Chapter 1: What extreme weather challenges does Phoenix face?
A couple years ago, in the summer of 2023, I was in Phoenix doing some reporting. And that summer turned out to be the hottest on record, not just for Phoenix, but for the entire planet.
September greeted millions of Americans with some of the hottest weather of the summer. Here in Phoenix, we are definitely used to this extreme heat. We are not used to experiencing 110 plus degree days this many days in a row.
For 31 days, from the end of June until the end of July, temperatures exceeded 110 degrees. Saguaros were dropping dead from heat exposure. People were spending days and then weeks inside. Playgrounds were empty because the playground equipment would burn a kid's skin.
The unrelenting sun high above Phoenix seems to be taking its toll on all living things.
And what struck me walking around the city during that time was how totally dependent Phoenix is on air conditioning. Everywhere you went, every building was cooled to the temperature of a refrigerator. And it was an enormous relief to walk into one of those crisp buildings after struggling through the hot air outside. No matter where you live, the electrical grid is essential infrastructure.
But in Phoenix, it's not an overstatement to say that the city cannot exist without it. If power goes out in the summertime, if all those air conditioners cannot run, people will die. Which made me wonder, how does the city know how much energy they'll need to provide on the hottest summer days? I'm Delaney Hall, and this is Service Request, a show from 99% Invisible and Campside Media.
Each episode, we investigate a question about infrastructure, the vast and hidden machinery of modern life. We're looking at the pipes, the wires, the systems beneath your feet that you never really think about until they stop working. Today, I'm submitting a service request.
How does the grid in Phoenix actually work?
What an excellent question. And the answer takes us into the enormous and complex machine that sends us our power.
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Chapter 2: How does air conditioning impact Phoenix's energy needs?
Solar panels are a power plant. They're just scattered everywhere.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I have been that kid, yes.
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Chapter 3: What role does the electrical grid play in Phoenix's infrastructure?
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.
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... the transmission lines eventually run into substations.
Which is the piece we're least likely to notice, which is essentially a kind of gray, industrial-looking kind of Lego-built box, sometimes in a box, but it's often just a square of land with a fence around it. And what happens at the substation is that the electricity is stepped down in voltage, and it goes on to a totally different system, which is called the distribution network.
And that's what goes into the house.
Before it goes into the house, it's stepped down once again by a transformer, which is often located on top of a utility pole outside your home. Again, this is for safety, so that an elephant-killing dose of electricity isn't flowing into your house.
So all of this stepping up is to move electricity long distance and stepping down is to keep it from being entirely lethal. You can still kill yourself with it, but it's harder to do. OK.
The amazing thing about this system, the generation of power and then the movement of electricity through power lines to the home, is that it happens incredibly fast.
Electricity is always very, very fresh. If you flip on your light switch or turn on your air conditioner about a minute before, that was a piece of coal or coal dust. That tends to be what we burn. Wow. Or a drop of water or a gust of wind, right? It's a very fast system. And it will go simultaneously anywhere it's called. And we call that a sink.
So if you turn on your air conditioner, all of the electricity in the system will say, ooh, a pathway. And it will all come to you. Wow. And then it comes, poof, and your air conditioner goes on.
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