BTW, this is where I got the 18 month figure from (from the WSJ article in the OP):
Also, regarding the survival of the U.S. as a political entity, how would the U.S. pay the interest on the national debt? The GDP would be in the shitter. Tax bills would be hard to enforce. Interest rates would go through the roof.
Martial law would almost certainly be declared. It’s hard to see how any semblance of order could be restored without it. Naturally, there would be a large pushback.
Once the crisis was over, what would become of the US?
So in such an event, could the electrical grid be dismantled and the individual utilities left to manage supply and demand within their own territories? (BTW, see this Wikipedia map that shows the four interconnections in North America.)
And even if the normal turnaround for replacement transformers is eighteen months or so, what can be done if the need is critical and money is no object?
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I’m reminded of a saying I heard a while ago: a woman can make a baby in nine months, but nine women cannot make a baby in a month. Some things just take time, I’m not sure if transformers are among them.
The military isn’t big enough to “deploy and resume control” of the entire country. http://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/MOS/Reports/2014-Demographics-Report.pdf is a fascinating report on the size and demographics of the United States military. There are roughly 1.3M Active Duty members of the armed services. That includes people with jobs as electricians, mechanics, cooks, barbers, air traffic controllers, dentists, etc. Aside from a substantial contingent deployed abroad (maybe 150K altogether), the members of the military are concentrated rather heavily in a handful of states (CA, VA, TX, NC, GA, FL, WA, and HI).
To give you an idea, my home state, Utah, has about 3 million people in it. According to the report, there are 3,749 Active Duty personnel, and I’m certain that virtually all of them are at Hill AFB in Ogden. Even if they all decided to keep coming to work after the blackout, what are a bunch of airplane mechanics (which is what most of them are) going to do to secure the state of Utah? They’re not equipped to send a contingent of troops to St. George (330 miles away) to stop rioting and restore order. They probably couldn’t even deploy to Salt Lake City (31 miles away) and be expected to restore order. They are airplane mechanics, not riot police.
At best, the military might be able to restore order to a few population centers along the Eastern seaboard (they’re probably best situated to help in the South) and a few parts of CA and TX. Most of the country would be on their own and wouldn’t see any signs of the military.
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”
But if the transformer factory needs electricity to run–which it does–then you round up a bunch of generators at gunpoint and truck them to the factory and get the factory running. If there is gas in the underground tank at the gas station, and you need electricity to pump the gas, you get a generator going and you pump the gas.
Now, does that mean that your suburban house is going to have power? No, because even if you have a generator you’re going to run out of gas. And yes, the gas station can run off of a generator, but pretty soon all the gas is gone, and when is the next shipment coming? Probably never. The refinery can get itself back up an running, but getting gasoline into the hands of consumers is way down on the list.
The economic disruption would be literally inconceivable. 90% of people would be unable to do their jobs. Money would be no good anymore, even if you had cash. Savings and ownership records would be wiped out. Yes, people could be put to work doing useful manual labor, but the organizational challenge would be insurmountable. So how do you keep people fed?
Seems to me that keeping the combines running becomes the main task. We waste a truly enormous amount of potentially human-edible food in this country, and getting truckloads of field corn and soybeans to starving cities rather than cattle feedlots seems doable. Yes, people are going to get tired of eating cornmeal mush and soybeans, better get used to it. You’ll wish to Christ you had a few of those MREs stashed under the floorboards. In positive news, you’ll never hear another human being complain about their gluten intolerance ever again.
But are we talking about a terrorist attack that blows up a few American power stations brings down the grid and takes a really long time to fix, or a giant solar flare that fries every electrical device and wire on Earth? The first and we’re talking a Great Depression style economic disruption and lots of people glad to get a sack of field corn. The second and we’re talking something completely different, and nobody’s delivering sacks of corn and most people in cities are going to die.
The size of generators you’d need to run a factory are probably not the kind you can “round up” quickly or easily. They’re probably too big and heavy to be lifted by anything short of a crane, and transported by anything short of a flatbed semi trailer, and they probably consume an insane amount of diesel for every hour they’re running. For example, here is a picture of a random Caterpillar D-349 generator with a person standing next to it for scale. That unit weighs 17,000 lbs and is 12 feet long. It should produce 750 kW of power in exchange for ~60 gallons of diesel per hour. I wouldn’t be surprised if a factory assembling transformers used hundreds or thousands of megawatts every hour it was running at full capacity.
You touched on this later in the post, but, while getting power to the factory is a challenge in its own right, the bigger challenge is getting the workers to the factory. Absenteeism is going to be a huge problem for every company and organization, just like it was for the New Orleans Police Department after Katrina. Imagine being the production floor boss of a factory where 10% of your workers are dead or dying, 30% are at home either because they have no way to travel to work or they have no desire to come to work because you can’t pay them and it’s dangerous to leave home, and 50% of them migrated south because winter is coming (completely unintentional GoT reference ). Oh, and BTW, this same problem exists at the factories for all of your suppliers, and all of the companies that would normally transport those suppliers’ parts to your factory for your just-in-time manufacturing. How many transformers do you think get assembled in those conditions?
I believe the main task is actually getting clean water for everyone. Going without water is a lot more immediate threat to one’s health than going without food, and frankly, it’s a lot bigger challenge than food distribution. For starters, at 8 lbs per gallon, water is heavy, and people need a LOT of water (the consensus seems to be an average of one gallon per person per day).
). Oh, and BTW, this same problem exists at the factories for all of your suppliers, and all of the companies that would normally transport those suppliers’ parts to your factory for your just-in-time manufacturing. How many transformers do you think get assembled in those conditions?