But who dares draw out the linchpin from the waggon-wheel?1
—R. W. Emerson, 1860
I
In How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021) Andreas Malm enjoins us to consider violence against infrastructure as a route to systems’ reform.2 His argument is that when class interests are involved violence has historically been an effective means of achieving systemic change. Since disrupting oil is for him as much about upsetting vested interests as it is about ending relations of material dependence, violence against the dumb structures of our world should at least be considered.
And yet, there is something myopic about locating oil in a pipeline and power in the ownership of such an asset when we all live in such intimacy with fossil fuels and their capacities. Explosions, after all, are what fossil fuels do best, and running hot is what we’ve learned best from them.3 Is the question, then, really how to destroy this system with heat—blowing things up, revolution, and resistance: all thermodynamic and social modes of exciting the passions and then using these to fuel action?4
Instead of hot-blooded logics in overheated times, we might turn our minds toward the cold. For there is one miraculous pocket of chilled air that we all quite likely share, and which, as improbable as it may seem, is critical to holding the fossil-fueled power system in place: the electric refrigerator. Thoroughly distributed, totally privatized, and utterly banal, the electric refrigerator is as familiar and domestic as a pipeline is alien and corporate. But you wouldn’t blow up your refrigerator, because if you did you’d also blow up your home.
The term “electric” in “electric refrigerator” is deceptive. Unlike most things that run on fossil fuels that can, with some tweaking, be made to run on anything—hydrogen, ammonia, batteries, old cooking oil, wooden pellets, steam, whatever—this is not the case for the electric refrigerator. It is in no way a neutral node on some imagined-to-be-fuel-agnostic electricity system. Indeed, the domestic electric refrigerator was a ruse from the start. It was never developed for us nor even for our food; it was made for the grid.
The privately owned domestic refrigerator was invented and ferociously mass-marketed because electric companies needed an answer to a ruinous set of thermodynamic and commercial problems created by using fossil fuels to make electricity. In other words, if we hadn’t begun making electricity with coal in the late-nineteenth century, and had we not continued making it with natural gas in the twentieth, we would not have the electric refrigerator today. But the inverse is also true: we may want to stop using coal and its brethren fuels in electricity production, but so long as electric refrigerators sit just about everywhere on the electric grid, this is impossible. The electric refrigerator is lodged like a stone in the aorta of the energy transition.
Such a cozy relationship with the coldness of fossil fuels thus calls for a more surgical approach to resistance than blowing things up. Like the linchpin of yore, slip the electric refrigerator out of the fossil-fueled electricity system and the coal-fired power plant, the natural gas power plant, the diesel power plant, and (bonus prize) the nuclear power plant all fall off the cart.5
II
What we use to make electricity has an inordinate impact on the design and good functioning of the system that delivers, makes use of, and makes money from that electricity. The electric grids we depend upon today were developed in the early 1900s and are all characterized by an intense reliance upon fossil fuels. In well-gridded areas, this fuel is or has often been coal (becoming, more recently, natural gas), while in places with less functional or less expansive electricity systems, it is typically diesel or heavy fuel oil.6
Though a transition across these fuels has been underway for nigh on thirty years, structurally speaking—from the point of how an electric grid functions—all are pretty much the same. All power plants that rely on fossil fuels are heat engines, and these work best when running at roughly the same rate of production all the time: 24/7; night and day; summer and winter; steady, reliable, predicable, and importantly, under human control. Nuclear functions in this way too. When a grid works in this way (which is most of the time), it is a triumph in decontextualized standardization.
The reason why electric grids were made to work like this is because fossil-fueled power plants are both difficult and expensive to turn up or down, and very slow (indeed, in certain cases almost impossible) to turn on again once off. As a result, fossil-fuel-plus-nuclear plants create what is now commonly known and lauded as “baseload”: electricity that is stable and reliably present. Though principally an idea, baseload has with time become something more. Much of the last century has been spent building baseload into the very bones of the electrical system, to the extent that it now feels like truth that regardless of when we might decide to use electricity, we can always count on it being there, available to us for our needs as much as our whims.
