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

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

#61

Post by dmurray »

FlyMoreRockets wrote: post #52
dmurray wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Add asteroid strike at with the energy level of a nuclear warhead to that list. Fortunately, it is 71% likely to come down in the ocean.

It would have to be a lot bigger than "a nuclear warhead" to cause a global catastrophe rather than a local one, and it has to be more unfortunately aimed than just coming down over land. It would be pretty bad if the Chelyabinsk meteor had hit Tokyo or Mexico City, but as it happened it troubled glaziers more than doctors.

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

#62

Post by antsar »

beckingz wrote: post #45
jerkstate wrote: post #32

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 eithe…

The main issue is that ultra high voltage transformers are large, expensive, have long lead times (12-36 months!), and are built almost entirely in China. You're correct though, that the entire energy industry skews old and is at risk of losing a lot of knowledge as talent retires. The real risk is squirrels and trees though. Flora and fauna do not play well with transmission equipment.

> long lead times (12-36 months!)

I was skeptical, but this seems right (at least circa 2012). Here's a source:

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Tran...

(summarized in the Concluding Remarks section)

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

#63

Post by runawaybottle »

csecdaemon wrote: post #5
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be assuming some sort of terrorist event. I would have thought the most likely reason for the whole grid to go down is another Carrington event.

I'm not assuming anything/anyone specifically but lean towards nation-state, anarchist, terror, etc. A natural disaster such as a flare, earthquake, fire, etc. are a different story. The radiation and electrical magnetic pulse from a solar flare could hamper equipment. However recent studies in the last few years by EPRI, INL, and ORNL actually show that much equipment would survive and equipment that did not would b…

Do we stress test our grid(s) core components with inputs that would be similar to that of a solar flare to write any of this off?

I feel like 5 months ago we’d be sitting here dismissing the notion that a face mask shortage is a trivial problem, all countries can just suddenly ramp up production. But we couldn’t.

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

#64

Post by runawaybottle »

FpUser wrote: post #28
csecdaemon wrote: post #2

While I don't disagree that transformers... let alone key transformer.. are critical. By disabling 9 transformers you cannot take down “THE GRID”. You could certainly cause havoc and perhaps take down sections of a grid, perhaps a large one such as new york city. But these would be localized. While ensuring that critical components are local and available is important much of this is being done in the energy sector.…

There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way This did not prevent "Northeast blackout of 2003" when bunch of states in the US and province of Ontario in Canada went without power for 3 days. I remember it quite clearly. Was not big fun. Luckily my friends and I with families went camping on the lake so did not really suffer other than some little disaster in a fridge ;)

From wiki

The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region.

How fragile we are.

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

#65

Post by agensaequivocum »

henrikschroder wrote: post #60
Noumenon72 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how you have identified this as the problem. Sure, states haven't coordinated on lockdowns, testing, or mask purchasing. But it's not because they're struggling against the federal government, it's because there's no official policy to coordinate with. Seems to me like our main difficulty deviating from normal is the fact that a 20% decrease in demand kills off 10% of businesses within weeks and ca…

Actually, there are two interstate pacts doing just that, coordinating their covid-19 response because they think the federal government is useless. There's the Western States Pact (CA, OR, WA, NV, CO), and NY just announced an eastern states consortium (NY, NJ, MA, CT, PA, RI, DE). Add to the fact that several states have had to take drastic measures like calling in their national guard to protect their own PPE ship…

This is how things are supposed to work. The federal government is give very specific enumerated powers per the constitution. The founder are would be appalled by the size and scope of the federal government. One thing they did not account for was lack of loyalty people have towards their own state.

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

#66

Post by maxerickson »

gerdesj wrote: post #41
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…

"How much should we worry about this?" Risk assessment. Hands up who anticipated SARS-CoVid-2 -> covid-19? ... OK who mitigated it with a fortuitous insurance policy? ... OK who simply happened to have enough cash in the bank by accident? Now look at the grid. Any grid.

Multiple world governments anticipated a novel respiratory virus. Especially post the first SARS.

For whatever reason, the US managed to take the idea seriously for decades and then not really be prepared once it actually happened.

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

#67

Post by BurningFrog »

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.

Insurance doesn't work when everything breaks at the same time.

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

#68

Post by frank2 »

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…

I always thought that the post-WWII German government is federal because it was designed mainly by the US government, which is federal.

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

#69

Post by mehrdadn »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #24
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…

I don't understand how you have identified this as the problem. Sure, states haven't coordinated on lockdowns, testing, or mask purchasing. But it's not because they're struggling against the federal government, it's because there's no official policy to coordinate with. Seems to me like our main difficulty deviating from normal is the fact that a 20% decrease in demand kills off 10% of businesses within weeks and ca…

The federal government has been actively confiscating PPE shipments and doing who-knows-what with them. There were multiple stories about this, though they didn't grab many headlines. It's not even just competition, it's more like federal spite, with focus on blue states.

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

#70

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

It might be a good investment for anyone to stockpile some of these things, assuming you can sell them for 100x what you paid when The Event happens.

Which, if my made up math is correct, means several entities probably already have done so.

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