At a high level, the power grid is a very simple thing.

It consists of a set of large power plants

(hydropower plants, nuclear power plants, etc.) all connected together by wires. One grid can be as big
as half of the United States.

A grid works very well as a power-distribution system because it allows a lot of sharing. If a power
company needs to take a power plant or a transmission tower off line for maintenance, the other parts
of the grid can pick up the slack.

The thing that is so amazing about the power grid is that it cannot store any power anywhere in the
system. At any moment, you have millions of customers consuming megawatts of power. At that same
moment, you have dozens of power plants producing exactly the right amount of power to satisfy all of
that demand. And you have all the transmission and distribution lines sending the power from the
power plants to the consumers.

This system works great, and it can be highly reliable for years at a time. However, there can be times,
particularly when there is high demand, that the interconnected nature of the grid makes the entire
system vulnerable to collapse.

Let's say that the grid is running pretty close to its maximum capacity. Something causes a power plant
to suddenly trip off line. The "something" might be anything from a serious lightning strike to a
geomagnetic storm to a bearing failure and subsequent fire in a generator. When that plant disconnects
from the grid, the other plants connected to it have to spin up to meet the demand. If they are all near
their maximum capacity, then they cannot handle the extra load. To prevent themselves from
overloading and failing, they will disconnect from the grid as well. That only makes the problem worse,
and dozens of plants eventually disconnect. That leaves millions of people without power.

The same thing can happen if a big transmission line fails. In 1996, there was a huge blackout in the
western United States and Canada because the wires of a major transmission line sagged into some
trees and shorted out. When that transmission line failed, its entire load shifted to neighboring
transmission lines. They then overloaded and failed, and the overload cascaded through the grid.

In nearly every major blackout, the situation is the same. One piece of the system fails, and then the
pieces near it cannot handle the increased load caused by the failure, so they fail. The multiple failures
make the problem worse and worse, and a large area ends up in the dark.

One solution to the problem would be to build significant amounts of excess capacity -- extra power
plants, extra transmission lines, etc. By having extra capacity, it would be able to pick up the load the
moment something else failed. That approach would work, but it would increase our power bills.

According to Imre Gyuk, who manages the Energy Storage Research Program at the U.S. Department of
Energy, we can avoid massive blackouts like the big one in 2003 by storing energy on the electric grid.
Energy could be stored in units at power stations, along transmission lines, at substations, and in
locations near customers. That way, when little disasters happen, the stored energy could supply
electricity anywhere along the line.
It sounds like a big project, and it is. But pretty much every system that successfully manages to serve
many customers keeps a reserve. Think about it. Banks keep a reserve. Supersized shops like Target and
Wal-Mart keep a reserve. Could McDonald's have served billions without having perpetually stocked
pantries and freezers?

On any ordinary day, electric power companies plan how much electricity to generate on the next day.
They try to predict what customers will do, mainly by reading historical records of usage on the same
day of the previous year. Then they adjust those figures to the current weather forecast for the
following day.

"It's impossible to exactly predict what the demand for power will be at a given moment," says John
Boyes, who manages the Energy Storage Program at Sandia National Laboratories. This scenario sets
utilities up to make more or less electricity than customers use. The mismatch sends ripples through the
grid, including variations in AC frequency, which, if not controlled, can damage electronics. Regional
electricity managers, or independent system operators (ISOs), swoop in and try to close the gap by
asking some power plants to change how much electricity they generate. But nuclear and fossil fuel
plants can't do that quickly. Their slowness worsens the mismatch between electricity supply and
demand.

Now, consider what happens on a sweltering day in Los Angeles when people citywide are running their
air conditioners. These are peak demand conditions, when the most customers use the most electricity,
which happens for a few hours on five to 10 days each year. On these days, facilities known as peaker
plants are called into action. These expensive fossil-fuel plants sit idle all year and can emit more air
pollution than a large coal-fired plant. "We wouldn't like to do it in a [smoggy] city like Los Angeles, but
we do it anyway," says Imre Gyuk. If the peaker plants fall short, utilities pay large customers like
aluminum smelters to use less electricity. "If nothing works, you have brownouts and rolling outages,"
says Gyuk.

Meanwhile, old substations are overloading. They're carrying more current than they're meant to
handle, and the metal structures heat. "That's not recommended practice," says Boyes.

Maybe it's not an ordinary day. Maybe a tree falls on a power line or lightning strikes it. These
disruptions will knock the line's voltage off of the intended amount. Voltage variations reset computers.
Now your alarm clock is blinking 12:00. Or worse: "For all automated manufacturing processes, if the
computer resets, it shuts down the process. If you're a plastics manufacturer, and your machines cool
down, plastic solidifies in your machines," says Boyes.

And what if a day's events exceed utilities' efforts to compensate? Yes, you guessed it -- you're facing a
blackout. It certainly happened across the Northeast in 2003.

