Electricity and Transportation

The Essentials, Third Edition

In the first edition of this blog, I noted that “the electric sector underpins every other essential industry sector, and it also relies on many of them. I…think of the overlaps like the Olympic rings – all interlinked, with some overlapping more than others.”

For the next several editions, I’ll continue to focus on each critical infrastructure sector in relation to the electric sector because electricity – which began to be deployed as a service close to 150 years ago – has enabled the progress, convenience and abundance that are hallmarks of modern life. Thereafter, I’ll get into the overlapping policy issues in more detail.  

I touched on the interrelationships between electricity and water in the second edition and now I’ll delve into the transportation sector. When discussing the history of water, I mentioned that it was one of the first “essentials” to be enabled by complex infrastructure.  Transportation infrastructure is also ancient in origin, but different from water infrastructure in that it enables many essential services and products to reach their destinations.  Transportation enables movement. As I noted in the last blog, the storage and transportation of water spurred population centers to grow – transportation infrastructure did as well.

Today, we think of three major modes of transportation: land, sea, and air.  This blog will mostly focus on the land element, but will touch on the others because overlaps exist between all three modes of transportation and electricity. 

To state the obvious, the first mode of human transportation on land was walking.  Besides human locomotion, enhanced transportation on land made much slower progress (no pun intended) than that of the sea/waterways.  Humans may have traversed water in basic boats as long as 900,000 years ago. The oldest preserved boat, a canoe-like dugout, dates close to 10,000 years ago.  Contrastingly, on land, humans didn’t make major progress until about 6,000 years ago when horses, camels and donkeys were domesticated (not all at exactly the same time, but you get the gist). The use of these animals not only enabled our ancestors to travel greater distances, but required development of roads and paths that could accommodate their feet and weight as well as the wheeled vehicles that came into being not long after domestication of riding and pack animals.

Horses are near and dear to my heart – I’ve been riding for decades and still compete my off-the-track thoroughbred in the sport of eventing. Their partnership with humans perhaps saved them as a species (obviously with a high price to pay given their lives of servitude), enabled human civilization to vastly expand, and underpinned the expansion of roadways.  But, while progress was made from 6,000 years ago to about 250 years ago, including the sophisticated roads built by the Romans throughout their empire, humans were limited by the limitations on the animals themselves – how far they could travel in a given day, their care, feeding, and how much they could carry or pull. Scotsman James Watt’s 1769 creation of a workable and scalable steam engine changed all that (the concept was developed earlier in the 18th century, but he perfected it).  His invention also eventually applied to the commercial expansion and development of – drum roll please -- electricity.  

Initially, the steam engine powered boats and exponentially expanded the ability for people to travel and trade, whether domestically or internationally, on rivers, lakes, and oceans. A French inventor, Claude de Joffrey, in 1783, built the "Pyroscaphe," the world’s first steamship. Even back then, inventors wanted to bring the concept to land, with the first automobile tested the same year as James Watt’s engine – 1769.  However, the weight of the engine only enabled a speed of 2.5 miles per hour, about the same as horses could travel during the course of daylight hours. About a hundred years later, the first two-wheeled steam powered bicycle was created, leading eventually to four-wheeled automobiles in the early 1900s.

Besides the waterway travel enabled by the steam engine, after thousands of years, land travel also made a huge leap forward with the creation of the railroad. According to ThoughtCo.com: 

“In 1801, British inventor Richard Trevithick unveiled the world’s first road locomotive—called the “Puffing Devil”—and used it to give six passengers a ride to a nearby village. It was three years later that Trevithick first demonstrated a locomotive that ran on rails, and another one that hauled 10 tons of iron to the community of Penydarren, Wales, to a small village called Abercynon. It took a fellow Brit—a civil and mechanical engineer named George Stephenson—to turn locomotives into a form of mass transport. In 1812, Matthew Murray of Holbeck designed and built the first commercially successful steam locomotive, “The Salamanca,” and Stephenson wanted to take the technology a step further. So in 1814, Stephenson designed the "Blücher," an eight-wagon locomotive capable of hauling 30 tons of coal uphill at a speed of four miles per hour…His notable accomplishments also include establishing the standard for rail spacing for most of the railways in use today.” 

