [2, p. 170]. The
initial application of these was to lighting. Although
inefficient by modern standards early electric light was “about
ten times brighter than gas mantles and hundred times
brighter than candles” [2, p. 170]. As a result, electric light
dominated the street lighting of industrial cities by the first
decade of the twentieth century, and these, and related,
developments were instrumental in the emergence of the
modern city and industrialized society more generally.
Electricity, an energy vector or carrier rather than an energy
source, is the ultimate pollution displacer because there are
virtually no direct environmental impacts associated with its
use. The flexibility and high efficiency with which electricity
can be used also make it exceedingly attractive for many
applications, something that was soon put to widespread
effect.
However, the benefits granted by electrification also had a
downside. Urban sprawl, for example, previously constrained
by horse- and steam-powered transport from suburban rail
stations, was significantly facilitated from 1890, but
increasingly from 1900, onward by the advent of electrified
tramways or trolleybuses [3, p. 148].
1
These were faster,
cheaper, cleaner, and more convenient, and they significantly
encouraged the expansion of city boundaries. This shaping of
certain “forms of life” by electricity was not only structural,
such as with the case of urban sprawl, but also intimate as in
the case of emergent domestic energy services. In the
domestic sphere where electric lighting was vigorously
promoted and enthusiastically embraced from the beginning,
this was not the case for other energy services. While there
was some uptake, and promotion of these energy services in
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richer households it was only with economic collapse at the
end of the 1920s that utility managers turned to the domestic
sector as a serious source of potential new load [4]. Much of
the groundwork for this had been done however. For
example:
1
The age of electrified tramways was short-lived, however, with the rise
of automobile ownership from the following decade onward tending to
thenceforth dominate the dynamic growth of urban sprawl.
in 1920…General Electric's “advertising
introduced a new objective: the creation
and fostering throughout America of a
new electrical consciousness which would
normally express itself in a certain
fundamental ‘want’ – the desire of
individual families to make their homes
into electrified dwelling places” [5, p.
265 (quoting the GE Publicity
Department)].
This involved not only mass marketing but also “door-to-door
selling, poster contests, parades…other locally focused
advertising drives…[and involved] utilities often provid[ing]
inexpensive wiring services, payable in monthly instalments,”
because “[u]nlike industrial sales, the domestic market had to
be built literally unit by unit” [5, p. 265]. Many of the
strategies used at the time underscore how these services were
viewed very differently than today, something underlined by
the then-common strategy of suggesting that electric
appliances could replace domestic servants [5, p. 271]. That
this went on for some time is illustrated by how electric irons,
which replaced heavy cumbersome “flatirons” that required
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manual heating, were the second most successful energy
service after lighting until the 1950s [4, p. 7]. Refrigerators,
which displaced electric irons in terms of domestic “appliance
saturation”
2
around 1950, provide an insightful case study of
the character of many of these changes.
2
“[T]he number of appliances in stock per one hundred households” [4, p.
7].
“[S]o rare in 1922 that it was not even covered in most
standard home economics texts…there were only 20,000
refrigerators in the entire United States” in 1923 [5, p. 275].
Domestic refrigerators only became cost effective in the
1930s (276) as a result of design improvements from the late
1920s onward that eventually delivered self-contained
machines substantially equivalent to those used today. An
interesting twist to this story is that while this effort focused
upon the optimization of electric compression machines, gas
powered absorption refrigerators were more advanced from
the beginning of this period and are still today the machine of
choice where efficiency and reliability count most, such as in
remote applications [6, pp. 128–143]. Needless to say electric
utility companies, such as General Electric, were prime
movers in the optimization of the electric compression
machines that were to play such a significant role in domestic
load building through the twentieth century and beyond.
Even the widespread assumption that the uptake of electrified
energy services was, in some sense or other, “natural”
because they were inherently superior in terms of the comfort,
convenience, and time saving they delivered does not always
stand up to scrutiny. As the title of Edith Cowan's classic
More Work for Mother[6] declares sometimes the situation
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was the inverse. Vacuum cleaners, for example, whose uptake
was only second to that of electric irons until around 1950 [4,
p. 7], were expected typically to be used, by mothers, about
once a week, whereas the far more infrequent rug beating they
replaced was generally regarded as men's work up until this
time. This was not the story told, however, by both appliance
manufacturers, most of whom were also utilities, and various
other societal interests with which they were closely aligned,
such as the home economics movement. For them a very
particular model of electrification took pride of place, focused
by contemporary ideals such as that of progress, but the
numbers tell a different story. Women spent as much time on
housework late in the twentieth century as they did at the
beginning [5] and [6], although what they did changed
considerably.
