Delaney Hall

She's a cultural anthropologist who's studied the work of electrical engineers, regulators, utility operators, and energy traders, trying to understand what they do.

And I'll be honest right here at the start of this episode.

The grid is not easy to describe.

Electricity itself is not easy to describe.

The system that delivers it to our homes is not something that we really see.

And it's meant to be illegible.

But we're going to do our best to make this whole system that generates and transmits our power more legible, starting with where electricity comes from.

And the electricity that flows to your house has to come from one of these sources.

It could be a natural gas plant or a nuclear plant, a wind turbine, a solar array, a hydroelectric dam.

Someone had to generate that electricity.

Let's say you're on a coal system.

No, I mean, honestly, this is like poetry.

I'm loving this.

Those electrons are not moving steadily in one direction, like water flowing downhill.

Instead, as Gretchen said, they're jiggling back and forth, back and forth, 60 times a second.

And that back and forth motion is what's traveling through the wire.

Those big transmission lines carry high voltage electricity over long distances.

It's way more power than anyone would need to run their household appliances.

It's enough power to kill an elephant, actually.

And so...