The 1800s saw railroad infrastructure expanded throughout the globe, using the concept of heated water to turn a turbine that in turn rotated paddles on boats or moved wheels on railroads. During the 1800s, the steam was heated by wood or coal. 

Because railroads require extensive infrastructure to operate and because that infrastructure can only go so far, people still needed horses and other four-legged animals to move goods from the railroad station to homes and businesses.  However, the movement of food, goods, and people via railroad brought levels of commerce previously unseen, enabled growth of the middle class, and contributed to the development of ever larger population centers.

The success of the Watt steam engine and its ability to mechanically mimic horsepower enabled inventors like Thomas Edison to harness electricity for everyday use later in the 1800s.  The concept was the same – using coal or another energy source to produce steam to turn a turbine.  Electricity was then created by that turbine interacting with a magnet and being funneled into wires.  Edison was further able to harness electricity to create light in every home and business.

Once finally designed correctly, automobiles overtook my beloved horses as the primary way for individuals to move around (thankfully, horses are still great for companionship and horse sports).  Electricity enabled automobiles to be mass produced in the 20th century. Same with airplanes.  Electricity enabled the concrete and rebar manufactured to create the interstate highway system.  You get my drift.

In the 21st century, electric vehicles are, of course, manufactured using electricity.  And drones as well.  All three modes of transportation – air, land, and water – contribute to the modern production of electricity. Detailed components of electric distribution, transmission, and generation facilities – things as small as bolts and as large as bulk power transformers – are transported from overseas via boats or planes and then delivered to electric utilities via freight rail or long-haul trucks.  For the parts produced domestically, they still need to be delivered using railroads and trucks.  In terms of fossil fuel energy sources used to produce electricity, coal is typically delivered via railroad, natural gas via pipeline (to be discussed in a future blog), and fuel oil via truck.  

Helicopters have for decades enabled utility workers to inspect far-flung, hard to access transmission lines and, more recently, drones have provided those same workers with greater capabilities of inspecting infrastructure for routine maintenance or repair.  This is especially helpful when there are harsh weather conditions or safety hazards – using drones to pinpoint damage enables a surgical approach that improves safety for workers and can improve restoration times after power outages.

As with the overlap between water and electricity, there are some very similar policy challenges that the transportation sector (all three major subsectors) share with the electricity sector.  Unlike the water and electricity sectors, transportation is not considered a “utility” and so is not regulated in the same way as those two.  On the other hand, some of their infrastructure is funded with public money – roads, bridges, etc. With that in mind, following are some of the policy overlaps that are high on my list:

-Aging infrastructure (especially on the transportation side), and pushback from customers who are often reluctant to fund the capital investments needed to upgrade, especially given current inflationary trends.  

-Siting and permitting.  Railroads have long-held rights-of-way, but building new lines can be a major challenge.  Same with building or expanding airports or runways and ports.  

-Workforce challenges and the knowledge drain that has resulted from retirements in recent years. 

-Supply chain constraints that impact every aspect of infrastructure deployment and maintenance. 

-How to best use technology to create efficiencies, extend the life of infrastructure, and minimize expenses.  

-How to manage the cybersecurity risk that comes with those technology deployments. 

-Given the workforce challenges, how to hire skilled workers who can understand both technology and the infrastructure itself. 

-How to best manage our airways given the increased use of drones.  How can they be best deployed in helping with electric infrastructure?

-How to deploy electric vehicle charging stations along our nation’s roadways while ensuring electric reliability and safety.

-How to ensure that wireless telecommunications technology is reliable when deploying drones, autonomous vehicles, etc.?

-How will the two sectors deploy AI – what are the overlaps?

And I may be missing a few!  While daunting, coordination and collaboration will help these sectors come together around these incredibly important topics.  In the meantime, I’ll be mulling all of this over while taking a ride on my four-legged friend.