Total Grid Failure

[jwfuhrman]

Any one see they are making Lights Out into a movie? It's a low budget thing but still doesn't look terrible

[cinco]

And the mass causality drill in DFW, North of the town of West the day they had a plant explosion.

Forgot about that one Moose. What's it say when there are too many to keep track of?

[NWPilgrim]

I did consulting work at a regional power company HQ years ago. There are I believe five major power grids that interconnect at specific points: California, NW, Texas, Midwest and Eastern. the interconnects allow transfer of power from one grid to to the other to balance generation and load. An interruption there would be a major disruption and cause at least brown outs. I don't think it would be too hard for knowledgeable terrorist to take down the high tension lines of these interconnects. They are not in hardened facilities nor are they guarded. Most people think of damage to the generation facilities but you take out some of the major high tension lines or substation/transfer stations (distribution) which are key bottlenecks and there would be a world of hurt at least regionally. The larger transformers are not stockpiled and would take months to replace more than a couple of them.

Destruction of a control room would be catastrophic and they are not hardened. The control room I visited with the huge monitors on the wall and technicians adjusting power flow was secured by a card key. No hardened structure or guards. Same with the computer room next door. And there is no back up control room/computer system. It would be one of the easiest targets for terrorists to assault and take out. Offsite backups could help restore much of it in a month but it would be a hell of a mess for a few weeks.

Those would be painful but temporary interruptions. Something like and EMP would be long term, back-to-1840 time travel. And as relatively cheap and simple as an EMP is (compared to a conventional force of equal capability) it seems only a matter of time before SOMEONE or SOME COMBINATION OF PARTIES does it. We are the perfect target, the most technology dependent nation on the planet. With every passing year the technology for EMP spreads to more nations and more terrorist orgs arise and become stronger. All it takes is for our vigilance to decline and their motivation to arise.

I don't think there is any doubt that the technology for quickly disabling the US exists in the world today. As does the means to deliver it. All it takes are human factors of enough motivation and the right opportunity. It seems to me inevitable that at some point in the next 50 years the right combination of us not paying attention and some party (or parties) being motivated enough come together and we get EMPed back to Little House on the Prairie with a broken iPod.

[RogerinTPA]

Any one see they are making Lights Out into a movie? It's a low budget thing but still doesn't look terrible

It will probably be on the same level as "The Road" but concentrating more on the actual survival, self sustainment aspect as the main theme.

[cinco]

I did consulting work at a regional power company HQ years ago. There are I believe five major power grids that interconnect at specific points: California, NW, Texas, Midwest and Eastern. the interconnects allow transfer of power from one grid to to the other to balance generation and load. An interruption there would be a major disruption and cause at least brown outs. I don't think it would be too hard for knowledgeable terrorist to take down the high tension lines of these interconnects. They are not in hardened facilities nor are they guarded. Most people think of damage to the generation facilities but you take out some of the major high tension lines or substation/transfer stations (distribution) which are key bottlenecks and there would be a world of hurt at least regionally. The larger transformers are not stockpiled and would take months to replace more than a couple of them.

Destruction of a control room would be catastrophic and they are not hardened. The control room I visited with the huge monitors on the wall and technicians adjusting power flow was secured by a card key. No hardened structure or guards. Same with the computer room next door. And there is no back up control room/computer system. It would be one of the easiest targets for terrorists to assault and take out. Offsite backups could help restore much of it in a month but it would be a hell of a mess for a few weeks.

Those would be painful but temporary interruptions. Something like and EMP would be long term, back-to-1840 time travel. And as relatively cheap and simple as an EMP is (compared to a conventional force of equal capability) it seems only a matter of time before SOMEONE or SOME COMBINATION OF PARTIES does it. We are the perfect target, the most technology dependent nation on the planet. With every passing year the technology for EMP spreads to more nations and more terrorist orgs arise and become stronger. All it takes is for our vigilance to decline and their motivation to arise.

I don't think there is any doubt that the technology for quickly disabling the US exists in the world today. As does the means to deliver it. All it takes are human factors of enough motivation and the right opportunity. It seems to me inevitable that at some point in the next 50 years the right combination of us not paying attention and some party (or parties) being motivated enough come together and we get EMPed back to Little House on the Prairie with a broken iPod.