But baseload is not a gift, it is an artifact. Baseload—so oft lauded and so assiduously preserved in discussions around grid reform—is little more than a side-effect of the physics of a coal-burning power plant coupled with the problem of making a profit. As a result, contemporary grids are constructed to preserve stability on the supply side (power plant) while allowing variability on the demand side (us).7 This is in contrast to, for example, solar power, which is unreliable even during the day (puffy white clouds be damned), seasonally variable, and totally useless at night; or wind power which varies inconsistently, if somewhat predictably, with the weather. With renewables, then, variability happens on the supply side. This means that rather than simply using electricity in whatever quantities and at whatever times we want, we need to adjust our use to its production. This is not necessarily complicated, but neither our machines nor ourselves are well-prepared for the shift.
It has been a hundred years since electricity systems were built around the exigencies of burning coal, a process that necessitated a significant number of “tweaks.”8 Only a few of these tweaks have become so structurally important to function as linchpins, but one that does is the electric refrigerator. And with time, it has become something more than just the mechanical nubbin of a difficult grid. Like wolf unto dog, this domesticated cold box lives with us now.
III
When I was a child, growing up in a rural part of a rural state at the western edge of the North American continent, I was taught to put food in the fridge. Everything not canned went in there: leftovers, freshly bought fruits and vegetables, cheese, eggs. Even things made irritating by refrigeration, like honey and butter, went in, particularly during ant or moth season. But bugs were the secondary cause of our refrigeration; the first was to keep food from going bad before we could eat it. We were poor, but what mattered most were ideas about freshness and cleanliness. We should eat fresh food, without bugs, and without mold.9 The refrigerator was our friend in this endeavor; a help mate, a health mate.
My French-ish parents-in-law, who are now a century old, live every summer amidst swarms of fruit flies. Because we have no air-conditioning (also a type of refrigeration), whenever they visit, I put their fruit in the fridge, where incidentally they can’t find it. Being roughly the same age as mass electrification, it simply wouldn’t occur to them to look. My aim with this is not to deprive them of fruit, but to keep it fresh and to keep the flies to a minimum. But my in-laws don’t care much about either.10 They eat fruit even when it is mostly rotten. They eat the flies too. My mother-in-law, sensing my weirdness about the swarms, famously said: “Oh, but those are the flies you can eat.” I was raised without this category of fly.
When my own mother was a child growing up on the South Side of Chicago, they ate canned fruits, vegetables, and meat. Some things were frozen (peas) and few were fresh or processed (principally meats). Part of the reason I was raised with fresh food and a cherished refrigerator was because of the awe my mother felt upon her first encountered with fresh spinach in her early twenties, after leaving the Midwest. When she speaks of the moment she realized that wet-mop spinach from a can was not a fair representation of the glory of the edible plant her face still lights with joy.
When, in my own twenties and living in the highlands of Guatemala I discovered that the refrigerator was, counter to all previous experience, an unwelcome presence. There coldness was a quality to be distrusted, so much so that when we moved to a place with a small and unobtrusive refrigerator, my Mayan partner insisted we unplug it at night, as the cold should not be present in the room together with sleep.11 He never believed that the cold stayed in the machine, nor that the cold might be good for the food. Instead, whenever anything went wrong with what we were eating, the refrigerator was a postulated cause—never a sought-after solution.
Like every highland Mayan I’ve ever met, his cheeks were discolored from the cold, his skin having been burnt frozen time and again. His parents had installed a light bulb in the common sleeping room where we stayed when not in our own small place. This bulb was their only nod toward electrification and its potentialities. But it wasn’t there for light so much as warmth. Like any incandescent lightbulb, 95 percent of its energy was radiated as heat. The bulb helped keep our skin from freezing as we slept.
