Downtime on the Microgrid: Architecture, Electricity, and Smart City Islands

by Malcolm McCullough

Overview

Something good about the smart city: a human-centered account of why the future of electricity is local.

Resilience now matters most, and most resilience is local—even for that most universal, foundational modern resource: the electric power grid. Today that technological marvel is changing more rapidly than it has for a lifetime, and in our new grid awareness, community microgrids have become a fascinating catalyst for cultural value change. In Downtime on the Microgrid, Malcolm McCullough offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the cascade of white papers on smart clean infrastructure. Writing from an experiential perspective, McCullough avoids the usual smart city futurism, technological solutionism, policy acronyms, green idealism, critical theory jargon, and doomsday prepping to provide new cultural context for a subject long a favorite theme in science and technology studies.

McCullough describes the three eras of North American electrification: innovation, consolidation, and decentralization. He considers the microgrid boom and its relevance to the built environment as “architecture's grid edge.” Finally, he argues that resilience arises from clusters; although a microgrid is often described as an island, future resilience will require archipelagos—clusters of microgrids, with a two-way, intermittent connectiveness that is very different from the always-on, top-down technofuture we may be expecting. With Downtime on the Microgrid, McCullough rises above techno-hype to find something good about the smart city and reassuring about local resilience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262357012
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Series:	Infrastructures
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Malcolm McCullough is Professor of Architecture at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing, and Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information, all published by the MIT Press.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xv

1 At the Edge 1

2 Electrification's Eras 31

3 Smart Green Blues 65

4 Microgrid Institutions 97

5 Architecture's Grid Edge 129

6 Situated Interactions 157

7 To Island 185

Notes 215

Index 235

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The microgrid industry now has its bible. An engaging read for anyone trying to grasp both philosophically and practically what the microgrid era is all about. Both entertaining and informative, this is little energy's big book.

—Elisa Wood, Editor-in-Chief, Microgrid Knowledge

Modernity's energy paradigm involved an unseen central station delivering power at the flip of a switch. Now, with the rise of microgrids, the infrastructure of power production is more local and more visible. In an informed, inviting tone Malcolm McCullough explains that the stakes and opportunities for architecture could not be higher.

—Sandy Isenstadt, Professor and Chair, Art History, University of Delaware; author of Electric Light: An Architectural History

Malcolm McCullough demonstrates that the late nineteenth-century transition to electrification was a period of flexibility and exploration. More than the recent past, that era offers a guide to the microgrid's potential to reconfigure the built environment. Resisting deterministic narratives, he explores the possibilities that emerge when networks meet at the grid edge. Microgrids can foster architectural innovation and new sensibilities, including participatory buildings, green housing, and resilient urban archipelagos. A wide-ranging, essential work.

—David E. Nye, author of American Illuminations and Electrifying America