Good post. From what I've read, the major (big time) transformers are ordered years in advance and take a major coordinated transportation effort (big time over size road + water transport). Scary shxt.

[lunchbox]

It will probably be on the same level as "The Road" but concentrating more on the actual survival, self sustainment aspect as the main theme.

Netflix cycled it back up, for now.

[Suwannee Tim]

I work in the industry, at the substations, in the plants and in the control centers. I am not worried about a cyber attack. My employer's control system is not connected to the internet and without such a connection a hacker cannot attack it. Even if they were able to attack our system the worst they could do is trip breakers and put the system in the dark for a couple of days. We have been completely in the dark before and it took less than two days to completely restore service. It is impossible by remote action to cause physical damage to my employer's system. Someone with access to the control system could put a system in the dark but could not tear it up. You cannot for example close a generator breaker on an offline generator because there is a synch check relay i.e. a 25 that will prevent the breaker from closing. The 25 is a dumb device not connected to any communications network so it cannot be hacked. Every breaker that is vulnerable to this sort of event has a 25 to prevent exactly that event. I am concerned about attacks on the infrastructure but cyber attacks are the least of my worries. There are other ways to badly damage a power system that I do worry about, and except for EMP all of these methods require an attacker to be at or near the site being attacked. I'm sure you can all image methods whereby an attacker could damage a transformer or breaker. The parts of a power system are vulnerable to attack but these parts are very numerous and dispersed geographically which would make a large scale attack very difficult. I read on these issues and almost without exception the articles contain some glaring errors that prove the author's technical knowledge is very limited. Most of these self proclaimed experts aren't experts at all. You should take a lot of this stuff with several grains of salt.

[Suwannee Tim]

Good post. From what I've read, the major (big time) transformers are ordered years in advance and take a major coordinated transportation effort (big time over size road + water transport). Scary shxt.

This is true. Big transformers i.e. 50 MVA to 500 MVA are made to order and the backlog is months or tens of months. My employer has spares but probably not enough spares. We probably have more spares than a typical utility in part because we are municipal and not for profit. These things are expensive, a 50 MVA transformer costs about $2 million so utilities aren't keen on keeping a bunch of spares. This could and probably should be changed by regulation which could require more spares be kept. Following several large blackouts in recent years the industry is under increasing control of the North American Electric Reliability Council and the regional councils. Every region is supervised by a Reliability Coordinator who tries to maintain the stability of the systems. The utilities are not sitting ducks waiting for an attack. They are taking measures every day to make the systems more robust.

I worry about the economic system a lot more than the power system. In exact opposition to what the electric industry is doing, the big banks, brokerages, hedge funds, et cetera and the government make the economic system more vulnerable every day.

Notice I did not mention EMP. I don't know much about EMP but I do know the utilities are doing very little to protect against EMP which makes me believe it is not a very large threat or at least they don't think it is a very large threat.

[Bubba FAL]

Notice I did not mention EMP. I don't know much about EMP but I do know the utilities are doing very little to protect against EMP which makes me believe it is not a very large threat or at least they don't think it is a very large threat.

I have a background in electronics and a long-time student of Tesla's research, it is the latter more so than the former. Bad things can be done with EMP, the trick is being able to handle the electrical power needed to create a large scale pulse. You don't want to be in the way of a high energy electrical discharge - cellular disruption is permanent. Of course, one must take precautions to harden one's own electrical/electronic equipment before playing around with such things.

[SomeOtherGuy]

I have a background in electronics and a long-time student of Tesla's research, it is the latter more so than the former. Bad things can be done with EMP, the trick is being able to handle the electrical power needed to create a large scale pulse. You don't want to be in the way of a high energy electrical discharge - cellular disruption is permanent. Of course, one must take precautions to harden one's own electrical/electronic equipment before playing around with such things.

Not a scientist nor a recent guest of Holiday Inn Express, but I thought the effect of an EMP created by a nuclear explosion outside the atmosphere was considered certain to cause major spikes in power lines with resulting damage, along with destruction of some kinds of electronics?

Continuing the theme, I was also under the impression that an "EMP" created by anything less than a nuclear explosion was not very significant, except perhaps from some newest technology that the US and Russian militaries might have.

In other words, I had understood that EMP is a real and serious threat from a nuclear power with ballistic missiles (if they were willing to use one), but a small to trivial threat from anyone else. Am I right or wrong?