IV
Taylor Swift, in her break-up ballad “All Too Well,” sings: “Cause there we are again in the middle of the night / We’re dancing ‘round the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” A mere strophe and she captures the intimacy of our lives with this machine. The refrigerator, she reminds us, illuminates our most hidden scenes, the shameful or lustful fistfalls of 3:00 a.m. in the kitchen alone, together, with the fridge and the secrets it has seen.
“Anthropomorphized and sentimentalized” the refrigerator (or “fridge,” a sweet domestication of the machine’s name that arose in the 1950s when the device became a staple in the American home) has two faces, but we often see only one.12 Like a light bulb or a couch, the refrigerator has become a ubiquitous domestic presence over time. In places with universal electrification, this relationship of dependence and care tends to be one we’d like the rest of world to have too.
I have found that in conversations about the roughly 8 percent of the world population without access to electricity, refrigerators and electric grids emerge hand in hand. The argument goes something like: “Much of the world has no electricity. Let’s develop an electricity system so that they can have a refrigerator.”13 This kind of impulse links electricity and the refrigerator, but has it backwards: the electricity network is not for the refrigerator; the refrigerator is for the electricity network.
This is the second face of the electric refrigerator, the hidden face. The domestic electric refrigerator was invented and heavily mass-marketed by electricity companies as a way to “balance” the grid, so much so that the claim has been made that the very concept of a “mass market” first emerged in the 1920s with its invention and sale.14 That there might be something we all have, a “necessity” that we purchase and install ourselves (unlike, for example, an indoor toilet or an outlet, which are often installed by others), has been a remarkably universal success—even in places without domestic hot water heaters or dedicated heating or centralized air. Everyone has (or is slotted as needing) a fridge.15 Dorm rooms have one; hotel rooms have one; office kitchens have one; grocery stores are essentially one big one.16 In single-family homes, the kitchen has one, and often so does the basement. The electric fridge is such a constant and consummate companion it is hard to imagine how we might live without it.
Given all of this, it’s weird to think that the electric refrigerator was not, strictly speaking, invented for us, but as an answer to early utility companies’ problem with coal. It made baseload make sense. Before its invention, no one used electricity at night, we turned everything off when we went to bed. Lights clicked off when we left the office; streetcars parked once the commute was done; factories powered down at the end of the work day. With the exception of the occasional and limited electric streetlighting system, there was no call for “central station” electricity for roughly sixteen hours of the diurnal cycle: midday nobody needed light because it was light outside, and in the middle of the night nobody needed light because everyone was asleep. This is still largely true today. If you didn’t have a fridge, you could throw the breaker before going to bed and let your home drift off to a fossil-free dreamland together with you.17
V
Forget everything you think you know about batteries. Electricity cannot be stored.18 This is principally because there is no “it” to store. Electricity isn’t a thing; it’s a force, unique in our world.19 Storing electricity is the logical equivalent of filling a box with gravity to make it extra heavy. It just doesn’t work like that. Instead, with electricity (but not gravity), it helps to imagine a carefully placed row of dominoes: if you tip the first with your index finger and watch them fall, the force that fells each in turn is not separate, nor separable, from the dominoes themselves. Without the tipping of one into the next, there is no falling line, but without the dominoes correctly placed, there is no push to be measured. The dominoes and the act of falling/pushing-the-next are the same.
This is essentially how an electron stream works. A generator rips electrons from atoms; those electrons bump into the next nearest atom. In smacking up against that atom, they push some of its electrons away; these bump along to the next atom and do the same, and with the next the same, and the same, all the way around the grid. Electricity is this bumping along, this displacement of electrons by other electrons. Some substances, metals most especially, make this process of displacement easier, and these are what we tend to build conductors (wires) out of. Take away the conductive material, and the electricity isn’t there.20
The implications of this are both dramatic and well-known. Firstly, electricity is very fresh. Like an apple picked from the tree that travels straight to the mouth, it takes only a fraction of a second for electricity produced by wind farms in the Columbia River Gorge to light up bulbs in Los Angeles a thousand miles away (via a powerline affectionally known as The Western Doughnut). Secondly, if you generate more power than can be immediately used, you wreck the grid, and if you generate too little, things just don’t work very well.
