A Potential Catastrophe much worse than the Pandemic
Failure of the Power Grid and its Consequences
Bill Gates, among others, had been warning about the inevitability of a pandemic for years. But most of the world was not prepared for Covid 19. Planning for adverse events without previous related experience takes somewhat of a logically paranoid mind. Bill Gates probably has such a mind. It enabled him to stay ahead of his competitors during his career as founder and CEO of Microsoft.
I was involved in risk management professionally for some years. Preventing the injury or death of my clients was my job. I would lie awake at night thinking up worst-case scenarios. With time, pretty well everything that I imagined that could go wrong almost happened — but the intervention protocols that I had put in place…. worked. Although I’m sometimes accused of negativity, I’m glad my dark thoughts have had some utility for others.
Coming from post-war Europe, I understand what a fragile thing civilization is. Outlandish conspiracy theories aside, Americans (and Canadians) have been generally complacent in assuming their usual lifestyles can more or less carry on indefinitely without long-term collective planning for mitigating future risks. The Covid 19 pandemic has somewhat shaken that. But the virus is not the worst calamity that could occur, nor is it even the worst of those likely to happen to many people who are now alive. That is not to trivialize the present pandemic, which the science says is likely far from over.
Climate change and nuclear war are huge threats, but I’ll discuss here a potentially civilization destroying event that has received relatively little attention.
On March 31, 1989, the entire province of Quebec suffered a power blackout for nine hours due to the effects of a solar storm, a kind of hiccup from the sun resulting in the expulsion of electrically charged particles called a Coronal Mass Ejection. But that was a baby storm compared to the one of 1859 called the Carrington Event. That ejection from the sun probably would have weighed in at a billion tons, been much larger than our planet, and hit earth’s magnetic field at millions of miles an hour, causing a geomagnetic storm. The visible solar flare that was the signature of that ejection from the sun was witnessed by researcher Richard Carrington at a British observatory.
Pretty well, the only thing in the US and Europe that was dependent on electricity in 1859 was the telegraph system, which operated on batteries. That system went down during the event, and fires broke out due to overloads. Some operators received electrical shocks, and some realized that they could send signals with the batteries disconnected — from the energy that seemed to be streaming out of the ether.
If an event like that happened today, it could take out most of the North American power grid for an extended period. Our civilization has become highly dependent on the electrical grid since that event in 1859. The consequences of a prolonged outage today could be catastrophic for our society.
The US power grid gets a D+ rating from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Much of it dates from the fifties and sixties, and some of it is much older. The grid is extremely vulnerable to being knocked out, not just by a solar storm but also by cyber-attack, a nuclear electromagnetic pulse, or old-fashioned sabotage. There are estimates that it could take many months to restore the grid. But how would that even be possible without electricity? How would fuel be pumped into vehicles except maybe with a few hand pumps? Gas stations would be inoperable. Fuel production for resupply would cease in any case. How would communication take place? There would be no cell services. No internet. Sure, some systems have backup generators, but how long could they go without fuel? And how would any kind of commerce take place? In 1859, wealth, debt, and credit were recorded in ledgers. Now it’s all virtual. All your wealth and savings would disappear until the grid was restored. If that even happened in your lifetime — considering that there would be many hazards to survival in such a situation.
The more technology-dependent we have become, the more fragile our civilization is. The world’s population of 7.6 billion can be fed, but only as long as the highly interdependent technologies work. In 1859 most Americans were farmers. Now in America, 2% of the population feeds the other 98%. Technology makes that possible. And technology needs electricity.
The North American food supply chain depends on electrical pumping systems for irrigation, farm machinery for cultivation, and trucking for distribution. None of that would work anymore if the grid went down for a sustained period. Most urban water and sewage systems rely on pumps too, which are also powered by electricity. Cities like New York would be flooded in a few days. Sewage would back up. Diseases like cholera would set in.
Now imagine you are in your house with no electricity. No fridge. Maybe no stove. No lights. Perhaps no heat in winter. After a while, probably no running water. You would have no access to money other than the cash you have stashed in your home, and that will only be useful until the supermarket shelves are cleaned out, which wouldn’t be long.
