010—Understanding the Power Grid
Last Week I admittedly struggled with how to connect something as elusive but not actually elusive as the power grid to everyday life. It wasn’t the fact that power grid does not make its way into the making of landscape, I simply did not have a enough knowledge to make those connections.
I went ahead and started with the basics only to understand that individuals actually interact with this system everyday if not every hour of the waking day. I solidified my previous knowledge that energy was simply the heat available from energy carriers such as:
- Fossil Fuels (Non- Renewable)
- Bio Fuels (Renewable)
- Nuclear Power (Non-Renewable)
- Wind Power(Renewable)
- Solar Power (Renewable)
- Petroleum(Non-Renewable)
- Coal(Non-Renewable)
For obvious reasons, in recent times, the push to increase electricity is here and the need to move away from non-renewable energy sources has produced a number of patchwork solutions for all types of professionals in energy, transportation, planning, architecture and landscape architecture. The most notable landscape approach to avoiding the bad effects of nonrenewable energy particularly when it comes to co2 emissions is to created a highly vegetated (Tree-loving )environment and focus on carbon sequestration. This connection to increasing the quality of life that nonrenewable energy threatens is something I considered viable solutions but often turn into patchwork solutions as well. Now having now a much clearer understanding of how power grids work and how hard it is to store energy makes me understand the long transition it took for places to wean themselves off of non renewable energy. The Bay Area in particularly has already began to outlaw the use of natural gas in new development in several cities such as Palo Alto & Berkeley, this might be positive step towards the future but can definitely be hampered by the number of power outages and grid unreliability in the past few years, especially as it relates to regional wildfires.
