Gretchen Bakke

Solar panels are a power plant.

They're just scattered everywhere.

So there's a coal-burning factory somewhere, not too far away, within a couple hundred miles probably, and it's flash-combusting coal powder, coal dust.

So it's doing that, and there's a magnet stuck on the...

piece of a rotating piece of metal.

The coal dust is producing heat.

That's producing steam.

That steam is causing this thing to rotate.

And there's tiny little brushes on the outside and those brushes touch those magnets and they produce what we call an alternating current.

And that alternating current is sort of going, you can't see me, but it's sort of like forward, back, forward, back, forward, back, forward, back, forward, back.

So it's not a constant stream.

It's this motion forward, back, forward, back, forward, back, forward, back.

of electrons that are jumping from atom to atom.

Is this too much to tell?

What we have now are transmission lines, which are the really, really big lines that children watch happily through the window on cross-country driving trips.

Exactly.

They're beautiful in their way.

They really are.

They're striking in how they sort of hold their wires up.

They're a decorative piece of the grid in some ways, or the piece we're most likely to notice.