Homes have, arguably, become cleaner and more comfortable
(although see the discussion of the invention of the notion of
thermal comfort below), but they have also tended to be more
self-contained, self-sufficient, and isolated from neighbors
and community. Doing the laundry, for example, once a
communal activity, became a matter that a housewife shared
solely with a machine, although automatic machines, which
saved the chores associated with wringing and changing
water, were only developed in the late 1930s and became
common after World War II (WWII) [6, p. 94]. The
emergence of air conditioning detailed below graphically
illustrates both the artifice involved in these developments
and how consumer choice took a back seat to the preferences
of others as electrification grew apace.
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A Case Study: The Emergence of “Thermal
Monotony”
A debate over the character of healthy indoor environments,
particularly that of schools, between fresh air and air
conditioning (AC) advocates proved particularly pivotal to
the development of domestic AC. This debate culminated in
the establishment of an expert New York State Commission
on Ventilation in 1913 whose final report came out in favor of
window ventilation for classrooms “much to the indignation
of the engineering community” [7, p. 68].
3
The report
completed in 1917 wasn't officially released until 1923 giving
engineers time to counter. The American Society of Heating
and Ventilating Engineers (ASH&VE)
4
established the
ASH&VE Research Laboratory in 1919, which “[a]s it took
shape…attempted to address both technical issues and the
larger problem of public confidence” [7, p. 69]. Specific
attention was given to the establishment of numerical
standards and to the development of improved, more accurate,
measuring instruments. A contemporary journalist, quoted by
the leading historian of AC, Gail Cooper [7, p. 70], testifies to
the benefits so granted:
3
Cooper's Air-Conditioning America (1998) is the acknowledged
authoritative history of the emergence of air conditioning, with
Ackermann's Cool Comfort (2002) the only comparable, but narrower,
study.
4
In December 1958, members of ASH&AE and ASRE (the American
Society of Refrigeration Engineers) voted to merge the two societies into
the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning
165
Engineers, Inc. (ASHRAE), which is the relevant current body (see:
http://www.ashraeno.com/history.htm).
One of the engineers’ most effective
safeguards against loss of public
confidence is the development of fixed,
rational standards, and the determination
of precise finite values, that he may thus
express himself with an exactness which
ensures understanding.
Just before the New York State Commission on Ventilation's
final report was circulated, the engineers building upon earlier
work published the “Comfort Chart” that “graph[ed]…the
combinations of temperature and humidity at which most
people felt comfortable” [7, p. 71]. The current ASHRAE
Standard 55 is a straightforward elaboration of this work. The
provision of these parameters, and instruments for their
precise measurement, by ASH&VE's Research Laboratory
was the first step in allowing the indoor conditions defined by
the Comfort Chart to be generated and maintained, in
different places, on demand.
While, today, many take it for granted that this particular
definition of thermal comfort is somehow “natural,” the
marketing activities that its promotion involved suggest
otherwise. The engineers voted “at the 1923 ASH&VE annual
meeting…to delete the term [fresh air] from the society's
proposed ventilation code” [7, p. 73], a term central to their
opponent's rhetoric, and mounted a public relations campaign
whose mouthpiece was the journal Aerologist founded in
1925. This rhetorical engineering of future debate regarding
the relative merits of natural ventilation vis-à-vis AC, today
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commonly labeled “spin,” was successful with use of the term
‘fresh air’ becoming indicative of “support for the open-air
crusaders and an antitechnical spirit” (73). Ultimately in this
“contest between competing professionals…the
scientification of ventilation bolstered engineers’ status and
authority,” turning what had been “the ‘art of ventilation’ into
a science” and significantly enhancing the prospects of the
emerging AC industry [7, p. 78]. These standards broke the,
previously generally assumed, link between human comfort
and natural climate and proved to be a key to the success of
the Comfort Chart and its successors.
Cooper argues that “the ideals of the engineering profession
were literally built into the systems that they sold” [7, p. 109].
