Last week, Americans had a rare view into what the future might look like. It came from California, as usual, but it was not courtesy of Apple’s annual keynote, or indeed of any technology company. It came from the state’s electricity grid.
Wait—wait! Don’t click away yet. Electricity is, I hasten to add, extremely interesting. It is the energy source of the future. In basically any world in which America addresses climate change and zeroes out carbon pollution from its economy, we will have to use more electricity. Electricity will propel our cars, cook our food, and heat our homes. And that means we should start to cultivate the kind of commonsense understanding of the electricity system that many of us already have about, say, gasoline, or oil prices, or car engines. Because especially if you’re used to living in a world of physical commodities—and physical fuels—electricity is really, really weird.
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