Downtime on the Microgrid: Architecture, Electricity, and Smart City Islands

by Malcolm McCullough

Something good about the smart a human-centered account of why the future of electricity is local.Resilience now matters most, and most resilience is local—even for that most universal, foundational modern the electric power grid. Today that technological marvel is changing more rapidly than it has for a lifetime, and in our new grid awareness, community microgrids have become a fascinating catalyst for cultural value change. In Downtime on the Microgrid, Malcolm McCullough offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the cascade of white papers on smart clean infrastructure. Writing from an experiential perspective, McCullough avoids the usual smart city futurism, technological solutionism, policy acronyms, green idealism, critical theory jargon, and doomsday prepping to provide new cultural context for a subject long a favorite theme in science and technology studies.

McCullough describes the three eras of North American innovation, consolidation, and decentralization. He considers the microgrid boom and its relevance to the built environment as “architecture's grid edge.” Finally, he argues that resilience arises from clusters; although a microgrid is often described as an island, future resilience will require archipelagos—clusters of microgrids, with a two-way, intermittent connectiveness that is very different from the always-on, top-down technofuture we may be expecting. With Downtime on the Microgrid, McCullough rises above techno-hype to find something good about the smart city and reassuring about local resilience.

Genres: Nonfiction

258 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 31, 2020

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book. Better researched and more engineering oriented than your typical pop-sci book without being a dry recitation of tech specs. This accomplishes the two most important motivations for a book like this: You will learn something worthwhile (what is the past, present, and future of the grid) and also inspires you to learn more beyond the text. Chapter 3, "Smart Green Blues" is perhaps the best writing I've ever encountered that takes a tech-centric starting point and integrates the importance of all the "other stuff" that engineers are so reluctant to consider. As someone who works in analytics, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to leverage the "hybrid forum", as dubbed by the author, in my own life.

"Science, nevertheless, does have a bias toward what is most readily quantifiable... today, when externalities, complexities, and such immeasurables as hope and resilience play such necessary roles, when many former certainties about systems have destabilized and now demand more heterogeneous engineering, any more useful forum thus needs more widely open scope
...
smartgrid debate suffers from what critics call 'solutionism.' When experts begin too many conversations by claiming to know the answer, that makes creative discoveries and social participation more difficult"

Beautifully written, and as with all good general reading/writing, this focused point and others about the smartgrid are generalizable to many complex systems not even alluded to in the text. Your lateral brain will be firing thinking about the applications of these ideas to other domains and that, in the end, is what makes this an engaging read.

[Joe Kusters · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tldr; basically just the worst flaws of design and engineering communication with none of the rigor

"...Deloitte, which as a management consultancy is skilled at estimating return on investment..."

This statement popped up about 2/3 of the way through this book and was the final straw for me just committing to skimming the rest of the book for references to other sources. Just an exceedingly superficial book that sounds like one man's banal musings on a couple of random New Yorker articles he read about microgrids and resiliency combined with what he remembers from his AP US History class about Thomas Edison and the New Deal. The phrase "microgrid meme" is used 10+ times throughout which was another key contributor to me quickly glossing over whatever point was trying to be made, which to begin with was more a series of basic rhetorical questions about what it means for something to be "smart".

[Andrew Blunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author claims this book is for a general audience, but I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who isn't really into architecture or power engineering. It was engaging in some parts, but kind of dry in others. But he drives a convincing argument I'm glad to be more informed about. So overall, it was alright.