1 Emerging Smart Grid Struggles

At the end of October 2012, more than eight million homes lost power as Superstorm Sandy battered the east coast of the United States. The electricity system disruption from this extreme weather event impacted households and businesses across seventeen states, including those as far west as Michigan. The storm left some without power for weeks, and lower Manhattan was in the dark for several days. The storm closed the New York Stock Exchange, the most powerful market in the world, for two full days, and Broadway shows were canceled for three consecutive days (Webley 2012). The storm forced evacuation of critical care patients and premature babies at New York University’s hospital to another hospital in the dark, and flooded substations and downed power lines caused unprecedented levels of disruption to the city’s energy systems. As the disaster unfolded, the vulnerabilities of the United States’ electric system were broadcast to the world. In the aftermath of the storm, the region struggled to recover and restore electricity. In some places, the same vulnerable electricity system, with the same basic technologies and same structure, was reinstalled, demonstrating a common and fundamental irony of disaster recovery. Although a disruption provides a window of opportunity to upgrade technology and introduce new approaches to enhance system resilience, established policies and procedures often require investment in and installation of the same infrastructure. But Hurricane Sandy also sparked broad societal discussion on the vulnerability of the electric infrastructure and has encouraged long-term plans and investments to improve reliability and resilience. Investment decisions after a major disruption represent one of many emerging struggles of electricity system change. When the Secretary of the United States Department of Energy, Ernie Moniz, spoke about Hurricane Sandy in his first major policy speech in August 2013, he said: “we have to help this rebuilding in a smart way” (Moniz 2013). In this political statement, Moniz was underscoring this critical challenge in electricity system change. When system disruptions occur, the pressure to “get the lights back