We had a blackout in my neighborhood yesterday and it got me to thinking about a report in the media that stated that if terrorist simultaneously hit a small number of key substations on a hot summer day, it would knock out the grid for 18 months.
(here is a link to a similar story, but I don’t believe it mentions the 18 month figure)
Were that to happen, or some other event that removed electrical distribution capability for 18 months in the US and Canada, what would happen? A massive depression? Dogs and cats living together? Nothing good, I am sure, but realistically, how bad would it be? Do we have anything to go by?
Home generators would fly off the warehouse shelves. And most critical infrastructure already has generator backups.
What it would do is entail a whole lot of work to get the grid back up and running, which might be a good thing for electrical workers. But it would cause almost all other industries to be depressed. But this is more an economic issue, where large companies end up paying the costs, rather than a humanitarian situation where large numbers of people die.
I don’t buy the 18 month figure at all. We got all the freeways back into use a lot quicker than that after the 94 Northridge quake, and that was heavy construction. Unless the Bad Guys nuked all 9 substations, the damage wouldn’t be that extensive. Replace units, work around the damage and the country would be sorta back on grid rather rapidly. Total repair could easily take that long, but the whole country without power for 18 months? That’s gonna take an asteroid strike.
The total loss of the power grid coast to coast for 18 months? Probably not, at least not in the form we are in today. The only thing I could think of that would cause the total loss of the power grid coast to coast, however, is something like a major solar storm, and it wouldn’t just affect the US…in that case you are looking at TEOTWASKI…and I doubt anyone would be feeling fine.
Most power outages are measured in hours or days. A power outage that widespread and long-lasting would be unprecedented, although perhaps not impossible, with a really thorough EMP effort by the Russians, or perhaps a super-sized Carrington Event.
That being said, “were it to happen”, I suspect there’d be moderate casualties and major economic disruption. We don’t have nearly-enough off-grid generation capabilities to maintain any semblance of normalcy. Most businesses would shut down, most homes would be without power, which means no HVAC (some Northerners would probably freeze in the winter and some Southerners would probably die from heat stroke in the summer), no refrigerators, major disruptions to food storage, distribution and preparation. There would be significant rioting / looting in urban centers, at least initially. Law enforcement would be overwhelmed. The average American lifestyle would probably descend to third-world levels inside of a week or two.
ETA: I live in Utah, probably the best state in the Union to live in during a situation like that.
Let me chime in about not believing the 18-month outage premise. Don’t the power companies have portable, industrial (as opposed to single-family residential) mobile vans for just such emergencies? There would have to be a lot of power substation bombings before emergency facilities were overwhelmed. You could even overnight airlift all the parts necessary to rebuild a power substation from anywhere in the industrial world.
No expert me, but a little quick googling suggests that there is maybe ~200 GW of backup generator capacity in the United States vs. peak demand of 786 GW ( in 2013 ). Both those numbers are surely not up to date, but still that is a yawning gulf. Especially considering some of that backup power probably can’t be all that quickly re-jiggered to serve vital needs.
It would be all kinds of ugly, but of course we’d survive, unless someone else invaded us at the same time. Then it would be even uglier, tho we’d still likely survive after some fashion - or at least make the invaders as miserable as we were.
How much fuel do you think would be available a month into the outage? At what price? I mean, I agree people would buy them, but how mitigating would that be?
Large transformers often have a lead time of at least 18 months, if not 2-3 years. That’s where the 18 month figure is coming from. The rest of the equipment like transmission lines, circuit breakers, busbars, switches, relays, etc (excepting, I suppose, large turbine generators), could probably be replaced relatively quickly.
Some of us would be screwed. Depends on how successfully local/regional power companies can isolate their distribution grid from the affected areas. Even a best-case scenario would involve billions in damage and thousands if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. Major cities are 24 hours away from food riots on the best of days.
It would be a bad situation. I don’t know what ‘survive’ means here. There will be chaos for some time but we’ll be able to restore power to critical industry in less than 18 months, we still have vehicles to get around. A lot of the country may end up under martial law but once we get things back we’ll be able to put things back together again after a few years.
Even given those numbers, I don’t think peak demand is the right benchmark to use. Peak demand involves things like going to a sports game or seeing a movie, or whatever. If we were in a “no power except for backups” event, I imagine there would be extreme rationing to the point were the only businesses that would be open would be grocery stores and other infrastructure dependent items, and people would have their home electric monitored and cut off if they were using too much (probably only allowed for refrigeration, which is admittedly quite a power draw). Hospitals, Police, and Fire would probably get full use of the remaining grid, but sports teams and movie theaters are going to be on holiday until the grid gets back to normal.
If we had an event that merely meant we’d have to go to 1/3 of our normal usage, I think we’d manage.
I spent some time working for a major utility in information security.
We would be so screwed. And they know it. We don’t have nearly enough off grid power for hospitals and finance (and gas for generators isn’t going to be adequate for eighteen months).
The biggest plus - its highly distributed and ancient - most of the grid can’t be networked. So you can’t hack it and take it all down.
Unlikely. Those gas stations that you fill your vehicle up at every few days, their pumps run on electricity. Electricity which they wouldn’t have in this situation. Even if they did, the tanker trucks that come and fill up their in-ground tanks every day or few would stop running. You couldn’t reliably count on having access to any additional gasoline besides what you have in your gas tank at the time of the power outage and whatever else you might have stored. For most people, this means that they wouldn’t have a vehicle capable of transporting them in fairly short order.
The government doesn’t have the manpower to impose martial law on the whole country, and they certainly wouldn’t be able to without electricity. When Katrina hit New Orleans, hundreds of police went AWOL. That same scenario would occur at every police department and every military unit across the country. People would stay home to take care of their families. Government would largely cease to function.
I can’t see why it would not come back in, at first, isolated islands of power, then slowly spread back on line from there, eventually re-interconnecting into the grid we all know and ‘love’. There may be power rationing, and areas that are blacked out/generator dependant, but 18 months without the grid does not equate to 18 months without power.