In 1882, heaps of black coal were hauled by horse-drawn wagons to the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York’s powerhouse on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, where “jumbo” steam-powered engines (named after P. Kauffman added, and with climate change, the state has to “rethink that basic architecture.” It’s like a mainframe computer in the age of cloud computing, Mr. Kauffman, the state’s so-called energy czar, who is leading its plans to reimagine the power grid. “We have a system which is energy-inefficient because it was never designed to be efficient,” said Richard L. Moreover, a surprising portion of the system is idle except for the hottest days of the year, when already bottlenecked transmission lines into the New York City area reach their physical limit. But the kilowatt-hour produced down the block probably costs more than the one produced at the Canadian border. Your household power may have been generated by Niagara Falls, or by a natural-gas-fired plant on a barge floating off the Brooklyn shore. When you turn on a light or charge your phone, the electricity coming from the outlet may well have traveled hundreds of miles across the power grid that blankets most of North America - the world’s largest machine, and one of its most eccentric.
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