How the Grid was built (and why Energy companies are hustling us into paying for their Smart Grid)

DAWN OF THE GRID

Yes, it’s convenient. We come in, flip a switch, and there is light; we turn a handle and water comes out of the tap. And I understand that for most of us, most of the time, the grid is welcoming. It bestows a sense of security; we know that someone is looking out for our power and water.
But today, all those things are available without the grid. The latest inverters, renewable energy sources, and rainwater- capture systems can provide for our needs. As the country prepares to spend the hundreds of billions to upgrade the grid and transform it into the “smart grid,” it is worth reminding ourselves how we came to build the grid in the first place.
The idea of power and water utilities as models of probity is one that, of course, they have steadily projected over the years.
The power companies have a privileged monopoly position, and with that kind of a license to print money, the assumption has been that they would have no reason to abuse it. Yet they do abuse it and they always have.
The growth of General Electric, and to a lesser extent Westinghouse, is a profound case study in the changing ways of American business, an early example of what economic historians call “managerial capitalism” superseding traditional “family capitalism,” exemplified by the businesses run by the Rockefellers and the Morgans. The new-style corporations were run by managers who were not significant shareholders in the business, and companies such as GE were both vertically and horizontally integrated—i.e., they controlled every aspect of production, distribution, sale, and aftercare of the product, all the way from raw materials (in this case electricity and the machinery neededto produce it) to the use of the appliance in the customer’s house.
The idea that they were building a corporate America was very deliberate in the minds of GE’s senior management. One of the most powerful men at GE, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, sincerely believed that corporate functionaries should replace America’s elected national government. Cigar-chomping Steinmetz, who kept six alligators as pets at his home in Schenectady, thought that re-organizing America along the lines of a corporation would rid us of illogical politicians.

It must have seemed like a brave new world at the time, a meritocracy being established and a new rational order replacing the semifeudal era of robber barons such as the Rockefellers.
Not only was GE organized along the inhuman lines satirized in Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s film about the drudgery of life in a mechanized city; the product it created—electricity—enabled other megacorporations to do the same.
Historian David Nye, in his book Electrifying America, says the grid was not built to help the consumer, nor to give communities more control over their own lives, nor necessarily to guarantee a more reliable flow of energy—that was a by-product.