How the Lights Stay On · The People Who Watch the Grid

The People Who Watch the Grid, part 2

A lineworker — sometimes called a lineman, though the workforce now includes women — is the person who climbs the utility poles. They are the ones in the bucket trucks on the side of the highway. They are the ones who go up in storms.

The work is physical. It is dangerous. It pays well, by trade standards — a journeyman lineworker in the United States typically makes $80,000 to $130,000 per year, depending on overtime and storm work. It requires years of apprenticeship. It involves working with voltages that can kill you instantly. Lineworkers have one of the highest fatality rates of any American trade — roughly 20 deaths per 100,000 workers per year, several times the national average.

When a hurricane hits the Gulf Coast or a snowstorm shuts down New England, the lineworkers from neighboring states drive in. Mutual aid agreements between utilities allow crews from Texas to help in Florida, crews from Michigan to help in New York, crews from Ohio to help in Vermont. The driving alone can take days. The work, once they arrive, can take weeks. Lineworkers sleep in shifts in hotels or in tents at staging grounds, eat catered meals, and work twelve-hour days in conditions that range from miserable to dangerous.

After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, lineworkers from across the continental United States flew in to help restore the grid. The work continued for months. Some of those crews are still talked about today in the industry — both for the heroism of the work and for the moments when the systems of mutual aid broke down and crews were stranded or under-supported.

When you see a power-restoration update on the news after a storm, the number of customers restored each hour is a statistic. The actual work is being done by a person, on a pole, in the dark, while the storm is still receding. You will probably never meet them. They will probably restore your power one day anyway.

The dispatchers tell the plants what to do. The plant operators actually do it.

A coal plant, a gas plant, a nuclear plant — each is a complicated industrial facility, full of pipes and pumps and turbines and electrical equipment. Running one safely requires teams of people working continuously, monitoring temperatures and pressures and flow rates, making small adjustments, performing maintenance, responding to alarms.

Nuclear plant operators are a category of their own. The training to become a licensed reactor operator in the United States takes about two years, full-time, and includes extensive coursework, simulator training, and supervised on-the-job experience. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission examines and re-examines operators throughout their careers. A licensed senior reactor operator at a US nuclear plant is one of the most credentialed industrial professionals in the country.

Coal plant operators are less famous but no less skilled. Modern coal plants are enormously complex machines that, when running well, operate at high efficiency for years at a time. The recent decline of coal in the American grid means that many of these operators are being retrained or retired — and the institutional knowledge of running large thermal plants is, slowly, being lost. This matters more than it sounds. As the grid restructures, we may need that knowledge again, or we may not. Either way, it is leaving faster than it is being replaced.

Gas plant operators, especially at the new generation of combined-cycle plants, are doing some of the most technically interesting work in the industry. A modern gas plant can ramp from idle to full power in twenty or thirty minutes. The operators are flying a complicated machine through rapid changes — exactly the flexibility the grid needs to handle the duck curve from Chapter 6.

A transmission planner is an engineer who thinks about the grid five to twenty years in the future.

This is one of the most thankless jobs in the entire industry, and one of the most important. The grid we have today is mostly the result of decisions made fifteen to forty years ago by people whose names you will never know. The grid we will have in 2050 is being designed right now, by another generation of people whose names you will also never know.

A transmission planner studies load forecasts (where will demand grow?), generation queues (where will new power plants want to connect?), and constraint maps (where is the existing grid running out of capacity?). They model the grid under thousands of hypothetical conditions — what if a particular line fails on a hot day? What if two plants trip at the same time? What if there is a sudden surge of EVs being charged at 6 PM? They identify where new lines and substations need to be built, and they propose those projects to regulators and to neighboring utilities.

Their work is mostly invisible until something goes wrong. A blackout caused by a missing transmission line is a planning failure. A bottleneck that delays interconnection of new renewables is a planning failure. The 2,500 gigawatts of generation projects stuck in interconnection queues globally (Chapter 11) reflect, in part, the limits of how fast transmission planning can move.

Transmission planners are also, increasingly, in the middle of political fights. The Northern Pass project from Chapter 3, the SunZia project, the failed Plains and Eastern transmission line in Oklahoma — every major transmission battle has, somewhere in it, a team of planners whose careful work has been overtaken by political opposition or by litigation. Some of them retire frustrated. Most of them stay, and start another project.

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