One of the main reasons why coal, natural gas, heavy fuel oil, and nuclear are so prevalent is because we can stockpile them. We may not be able to store electricity, but we can store fuel and then use it to make electrical power when we want. Hydroelectric dams also work like this: they stockpile water and then we control (for the most part) when and how much power they make. Adjusting generation to match use in this way also fits well to the twentieth-century cultural logic of command and control. We build it, we tell it what to do and when, and everything should march in some orderly way toward ever-more efficient functionality. Sadly, what we do not control is the wind, the sun, the rain, and the waves; and though we may command them, they do not deign to listen.
VI
In the early days of the grid, when dusk settled over a city, every front-office clerk and every corner-office executive alike found themselves in need of artificial illumination. This was the entirety of the electricity market. The demand for electricity then dropped off precipitously as offices closed up for the night and the last of the city’s workers stepped aboard electric street cars or trains bound for the suburbs, where they read by gaslight and ate food cooked with a gas flame.21 At night, in the mornings, and for most of the day (especially during the summer), coal-fired power plants sat idle or massively underutilized.
That same power plant, however, had to be fully staffed 24/7. On top of that, the most expensive thing about large-scale infrastructure projects was, and remains to this day, paying back the interest on the massive loans necessary for their construction—an expense that varies neither seasonally nor diurnally. Samuel Insull, the man who invented the electrical monopoly, once famously described this bind by saying: “If your entire plant is only in use 5.5 percent of the time, it is only a question of when you will be in the hands of a receiver.”22 He, like everyone else in the business in the early 1900s, needed a way to sell power the rest of the day. He needed someone, or something, to use electricity 24/7. Otherwise, power plants have to be turned off, which can’t be done because the physics are bad, and the money even worse.
At the time, there were two ways to approach this problem. First, by gathering customers (or uses) that circled the clock: not just office lights in the evening and streetcars for morning and evening commutes, but midday manufacturing, nighttime city street lighting, and the late evening domestic lighting market.23 Yet, a problem remained: nighttime load. There simply wasn’t any. What everyone in the electricity business needed was an echo to coal—something that would use at least some of the power from that plant all the time. This something would also ideally be sold and maintained by the electric company, thus making them money thrice over: more electricity could be sold to power the thing, plus the thing itself could be sold, and since most electrical machines at the time were both temperamental and wonky, maintenance services could be offered for a fee. Enter the electric refrigerator.
VII
In the early 2010s, I was conducting research with people living off grid in central California. They loved to show off the electricity system they’d built for themselves (a grid, just smaller), as well as all of their electric stuff: the big screen TVs, the computers, internet, game stations, and lighting systems (indoors and out). They did all of this while preaching renewable power generation and energy independence. These people had pantries, root cellars, canned food, pickled food, fermented food, and gardens, but they were not farmers, so there were no cows or goats to milk, and they weren’t making their own butter, curing meat, or pulling up fish from the pond. They were living off grid, but they didn’t necessarily want “alternative” lives. Usually, they just didn’t want to pay their utility company tens of thousands of dollars to install a few additional poles out beyond grid edge.
Like everyone else, they also had a refrigerator. But unlike most Americans, theirs was the smallest possible such device, the sort of machine you might find in a Las Vegas hotel room with barely enough space for a traveler’s leftovers and a couple miniature bottles of vodka. Even though their renewables-based homemade electricity systems were robust, they simply could not support a grander machine. No matter the size, their fridge—like every fridge—was insatiable, consuming power all the time. Renewables just don’t make power like this. Instead, their output follows the rains, the runoff, and the path of the sun; they produce electricity sometimes.
