Gretchen Bakke

So it's weirdly local, even though it's also incredibly immense.

It's often called the largest machine in the world.

This is Gretchen Bakke.

I mean, it's really, it's this, you don't have any access to a power plant.

Like you cannot like just go wander into a nuclear power plant or to a coal burning power plant or even a hydroelectric dam.

So you just get this thing in the mail and it doesn't seem to relate to anything.

It's in some sort of unit that you have no idea what it actually means.

It doesn't seem to matter whatsoever what you turn on and what you turn off.

It's like going to the grocery store for the whole month and then just getting the bill at the end of the month.

Did you buy pomegranates?

And were they really expensive?

You don't even know, right?

You don't know why your electricity bill goes up and down.

So it's illegible in every way.

No matter how big of an electricity system you're talking about, there's always more or less the same set of components.

Let's talk big.

Big is power plants.

Power plants were originally mostly coal burning.

With time, the transition in the 2000s was toward natural gas.

But wind is a power plant.