Senior Editor
KATHLEEN DAVIS

In October, President Obama—in a nice photo op at Florida Power & Light’s DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center—announced a whole bucket of cash for the grid (see Notes, page 17). Now, was I the only person who thought, “Shouldn’t he be at a substation or under some powerlines or something?” While I get that he’s big on the renewables, his choice of proper placement for this announcement isn’t exactly grid-specific. It seems a little off-topic.

He’s forking over $3.4 billion of my tax money for grid upgrades, so I guess I shouldn’t be picky, but it still irks me a tad. Despite all the shiny talk about smart, intelligent grids, despite the chatter about grid evolution and grid 2.0, grids are still ... well, they’re just not very sexy, now are they?

Renewables are sexy. Solar panels and wind turbines and great, sweeping landscape shots. Renewables are going save the world, and saving the world is sexy.

Figuring out how the wires, components and interconnections make that world-saving happen—not so sexy. Think of it like your flat-screen TV. Flat-screens are the ultimate in tech sexy, but when you open the manual and try to figure out how to plug in your DVR and your DVD player and all the other dangling components—well, then that flat-screen loses a bit of the zing it had.

My parents have never fully figured out their flat-screen. They still have to crawl behind it to unplug the Direct TV and plug in the DVD player when they want to watch a movie, and they gripe about it, but it works.

We can’t unplug a power plant and plug in a wind turbine. All our cables in this industry aren’t quite so plug-and-play as those connecting our home electronics. Despite the lack of visible sexiness in those big wire bundles, we need to look at them more often. We need to recognize the beauty—and, yes, the sexiness—in them.

Like inner beauty, it’s an inner sexiness. I get that. It’s based on the world-saving, flat-screen-powering zip that those wires will bring us rather than the wires themselves, but inner sexiness is a good thing.

My parents never could teach me the system for unplugging the satellite TV and plugging in the DVD player at their house, but they did teach me about inner beauty and its importance. I’m sure a lot of other parents did the same.

While I recognize that the lovely lines and slick surface image of renewables will always make for a nice picture, I can’t help but hope that President Obama or Secretary Chu will pop up at a substation or under a pole transformer or beside some shiny switchgear where he will pose like Vanna White, give a little flourish of a wave toward the technology and earnestly believe in the beauty and sexiness of that equipment—not just in its utilitarian necessity.

This commentary was originally published online as an entry in the EYE ON THE GRID blog, http://power-grid.com.

Opinions expressed in this commentary belong to the author and might not be shared by other employees or management of POWERGRID International or parent company PennWell.