While users may not always reflect these ideals their static
character is reflected in a homogeneity common to
air-conditioned environments and cultures, something
reflected in the use of the term “thermal monotony” that
commentators commonly use to describe air-conditioned
environments and spaces. That AC does carry an
homogenizing imperative is borne out by how, as it became
an essential feature of the post-WWII U.S. manufacturing
environment, it facilitated the decline of a distinctive southern
U.S. culture. Before WWII “air-conditioning evolved from a
ballyhooed novelty into a standardized expectation among
middle-class users of public facilities” in the United States,
with movie houses the most notable trailblazer [[7] and [8], p.
46]. Gail Cooper argues that the post-WWII success of AC
was, however, less a matter of consumer approval and more a
result of how “[a]rchitects and builders made the decision to
air-condition American homes and offices, then lenders and
regulators stamped the change with institutional approval” [7,
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p. 142; 8]. Although ideas, promotion, and marketing played
key roles in the growth of AC,
the triumph of air conditioning in the
1950s was based upon its integration into
building design, construction and
financing. Architects, builders, and
bankers accepted air conditioning first,
and consumers were faced with a fait
accompli that they had merely to ratify [7,
p. 142].
Advertising specifically helped in “domesticating and
normalizing the use of technologies that might at first seem
frightening…[while] also ultimately marginalizing those who
still refuse[d] to use them” [8, p. 125]. Domestically central
AC made possible cheap, lightweight, thermally inferior
construction techniques:
The peculiarities of tract housing and
modern design made air-conditioning
virtually essential. Tract houses were hot
houses. Lightweight construction made
them cheap and large picture windows
gave them a modern look [7, p. 157].
New post-WWII office construction offered opportunities to
air condition office space far cheaper than the costs of
retrofitting older buildings [7, p. 159]. The escalating cost of
urban land resulted in an increasing number of simple block
shaped buildings, whose cheapest configuration left interior
spaces that, without windows for ventilation or light, required
AC and fluorescent lighting to render them habitable [7, p.
168
160]. Thus, as with domestic housing, “an air-conditioning
system facilitated the construction of a less costly building
style. The office block was a design dependent on air
conditioning to make it habitable” [7, p. 161]. Government
support was central and evidenced by, among other things, a
1955 change in federal government policy ensuring that
“virtually all new government buildings would be
air-conditioned” [7, p. 163]. The resultant proliferation of
“[b]oth the small picture window house and the glass-fronted
office block…heavily dependent on air conditioning to make
their economical designs habitable” [7, p. 163] influenced not
only the form and content of the built environment but also
the “forms of life” it supported.
This is graphically illustrated by Arsenault's account of how
“air conditioning has affected nearly every aspect of southern
[US] life” [9, p. 628]. As in the United States more generally
AC was first found in the movies, and by WWII most movie
theatres in the South were air conditioned [9, pp. 603–4].
Further developments took some time to become established,
and while by 1950 many federal buildings were air
conditioned “most of the region's state buildings and county
courthouses did not become air-conditioned until the 1960s”
[9, p. 605]. The domestic uptake of AC followed, but more
intensely than in the North, and the trajectory of cheap
post-war tract home developments in the United States was
more steep. “By 1955 one out of every twenty-two American
homes had some form of air conditioning. In the South the
figures were closer to one in ten” [9, p. 610]. This escalated
such that “by the end of the [1960s] half of the homes and
apartments in the South were air-conditioned” [9, p. 610].
By the 1970s,
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the air conditioner invaded the home and
the automobile, there was no turning
back…The South of the 1970s could claim
air-conditioned shopping malls, domed
stadiums, dugouts, green-houses, grain
elevators, chicken coops, aircraft
hangers, crane cabs, off-shore oil rigs,
cattle barns, steel mills and drive-in
movies and restaurants [9, p. 613].
Arsenault underscores how industry, government, and finance
institutions not only structurally facilitated these
developments, but were also actively involved in the
conditioning of consumer preferences and dispositions.
Particularly intriguing examples of this include the issuing of
a ‘Discomfort Index’ by the National Weather Bureau in
1959, calibrated to highlight how outdoor temperature and
humidity diverged from indoor thermal comfort standards,
and the meteorological invention of the term “heat storm” in
the 1960s [9, p. 615].
While Arsenault notes that the mostly black poor are still
often excluded from “thermal monotony” he argues that
[a]ir-conditioning has changed the
southern way of life, influencing
everything from architecture to sleeping
habits… contribut[ing] to the erosion of
several regional traditions: cultural
isolation, agrarianism, poverty,
romanticism, historical consciousness, an
orientation toward non-technological folk
culture, a preoccupation with kinship,
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