Here the electric fridge wasn’t a linchpin, it was a thorn. We would pause in front of it and the tone turned plaintive. Why, they asked, isn’t there a refrigerator that can run on variable power? Why must it be on all the time? Why do they all use so much electricity? Why is there no alternative? The 24/7 electric refrigerator simply didn’t work with the small-scale solar/hydroelectric systems they’d built. These people stepped away from fossil fuels, designed an alternative mode of living with electricity, and tied the luxury goods of modern life to a new set of infrastructural logics. But in so doing they’d unmasked the fridge for what it is: a ubiquitous node in the long arm of coal (natural gas, and oil, and nuclear). Those of us linked to such contemporary systems see it as a friend, an intimate, a necessity. But they saw it as an incorrigible, uncorrectable interloper preventing something unsanctioned from coming into being.
VIII
Despite its ubiquity, the domestic refrigerator is only about 100 years old. It was predated by iceboxes and large-scale refrigeration by decades. In 1890, for example, almost every brewery and meat packer in the United States had an industrial-scale cooling device installed that weighed about five tons and was usually powered by steam engine.24 The refrigerator and the electric motor therefore did not emerge entangled. In the early days, electricity was principally for expanding corporate light, while gas would become the go-to fuel for refrigeration. This was especially true as refrigerators shrunk and were redesigned for the domestic market.
In this decades-long bout of marketing competition, the worst machines were electric. Rather than a gas flame (to which every urban household had access) and a silent system of recycled ammonia, electric refrigerators were cooled by an electric motor installed atop an insulated cabinet that bore a remarkable resemblance to a standard icebox. This motor was insanely noisy, difficult to live with, and widely detested. And like anything motorized, the electric fridge had many moving parts, which meant it broke down all the time, not to mention being more expensive than its gas-powered counterpart. Unlike the gas refrigerator, however, the electric refrigerator was backed by powerful electric companies.
It is not unusual in the history of capitalism for a poor product to beat out an exceptional one because the company hawking the crap simply has more money to spend—on advertising, on acquiring competitors and quietly closing them down, on product placement and supply chain control. Add to these legal means predatory pricing and collusion, which were less thoroughly controlled in the earliest days of mass electrification, and a company with means and motivation had immense power over a nascent market. Facing the difficult task of making a profit off of an unstorable, unmeasurable, indivisible, and lethal product—electricity—with a minuscule market, companies like Westinghouse, General Electric, and General Motors were particularly motivated.
The electric refrigerator was valuable to them, precisely because of its avarice. It consumed a lot of power all the time. It was, and remains, the one domestic device that consumers don’t use intermittently; its draw on the electricity system is constant, 24/7; night and day; summer and winter; steady, reliable, predicable. Because it helped solve the utilities’ largest problem, popular displeasure with this early cacophonous and glitchy cold box was matched and trumped by the ferocity of its marketing.
Constant uses for electricity at night is a problem that has not been solved otherwise ever since. Grids still rely on very few invariable draws on electric power, which must be used simply because it must be made. Electric cars briefly delighted contemporary utilities.25 Data centers today are another source of hope for electricity companies. Even streetlights and traffic lights were developed and popularized in part as balancing devices for the grid.26 Nighttime load, whatever the form, is a net win for anyone and everyone trying to make some kind of money with thermoelectric power plants.
Had we developed electrical power grids around solar or wind or waves or tides or swift running rivers from the get go, the answer to the problem of how to keep food fresh would not have been the same as what was developed to assuage the woes of coal-burning power plant owners.27 Pull that answer out now and it’s like slipping the linchpin from its spot in the axel. Except, rather than crashing like a cart, the entirety of our contemporary electric grid might be set free to find new forms and support new habits. So long as we have the electric refrigerator, we will have coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear, or we will jerry-rig a bunch of systems and machines to make the grid function as if we do. And yet, renewable electricity is far better suited, in its rhythms and intensities, to machines that don’t need power at night, and equally, to those that present no constant draw. Rather than redesigning a fossil-free electrical power system to suit the electric refrigerator, why not answer the question of how we might keep food fresh otherwise?28
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Considerations in Conduct of Life (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1860).
