Lights on Please!

 

 

"Someone once said our electrical grid is like a bank with the vault left unlocked"

For those who remember the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, you will know of what I speak. We had hundreds of thousands without power for weeks, some months. Many suffered. How could this happen? This is America, and we are in the 21st century for Pete's sake! Did we not just have a big storm in the same location the year before? Is our electrical grid that fragile? Is it that hard or expensive to fix? The answer to some of these questions may surprise you.

We are a nation that runs on energy. Whether we like it or not, we need oil and we need electricity. If all of a sudden we had no oil, our transportation system could grind to a halt. By the same token, if all of a sudden our electricity was taken away. everything else would grind to a halt. No heat, no water, no toilets, no cooking, nothing. Ask the folks in some of the hardest hit areas of Hurricane Sandy - they will tell you in blunt terms what their lives have been like with no power.

What we have right now is a very old, very vulnerable power grid. On top of that, we have people overseas who are trying to disable parts of our grid using cyber attacks. Cyber attacks have come a long way since what we saw in the movie War Games - today's cyber terrorists are good, very, very good. In addition to terrorists, we also have countries like North Korea who have just recently threatened to hit us with a nuke. One of the nukes they are developing is an EMP bomb. We have known about this for years. If they were ever able to detonate an EMP bomb with the correct yield at the correct altitude in the correct location, it would literally be "lights out" for the country. People would die. They would starve, freeze or die of neglect. Life would quickly look like something out of a Steven King novel.

Lets not forget the power of the sun. Old Sol has been good to us by giving us a small amount of power through solar energy. However, the sun can take away as easily as it gives. Even a moderate solar flare hitting the Earth at the right location can cause huge problems with our grid.

I find it interesting the way we do business these days in our country. Right after Hurricane Sandy hit, the vulnerability of our grid was discussed ad nauseam. Today our elected officials have their focus on how many rounds should go in a clip and should we make illegal immigrants legal. Meanwhile, our grid remains a mess.

Last October Forbes reported on Massoud Amin, a highly regarded University of Minnesota Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I have seen the cost to update our grid start at $300M for a"patchwork" fix. However, Professor Amin said to really do it right, the cost should be about $170B. That is a whole lot of money until you consider the annual cost of power disruptions in our country is about $50B. When we did our 2009 "stimulus" package of $1T, this fix would have taken only a  fraction of it - and we would never have to worry about this issue again.

Professor Amin went on to say, "Given the enormity of the undertaking and the overlapping patchwork quilt of jurisdictions affecting the power grid, we can be fairly certain this won’t happen anytime soon. Perhaps the best we can hope for in the near term is a heightened focus on micro-grids. These are mini power grids that can be cut off from the larger utility grid at times like the present, with a smaller infrastructure serving critical loads like hospitals, emergency services, and perhaps a gas station and grocery store. This would be enough for a community to survive the initial onslaught of a disaster and weather an outage of some weeks’ duration. And they can be built within a relatively short time scale relative to a wholesale revamp of the power grid."

I think it is time for Congress to step up its game on dealing with this issue. It might be time for another reminder letter to my congressional and senate representatives.