When you turn on a light or charge your phone, the
electricity coming from the outlet may well have traveled hundreds of
miles across the power grid that blankets most of North America — the
world’s largest machine, and one of its most eccentric.
Your household power may have been generated by
Niagara Falls, or by a natural-gas-fired plant on a barge floating off
the Brooklyn shore. But the kilowatt-hour produced down the block
probably costs more than the one produced at the Canadian border.
Moreover, a surprising portion of the system is
idle except for the hottest days of the year, when already bottlenecked
transmission lines into the New York City area reach their physical
limit.
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