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (New York: Verso, 2021). Notably published in advance of someone actually blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, ed., An Overheated World: An Anthropological History of the Early Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2019).
Gretchen Bakke, “To Transact and Shimmer: Energy in the Expanded Field” Annual Review of Anthropology 54 (2025): 167–83.
A linchpin is a sort of sturdy metal skewer that one slips through an axel to hold the wheel of a cart in place. It’s a simple technology that allows a more complex technology (the cart) to work reliably and well.
See especially Gökçe Günel, “Energy Accumulation,” e-flux Architecture, September 2020, ➝.
Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future (New York, Bloomsbury 2016).
Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber, eds., The Persistence of Technology: Histories of Repair, Reuse and Disposal (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2021).
Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).
It is worth noting that in the south (global and American) the air-conditioner augments the refrigerator’s role in the production of nighttime load. There are many complications, however, to balancing a grid with the mass adoption of this device because people can (and do) turn the air-conditioner up and down as they please, usually all at the same time and in reaction to local shifts in the weather, contributing to unbalancing a grid running on baseload, which is poorly reactive. The fridge thus is a better match to a fossil-fueled grid than the air-conditioner because its electrical draw is constant.
Ellen Messer, “The Hot and Cold in Mesoamerican Indigenous and Hispanicized Thought” Social Science and Medicine 25, no. 4 (1987): 339–46.
By 1950 more than 80 percent of American farms and more than 90 percent of urban homes had a refrigerator. In England the number was 3 percent largely due to the slow development of the national grid; in Germany by 1954 about 10 percent of households had refrigerators due to prewar poverty and postwar rebuilding. For all of this and more, see Helen Peavitt, Refrigerator: The Story of Cool in the Kitchen (London: Reaktion Books, 2017).
It is undeniable that the refrigerator changes worlds, especially in places hot and humid enough that food rots quickly. However, it is the culture of a place and not its climate that determines how a fridge remakes relations of society and health. In India for example, especially among the higher castes, food must be made and served fresh. This necessitates at least a person – traditionally and today, a woman – singularly devoted to shopping and cooking. A woman cannot buy fresh food and prepare several meals across the day to be eaten in their entirety and also go to work. In this context the domestic refrigerator is an important element in the professionalization of women, a development that is also linked to a family’s movement out of poverty. To buy food and to refrigerate it; to prepare food and to refrigerate—that enables time itself to be compartmentalized. One can cook now and eat later, and while extreme freshness might be lost, it’s not so far gone. In contrast, in Jamaica, also a hot and humid place, the refrigerator and its pocket of cold is regarded with the same distrust as in Guatemala. There rather than learning to refrigerate, a set of practices and foods have been developed that bypass refrigeration. These include relying upon dried foods, like beans and rice; the cultivation of those sorts of rot that “preserve” food in edible forms (the French do this too), most especially yogurts, cheeses, fermented vegetables etc.; and the sharing of fresh food among households. If for example a family kills a pig, it is quickly distributed and eaten by the community. A gift repaid by neighbors at a later day and with another pig. Cultures of food, class, and gender thus matter as much to the purported necessity of a refrigerator as climate or the characteristics of the device itself. On India, see Harold Wilhite, “Refrigerating India,” The Material Culture of Energy, no. 09 (Spring 2018); on Jamaica, see Peter Knight et al., “Household Food Safety Awareness of Selected Urban Consumers in Jamaica,” International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition 54, no. 4 (2003): 309–20.
