Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

themoneyillusion.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 267 posts

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#31

Post by dmurray »

ars wrote: post #19

I wonder how many other rare disasters there are that cost only 300M to prepare for. If it's just a couple, then sure, fund this one. But if there are thousand of possible rare disasters - how can you possibly fund them all?

Now that we've got "global pandemic" marked off our bingo card, I'd put this at the top of the most likely "unforeseen" worldwide disasters. Some kind of supervolcano eruption is the other candidate.

Of course, not all disasters are global and every country or region will have its own rare disasters to prepare for.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#32

Post by jerkstate »

Did this guy even talk to a power grid engineer before posting his opinion? Offline spares of long lead time equipment are always kept by utilities. The risk to the power grid is institutional knowledge, if something happens to the small group of greybeards who run each regional utility, they could bring in new qualified engineers but it would take time to understand the system (which would cause an outage that either wouldn't happen in the first place or would be short to become protracted). The other major risk is if they are kept from doing their jobs due to budget or political issues (see: PG&E)

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#34

Post by wfbarks »

I feel like 2008 was an era of irresponsibility. Home buyers took out risky loans, banks sold these loans without accepting responsibility for how risky they where, investors purchased these loans without taking the responsibility to even see what kind of Loans where even in these mortgage backed securities. Ratings agencies abdicated this responsibility too. Goldman lied to AIG, and AIG didn't do the research to understand the credit default swaps they where selling. Central banks didn't accept responsibility for anything, saying "it was impossible to see the crisis coming".

It doesn't appear that we have left this paradigm at all. The only group that has improved is the consumers, households have significantly cut back leverage since the 2008 crisis. But companies have not. Companies don't feel they have any responsibilities to prepare for these long tail situations, and governments don't seem capable of doing it. leaving it to central banks to throw trillions at the problem after the fact.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#35

Post by williamdclt »

ars wrote: post #19

I wonder how many other rare disasters there are that cost only 300M to prepare for. If it's just a couple, then sure, fund this one. But if there are thousand of possible rare disasters - how can you possibly fund them all?

If there's 3.3 thousand similar disasters, it would cost ~1 trillion to prepare.

How much did covid-19 cost?

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#36

Post by pilsetnieks »

realtalk_sp wrote: post #26
btilly wrote: post #22

How much should we worry about this? http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk... was prepared by Lloyds of London after the 2012 detection of a large solar flare by a satellite in interplanetary space. (That one missed the Earth.) Their estimate was $600 billion - $2 trillion dollars of damage from an event that happens roughly once ever 150 years on average. Therefore the amortized cost of this r…

Sadly it might cost Berkshire even less to just reinsure against the risk.

I'm suddenly tempted to write a not-quite-serious novel about a time period up to and including a post-apocalyptic dystopia that occurred simply because almost all emergency measures in the world were replaced by insurance policies.

In the end people subsist on irradiated rats and mutant vegetables but they're doing great because each of them are owed millions of pounds by Lloyd's of London which may or may not exist anymore.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#37

Post by beambot »

wcoenen wrote: post #7

> I’d like to ask you guys whether we are prepared for other black swans. Let’s start with a collapse of the electrical system due to solar flares or electromagnetic pulse attacks. A Black Swan is a "high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare event that is beyond the realm of normal expectations". But we know that the Carrington Event happened in 1859, and that it's only a matter of time before a big solar flare will af…

Events like the Carrington & Covid seem to fit: high profile, hard to predict and rare. IMO, both qualify as Black swan.

At some point, you have to pick a threshold on the probabilities involved... These events are likely independent & identically distributed (i.e. hard to predict for any year), and I'd call sub-1% annual chance pretty rare.

But I'm receptive to a different threshold... But you can't just say "Black swan only counts for previously-inconceivable events".

Edit: I'm assuming covid-19 is structurally different than Sars, mers, Ebola, & H1N1 purely based on the global effect it has had to date. If you found those others as pandemics (not according to WHO though), then you can remove it as Black swan.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#39

Post by solarkraft »

wfbarks wrote: post #34

I feel like 2008 was an era of irresponsibility. Home buyers took out risky loans, banks sold these loans without accepting responsibility for how risky they where, investors purchased these loans without taking the responsibility to even see what kind of Loans where even in these mortgage backed securities. Ratings agencies abdicated this responsibility too. Goldman lied to AIG, and AIG didn't do the research to und…

I feel like most of the economy (through wrong regulation) is one of irresponsibility.

In many places there is a high incentive to mess things up, but little incentive to fix them.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#40

Post by yellowapple »

magicsmoke wrote: post #15
intopieces wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The coronavirus has made it pretty clear that America is completely unprepared for any sort of major deviation from "normal". This is the nature of the US system of competitive federalism. States only coordinate with the federal government when either (a) it's politically expedient, because the ruling party in the same for both at that time, or (b) the federal government forces this issue, at which time lawsuits en…

It's pretty interesting that most countries in Europe are unitary states while most countries in the Americas are federal states. Maybe due to the centuries of warfare in Europe the states that survived were unitary states that could better handle external threats. Or maybe it's a holdover from a tradition of monarchy that the Americas never had. Interestingly, Germany is also a federal state. Yet we never seem to he…

> most countries in the Americas are federal states

This ain't true¹. Most of the landmass of the Americas is covered by federated states, sure, but the vast majority of states are unitary.

The more relevant factor is the size of the state's territory. With a few exceptions (like China), most big countries are federated, and most small countries are unitary.

----

¹: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/Ma...

Post reply on HN