Posted on 12/10/2018 6:53:37 PM PST by marktwain
Executive Summary
The nation has steadily improved its ability to respond to major disasters and the power outages that often result. But increasing threats—whether severe natural disasters, cyber-physical attacks, electromagnetic events, or some combination—present new challenges for protecting the national power grid and recovering quickly from a catastrophic power outage.
The President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) was tasked to examine the nation’s ability to respond to and recover from a catastrophic power outage of a magnitude beyond modern experience, exceeding prior events in severity, scale, duration, and consequence. Simply put, how can the nation best prepare for and recover from a catastrophic power outage, regardless of the cause?
After interviews with dozens of senior leaders and experts and an extensive review of studies and statutes, we found that existing national plans, response resources, and coordination strategies would be outmatched by a catastrophic power outage. This profound risk requires a new national focus. Significant public and private action is needed to prepare for and recover from a catastrophic outage that could leave the large parts of the nation without power for weeks or months, and cause service failures in other sectors—including water and wastewater, communications, transportation, healthcare, and financial services—that are critical to public health and safety and our national and economic security.
What is a catastrophic power outage?
Recommendations
The United States should respond to this problem in two overarching ways: 1) design a national approach to prepare for, respond to, and recover from catastrophic power outages that provides the federal guidance, resources, and incentives needed to take action across all levels of government and industry and down to communities and individuals; and 2) improve our understanding of how cascading failures across critical infrastructure will affect restoration and survival.
There are a number of ongoing initiatives in both the public and private sector that are in line with our recommendations. We urge the continued advancement of these initiatives in conjunction with our recommendations.
The NIAC was challenged to examine events that are beyond our nation’s experience, yet would impact nearly every jurisdiction, industry, and citizen. The solutions we identified will require strong public-private collaboration—as the NIAC has recommended previously—to address the scale and significance of catastrophic power outages.
Link to NIAC paper ( 94 pages) on Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage
Link to National Infrastructure Advisory Council at dhs.gov
The plan discusses not only EMP potential strikes but a number of other ways in which the electrical grid could be taken down or severely degraded regionally or nationally.
Not sure why they think this is a threat.
But the lights flickering tonight a lot. In fact right at the moment, the power here seems
We had the local substation go out for a week.
Now I’m prepared to handle a week [or more] of local power outage.
Nationwide? We’re screwed.
I can keep up to a 6 mo. local travel vehicle fuel tactical reserve. [ It’s now at ~7 weeks with no compound electrical generation usage included.)
The vulnerabilities are being identified and hardened.
The report talks about the path forward.
Considering the stakes involved, it has been insane not to address this threat before.
In 1950, the threat did not really exist, because we were not so interdependent.
Now we are, and we need to harden the infrastructure.
The more we make ourselves a hard target, the less likely an attack will come, and the more likely we are to limit the damage of an attack or natural disaster.
I recall reading that all the transformers are now made in China.
What could possibly go wrong?
We already have issues with grid instability due to alternative energy sources. Pipelines have gone to electrically driven pumps instead of the natural gas fired engines of the past. If the power goes out t,he power stations with combustion turbines may stop without pipeline pressure. I don’t think we can avoid a large number of casualties.
Darks and I were assured years ago that the power supply was “impossible to hack” after the 2003 northeast blackout.
Both of us have been laughing at that since.
Exactly the sort of vulnerability this report moves to discover and address.
In another report, I read 95% of natural gas pipeline pumps are powered by natural gas. But the other 5% can be critical.
President Trump thinks bigly and outside the box. This is the sort of thing the national government is designed to do.
This is a national threat and needs to be addressed nationally.
Something like 90% are made overseas. There is a two year time frame to order and get one. A real vulnerability.
We need to harden the ones we have and make spares available.
We have done some work on that.
It is the big ones at the end of long transission lines that are most vulnerable and are hardest to replace.
That program is designed to create modular transformers that can replace most long-line transformers and be more easily transported in several modules.
Yup, more than one threat vector.
When I saw the transformer in post #12, my first thought was why not go modular. And the nice thing about the Recovery Transformer program linked here is it is dated 5 years ago. Hopefully it is well along.
We already have issues with grid instability due to alternative energy sources. Pipelines have gone to electrically driven pumps instead of the natural gas fired engines of the past. If the power goes out t,he power stations with combustion turbines may stop without pipeline pressure. I don’t think we can avoid a large number of casualties.
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Thanks for posting this...first I have read about grid instability due to alternative energy sources, but it makes sense...
Do you have any more information?
This is one option the DS is considering to take out DT.
Where we live the power goes out so frequently during the winter that everyone in the neighborhood has a generator. We run ours mostly on Natural Gas because it costs about a third of running it on propane or gasoline. When the power goes out it takes about 5 minutes to switch over to the generator. I check the oil before I start it and once a day while it is running.
We typically use about 24 kwh in a day, which translates theoretically into about a thousand watts continuous over 24 hours. But we use a 5000 watt generator to handle the starting loads of the furnace blower, refrigerators and freezers, and also high wattage items like the washer and motor on the natural gas dryer, microwaves, hair dryers, etc. The generator uses about eight therms of natural gas a day which costs us about $8 a day which is several times the approximately $2.50 a day electricity normally costs us.
If we switched to a slightly smaller generator it would save us some fuel expense. A generator performs far more efficiently when it is outputting close to its rated full load. But with the 5kw generator, despite using more fuel we basically do not have to do anything different to normal. The only thing we do not use is the electric oven.
If we lost natural gas and electricity, then we would have to rely on our fireplace and wood stoves to keep the house warm. For real SHTF scenarios I have propane and gasoline in reserve, but I also have a generator that is hooked to a stationary bicycle than can charge 12 volt batteries which can supply an inverter or USB adapters for phones, radios, computers, and other electronics. We also have a small 1000 watt generator that is far more fuel efficient for this purpose.
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