Collected book reviews
At Bill Gates's recommendation I recently read The Grid by Gretchen Bakke. There's been a lot of talk recently about the US having an infrastructure problem but mostly it's in the context of our roads and bridges. But really our electrical grid is also very important for modern life and impending changes to electricity generation look to increase the strain on the grid. The cost of solar electricity on average has been plunging but the demand for electricity doesn't go down when a cloud passes over a solar farm. We really want to be spreading out fluctuations generation between further flung power plants but to do that we need to build new, better, power lines. There's also a good history of early electrical innovation though I was already familiar with much of it. Donald Trump's election finally prompted me to get around to reading The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. He wrote about how social media has made the failu...