Ronald Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Antina von Schnitzler, Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid (Princeton University Press, 2016).
This is literally true in Iceland where grocery stores have a refrigerated section—a large room—within which all the “keep cool” goods are simply placed on shelves like in a regular grocery store. In shopping, one first makes selections from the room-temperature room (note: also climate controlled) and then walks through a hanging plastic barrier to the cold room, wholly manned by woolly-coated employees.
Dehlia Hannah once told me that throwing the breaker is precisely what she does when frustrated with her gadget-focused family. The fridge’s dependency on a constant current can stuff it. See Dehlia Hannah, “Blackout: A Manifesto,” E-flux Architecture, September 2024, ➝.
Despite being everywhere in contemporary electricity systems, including in our cars and in our pockets, the battery is a misnomer. It doesn’t have any electricity inside of it. Instead, electricity is used to move chemicals into a relationship that when reversed creates a new electric current. With pumped hydro – a common form of stockpile in places with hills – extra electricity at one moment is used to pump water up to the top of some sort of prominence. Later, when more power is needed, the water is allowed to flow back down hill (using gravity) which, as it passes through a turbine it, generates “new” electricity. Flywheels, which are literally everywhere on contemporary electricity grids, are the same—electricity is used to wind a spring that, when unwound, can be used to generate new electricity. For a gorgeous, novelistic reductio ad absurdum take on the flywheel see Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2009).
Gretchen Bakke, “Electricity Is Not a Noun” in Electrifying Anthropology: Explorations in Electric Practices and Infrastructures, eds. Simone Abram et al. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019): 25–42.
This is why electricity doesn’t drip out of an outlet to burn a little hole in your floor when nothing is plugged in. Air is a terrible conductor.
Worth noting is that it was, and remains, impossible for the electricity industry to make a profit off of rural or poor people. First because of the cost of building an expansive infrastructure for very few customers (see section VII) and the former because they don’t use enough electricity to pay for the cost of running the power plant. Electrification was, thus, in the early days – and to this day in many places in the world – a project for dense urban environments and wealthy people. Where the grid expands to something approximating universal electrification, is where the government has committed to this as a value rather than as a profit-making enterprise and heavily subsidized the expansion in various ways.
Quoted in Richard Munson, From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).
The second lag in electricity use is actually midday. Often utilities charge heavy industry less per kilowatt-hour at midday than it cost to make because at least they are getting something rather than nothing for the electricity they would have to produce regardless. Solar only exacerbates this problem. And the wind, unfortunately, tends to blow strongest just before dawn, when nobody, but nobody, is using electricity at all.
This section is largely a recapitulation of a remarkable essay by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum,” in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1999): 202–18.
This was before it was discovered that people tend to charge their cars when they come home from work, which is exactly the same moment that modern folk use more of everything electric: lights go on, TV goes on, the refrigerator is opened an average of twenty times in the hour before dinner, and just enough people are still at work that that load doesn’t dimmish by much. Dusk is also when winds tend to still and solar’s remarkable midday electrical output fades slowly into nothing.
Perhaps what is most amazing about this story of how we got the electric refrigerator is that the electricity/appliance companies succeeded so thoroughly that not only was their inferior product the market winner, but the very fact of its competitor’s existence has been lost to history.
If for example, we used solar to make electricity, the very first thing we would do is remove nighttime load. No fridge, indeed nothing at all. Flip that breaker off. Instead, what we are doing is not only maintaining baseload despite the addition of solar, but also attempting to design a whole generation of smart machines that can be programmed to run at night. The Internet of things (IoT) is for the most part a way to get your dishwasher/washing machine/hot water heater to act like your fridge and use electricity in the wee hours when nobody and nothing else is.
For an insightful tour of the global cold system that also ends in the domestic refrigerator and which many argue should get the boot because it is extractive, resource heavy, and very bad for local and small-scale agriculture, see Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves (New York: Penguin Press, 2024).