Mass starvation would not be far away. I know most people just can’t wrap their minds around that. We have just become so complacent. Even now, during the pandemic, most of us in the developed world can still have everything we really need with the tap of a credit card.
India might be much better off in this kind of situation than North America. Most people still live on the land. The economy is largely cash-based. The power grid is generally so unreliable that backup generators are everywhere.
I remember an incident in my youth during my time working on coastal tugboats. Our main engine and auxiliary were both disabled and consequently, we had no power of any kind. So we bundled up against the winter cold in the largely uninsulated steel boat and stared at the canned food, all we had left after more than two weeks at sea. But the only dedicated can opener on board was electric.
That incident was trivial and humorous compared to a continent-wide disaster, but it made me think about cascading effects when stuff stops working. I used my Swiss army knife that time to save us from going hungry for a couple of days until parts were flown in. Unfortunately, however, it is doubtful that we would be able to MacGyver our way out of the failure of the North American power grid.
Since the Quebec incident, the Canadian power grid has been beefed up with protections for transformers. The US system, it seems, remains highly open to failure. Although the Obama administration in 2016 mandated the upgrading and testing of protective systems for all transformers by 2020, I have not been able to find evidence that it was followed up on by the Trump administration. Recall that the Obama pandemic preparedness team was disbanded after Trump took office.
According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the simultaneous loss of any 9 of 30 critical HV transformers could cripple the network and lead to a cascading failure, causing a coast-to-coast blackout.
The large high voltage electrical transformers that make it possible to carry electricity over distances are custom made, mostly overseas, and typically take one to two years to deliver at the best of times. They require special 36 axle railcars to be transported overland. In the case of some older transformers, the adjacent rail lines that were originally used to install them no longer exist.
Electric utilities in the US are corporations that take in hundreds of billions of dollars a year. They spend tens of millions a year lobbying state and federal governments to fight legislation that they feel is onerous to their industry. The official stance of the industry has been that the likelihood of another Carrington type event has been exaggerated. Upgrading the creaking electrical grid and hardening protections for transformers would be expensive and cut into profits — affecting the stock options for directors.
There would be a 15 to 45-minute warning of a geomagnetic storm provided by space satellites. Deliberately shutting down the entire grid before the disturbance hit the earth would provide some protection to the transformers. However, congressional testimony in 2016 revealed that there are no coordinated protocols in place among the industry to initiate such action.
How likely is another Carrington type event? Estimates vary, from quite unlikely over a 100-year period to a 12% chance per decade. If such an event happened, though, the consequences could be dire. In Senate subcommittee testimony, former CIA director R. James Woolsley stated that up to 90% of the US population could perish from hunger, lack of water, and societal disruption due to a prolonged power outage lasting a year or two. “We’re talking about total devastation. We’re not talking about just a regular catastrophe.” Woolsley said.
And a solar flare from the sun is not the only way the power grid could be severely damaged. Deliberate sabotage, which need not necessarily be high tech, is also a threat. In 2013 a substation in Metcalf, CA was hit by rifle fire, possibly by a single shooter, causing power outages and 15 million dollars in damage. A more sophisticated plot by the IRA was foiled by British intelligence in 1997. Had the operation not been intercepted, it could have taken out the power in Britain’s most densely populated region, including London, for months. There is information on the internet on how to disable HV transformers. Presently, they are not generally guarded by security personnel.
The following is a statement from Mitsubishi Electric, a manufacturer of HV transformers. “If someone were to intentionally try, it is a surprisingly simple task, and there are a large number of ways to conceivably damage a transformer beyond repair.”
The power grid is probably the most essential yet vulnerable component of our civilization’s infrastructure. Take it away, and we would be much worse off than our ancestors were in the stone age when low population densities did not require complex technologies to be sustained.
It might be instructive that in July 2012 an incredibly large Coronal Mass Ejection narrowly missed the earth. How many people even know about that? Here’s a link to NASA’s webpage describing the event, which did hit their spacecraft, STEREO-A, one of two solar observatories orbiting the sun behind and in front of the earth.
A study by the National Academy of Sciences estimates that a direct hit on the earth by a CME like the one that hit STEREO-A could have caused damage to transformers that would take years to repair.
Complacency is easy. Thinking ahead is hard. But we better learn to do it. And pressure our governments to get on it.