With the grid already scrambling, it's hard to imagine adding more renewables, like wind and solar
power, because they are intermittent sources of power. We know customers are unpredictable, but
now, so is the electricity. When the wind dies unexpectedly, a wind farm can lose 1,000 megawatts in
minutes and must then quickly buy and import electricity for its customers.
The alternative then is to use a peaker-style fossil-fuel plant, but that adds air pollution to clean
electricity. Or nature can reign. On wind farms in Texas, the wind blows almost exclusively at night while
demand is low, and the price of electricity becomes negative. "That means you have to pay the grid to
put electricity on it," says Gyuk. "I talked to someone who runs his air conditioning all night to chill the
house because he gets it for free. Then he shuts the windows."

According to Gyuk, these problems will worsen as we use more electronics and more electricity. So what
could be the answer to these problems? Grid energy storage.

The job of the grid is to deliver electricity to every customer at 120 volts and 60 hertz. This is
accomplished by adding or removing current from the grid. A storage device helps by adding or
removing current exactly when needed.

Pumped Hydroelectric

Pumped hydroelectric stations use falling water to make electricity. An example of this can be seen at
Raccoon Mountain in Tennessee. At the foot of the mountain, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
made a lake by siphoning some of the Tennessee River.

When customers aren't using much electricity, TVA diverts electricity from other power stations to a
power house inside the mountain. The electricity spins the house's turbines backwards, pushing lake
water up a tunnel in the mountain to the top. After 28 hours, the upper basin is full. To make electricity,
TVA opens a drain in the upper basin. Water falls straight through the center of the mountain and spins
the turbines forward, generating electricity. It falls for 22 hours, steadily outputting 1,600 megawatts of
electricity, matching the output of a large coal-fired plant. TVA adds this electricity to the contribution
from its other plants on days of high demand [source:TVA].

Pumped hydroelectric stations are operating worldwide, outputting between 200 megawatts and 2,000
megawatts of power on peak demand days [source: Cole]. They emit no air pollution, and once charged,
are online in 15 minutes, faster and greener than a peaker plant. The only problem is "we're running out
of good sites for it," says Gyuk.

Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is storage for natural-gas power plants. Normally, these plants
burn natural gas to heat air, which pushes a turbine in a generator. When natural gas plants are near an
underground hole, like a cavern or old mine, they can use CAES. On slow days, the plant can make
electricity to run a compressor that compresses outside air and shoves it into the hole underground. On
days when customers need maximum electricity, the power plant can let the compressed air rush out
against the turbine, pushing it, along with the normal heated air. This compressed air can help for hours,
steadily adding 25 megawatts to 2,700 megawatts of electricity to the plant's output on peak demand
days.

Flywheels store energy by spinning. The fastest ones consist of a motor, a levitating magnet, a vacuum
to nix friction and a shell for safety. When there's extra electricity available on the grid, it can run the
motor, which spins the magnet. When electricity is needed, the flywheels can spin it out in minutes to
hours, as the situation requires.

On the electric grid, flywheels make good quality controllers. They're good at steadying frequency,
which, as we've mentioned, wobbles above and below 60 hertz in the U.S. today. It spikes when utilities
make more electricity than customers use and dips when utilities make less. Flywheels change the
situation because ISOs can control them directly -- eventually, they'll be automatic -- so that no one has
to call Jane at power plant A and wait for her to raise or lower generation to correct the frequency
problem. With fast response, the frequency can be leveled before the customer feels it. In fact, several
U.S. I.S.O.s are testing flywheel pads.

Another use for flywheels is steadying voltage on the grid. What could possibly change the voltage on
those sturdy high-voltage lines? Try domino effects from power outages, downed trees and electric
trains. When subway or light rail trains brake, they generate electricity, raising voltage and making
current surge locally. When trains accelerate out of the station, they draw electricity, making the voltage
dip and sucking current from elsewhere. Flywheels can absorb and release the current, leaving the rest
of the grid undisturbed. In fact, they've been tested on New York City's subway trains.

Flywheels are also great for wind farms, where they can spin up extra electricity during gusts and spit it
out during die-downs, so customers don't suffer the fluctuations.

Supercapacitors, even speedier than flywheels, store energy by separating charges. They're "super"
because they store more energy than traditional capacitors, but they work the same way. When there's
extra electricity, it can be used to push charges off of some metal plates and onto others, leaving some
positively and others negatively charged. When electricity is needed, the plates neutralize, and charge
flows, making a current. In Madrid, Beijing and other cities, cabinets full of supercapacitors buffer
electric trains [source: Siemens].

Superconducting magnetic energy storage, or SMES, is another way to get rid of voltage dips and spikes
on the grid. During spikes, loops of wire take up extra current, and during dips, the loops return the
current to the grid. Because the wire has almost no resistance, it stores current with almost no loss.

Batteries are like Lego sets for the grid. They come in many types, can be stacked or enlarged to store
more energy and can drive electricity for seconds to hours. On the longevity end, you'll find trailer-
sized flow batteries likevanadium redox and zinc-bromide and high-temperature batteries like sodium-
sulfur. These can supply up to 20 megawatts of power for hours [source: Gyuk]. On the burst-of-power
end, lead-acid batteries are commonly used today. Other batteries include metal-air,lithium-ion, nickel-
cadmium andlead-carbon. All batteries use and release energy through chemical reactions.