How the Lights Stay On

Chapter 16: The People Who Watch the Grid

It is four in the morning at a regional electric utility somewhere in the eastern United States. Outside, the sky is dark. Inside the control room, the wall of screens from Chapter 2 still glows. The numbers still scroll. The frequency on the central display reads 60.000.

A woman in her fifties is sitting in the chair. Her name is not important — there are people like her in every control room in the country — but her job is one of the most important in modern life. She is a system dispatcher. For the next eight hours, she is responsible for the moment-to-moment balance of an electrical grid that serves several million people.

She has been doing this job for seventeen years. Before that, she worked at a coal plant in Kentucky, running the boiler. Before that, she was in the Navy as an electrician’s mate aboard a nuclear submarine. The combination of nuclear training, plant experience, and grid dispatching is common in this profession. The skills transfer.

At 4:12 AM, a generator at a coal plant in West Virginia trips offline. The first indication is a small wobble in frequency — the heartbeat dipping from 60.000 to 59.997 — and a red alert on her screen. Within three seconds, the grid’s automatic generation control begins ramping up other plants to compensate. She watches the frequency recover. She sends a message to the next shift’s morning briefing logbook. She drinks her coffee.

This is the unsung work of the modern world. It is happening right now, somewhere, as you read this.

This chapter is about the people who do it.

For most of the last fifteen chapters, we have been describing the electrical grid as a machine. A juggling act. A synchronized continent-sized machine. A system with a brain.

These metaphors are all useful. But they obscure something important.

The grid is not actually a machine, in the way a car or a microwave is a machine. The grid is a service that exists because tens of thousands of human beings, every day, make it exist. The hardware is essential — the generators, the wires, the transformers, the substations. The software is essential — the energy management systems, the alarm software, the demand-response platforms. But the hardware and software do not run themselves. They are operated, maintained, repaired, planned, forecasted, and defended by people.

These people are mostly invisible. You will never meet most of them. You probably do not know what their job titles are. Their work, when it is going well, is so smooth that you forget it is happening. Their work, when it goes badly, becomes a headline for a few days and then disappears.

This chapter is a brief tour. The book has met some of these people already — the office boy in 1979, the FirstEnergy operators in 2003, the dispatcher at PJM in Audubon, the Texas grid operators who came within four minutes of catastrophic collapse. It is worth, before we close, devoting a chapter to the people themselves rather than to the events they were characters in.

There are a few roles especially worth knowing about.

The dispatchers are the people at the wall of screens.

Most large American grids — the eastern interconnection, the western, ERCOT in Texas — are run by regional organizations called Independent System Operators or Regional Transmission Organizations. The biggest is PJM, headquartered in Audubon, Pennsylvania, serving sixty-five million people across thirteen states and the District of Columbia. Others include the Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO), the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), and ERCOT.

Each of these organizations runs control rooms that operate around the clock, every day of the year. Christmas morning. New Year’s Eve. The middle of a hurricane. The afternoon of the Super Bowl. The grid never sleeps, and the dispatchers do not either.

The path into the job is rarely direct. Many dispatchers come from the military, particularly the Navy’s nuclear program — the training is rigorous and similar in style. Many come from plant operations, having spent years running coal, gas, or nuclear plants before moving to the more abstract work of the control room. A few come from engineering programs at universities. The federal government requires every dispatcher to be certified by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), with continuous education and recertification every few years.

The job is high-pressure. Most days are quiet. But on the days that are not — a heat wave pushing the grid to its limits, a storm taking out transmission lines, a generator tripping unexpectedly — the dispatchers have minutes, sometimes seconds, to make decisions that affect millions of people. They train for these days the way pilots train for emergencies: in simulators, repeatedly, with deliberate stress.

Most dispatchers I have ever read about or heard described love their work. They are deeply protective of the grid. They get angry when politicians talk about it carelessly. They roll their eyes at marketing language. They watch each other’s careers across the industry. When a dispatcher retires after thirty years in the chair, there is usually a quiet ceremony.

They are the closest thing the modern world has to lighthouse keepers. Most people will never know their names.

If the dispatchers are the calm ones, the lineworkers are the rough ones.

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