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

The People Who Watch the Grid, part 3

If you are reading this and you like engineering and you also like long-term thinking, this is an underappreciated career path.

Weather drives electricity demand. Weather drives renewable generation. Therefore weather forecasters are now, more than ever, part of the grid.

A forecaster at a major utility or grid operator is doing two things at once: predicting consumer demand (how many air conditioners will be running in seven days?) and predicting renewable supply (how much wind will be blowing in fourteen hours? how much sun?). The accuracy of both forecasts directly determines how the grid is operated.

For decades, this work was done by traditional meteorologists with traditional weather models. The forecasts were good but not great. Misses cost the grid money, sometimes a lot of money.

In the last ten years, forecasting has been transformed by machine learning. Modern grid forecasts use neural networks trained on enormous data sets of past weather, past demand, and past renewable output. The result is forecasts that are dramatically more accurate than they were in 2015 — and that get better every year.

This is one of the quiet ways AI is improving the grid that almost nobody talks about. The same machine learning that lets a phone recognize your voice or a website recommend a movie is also, today, telling grid operators how much wind to expect in Texas tomorrow afternoon. The forecasters who survived the transition learned to work with the algorithms. The ones who did not have mostly moved on.

The newest role on this list did not exist forty years ago, and is now one of the most important.

A cybersecurity professional at an electric utility is defending against attacks that, if successful, could darken cities and damage equipment. The 2015 attack on the Ukrainian grid was the first publicly known case of a state-sponsored cyberattack actually causing a blackout. Russian hackers reached into a Ukrainian utility’s control system, opened circuit breakers, and left about 230,000 people without power for several hours. The 2016 follow-up attack was more sophisticated. Both events are studied at every utility in the developed world.

American utilities have, so far, avoided major successful attacks. This is not by accident. The NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection standards — the CIP rules — require utilities to harden their networks, segment their systems, monitor for intrusions, and respond to incidents. The teams that do this work are usually invisible. When they succeed, nothing happens. When they fail, history changes.

The cybersecurity workforce is the youngest part of the grid industry. It is also one of the hardest to staff. Talented cybersecurity professionals can make more money in finance or tech than they can at utilities, and the work is often more glamorous. Recruiting and retaining the people who keep the grid digitally safe is, quietly, one of the biggest workforce challenges in the industry.

One more role, the most mundane, the most unglamorous, and — after 2003 — the most legally required.

Tree-trimming crews are the people who walk the transmission and distribution corridors with chainsaws and chippers, keeping the right-of-way clear of vegetation. After the 2003 blackout (Chapter 4), federal regulators imposed mandatory tree-trimming schedules on every transmission owner in the United States. Failure to comply now carries fines of up to a million dollars per day per violation.

The work is hot, dirty, and dangerous. Falling branches kill workers. Power lines kill workers. The hours are long. The pay is decent but not high.

Most people never think about tree-trimming crews. You may pass them on the side of a road and not notice. You should notice, though. They are the last line of defense between an aging American grid and the natural world that constantly threatens to overgrow it.

There is one more thing to say about all of these people, and it is the most important.

The American grid workforce is aging.

The average lineworker is over forty-five. The average dispatcher is older. Many transmission planners are in their fifties and sixties. The retirement wave that has been building for years is now arriving, and the new generation is not being trained fast enough to replace it.

This is a real and underappreciated risk for the modern grid. All the new technology in the world — the smart grid, the SMRs, the virtual power plants, the AI forecasting — requires people to operate it. And those people require years of training, much of which is delivered by the experts who are now retiring.

There are bright spots. Some utility apprenticeship programs are growing. Community colleges in places like New England and the Pacific Northwest are training lineworkers in larger numbers than they were a decade ago. The Department of Energy has launched several workforce initiatives. But the gap between people retiring and people entering the field is real, and it is unlikely to close on its own.

If you are reading this and thinking about what to do with your life, the American grid is in genuine need of new people, at every level. Engineers, electricians, dispatchers, planners, forecasters, cybersecurity professionals, lineworkers, mechanics. The jobs are real. The pay is decent. The work is meaningful. The training programs exist.

It is a not-glamorous secret of the next twenty years that the people who keep the lights on will, increasingly, be in short supply.

The office boy in Chapter 1 had a name that I do not know. The dispatchers in Audubon do too. The FirstEnergy operators in 2003. The lineworkers in Puerto Rico after Maria. The New York City police officers who climbed down into the subway tunnels in August 2003 and led the people in suits and heels back up to the sun.

There are tens of thousands of these people working today. They will not show up in your news feed unless something goes terribly wrong. They will not be at the front of the next big tech keynote. They will, on a quiet Tuesday afternoon in November, be in a control room you have never seen, watching a number — 60.000 — and listening for the moment something changes.

This entire book has been, in a way, about them. Every machine in every previous chapter is operated, in the end, by a person. Every blackout that did not happen was prevented by someone whose job was to prevent it. Every restoration after a storm was accomplished by someone on a pole.

If you are looking up at a power line today, somewhere a person climbed up to put it there. If your lights are on tonight, somewhere a person is making sure they stay on.

The grid is, ultimately, a service that exists because human beings keep it existing. The technology can change. The economics can change. The fuels can change. The framework can change. The human beings, at the center of it all, do not.

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