The idea that the US electricity grid could be knocked out for 1.5 years is a bit shocking. But that’s what the agency in charge of protecting it has revealed. It may have all gone under the radar and unnoticed, but someone at the Wall Street Journal took notice of a number of warnings put forth last year by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (following an attempted “terrorist attack” on a California substation) and recently wrote up a story about the matter. The essence of the risk was pretty concisely put forth by FERC officials: “Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.” (Note that many substations are protected only by fences and cameras.)
Well, the actual stats Shahan put up seem to jive with what I’ve seen elsewhere. But then he runs towards the cliff:
While an 18-month electricity-free US would be energy efficiency on steroids and help with global warming, we all know that steroids aren’t so good in the long term… or even the short term. The havoc, destruction, and harm to humans and other living beings that would come from such a situation are unfathomable. It’s hard to argue with that, but it’s also a good idea to point out that the American people really deserve a better, more secure grid.
I’m not believing that a lot (people, stuff) will be around after the first couple of months after such an event – especially if it were to start in deep winter. I’m also not thinking that young Mr. Shahan has thought this out a bit more and gamed it out – we won’t have to wait for the Zombies to have a type of Apocalypse descending upon us – the vast majority of folks just aren’t set up for this kind of “short term / energy efficiency” time period as they are only set up for our “just in time” society.
In the face of all of this, I think it’s very important to highlight the fact that a lot more solar power would increase grid security tremendously. This knowledge is nothing new. The US military has known and focused on this point for years. Nonetheless, it’s an important benefit of solar (and also wind power, by the way) that seldom gets mentioned.
Seldom mentioned? That’s all we hear about from the Greens – shut off the coal, tear down the dams, no more fracking; shut off our normal energy sources and rely on still expensive renewables. He does have a point here, though:
Distributed power sources offer a safer spreading out of risk, so to speak. Developing more distributed power sources creates a lot of resilience in the grid, and decreases the possibility that a huge portion of the power supply can be knocked out in one quick swoop. If you knock out a major nuclear or coal power plant, that results in a cascading effect in the grid, which can get really out of hand if other key, centralized elements are also shut down. Knocking out a relatively small solar farm or wind farm won’t have such a concerning effect, and it’s quite hard to knock out a bunch of them. Rooftop solar is even more distributed and brings even more grid security.
I actually would be in favor of getting one of the newer “neighborhood nukes” that could be put into the ground and service a number of families. At the first sense of cascading trouble, they would just delink from the others “subnets” and continue to care for its own small area, fine and dandy.
…Perhaps we should push the “solar power increases grid security” memo a lot more, and maybe also redirect some of our immense national security budget towards deployment of rooftop solar power systems.
Solar energy being our save all be all? Er, not so much:
“Ninety-four percent of the electricity generated in the United States in 2013 came from nuclear reactors, dams, and fossil fuels–including petroleum, natural gas, other gases, and coal–according to a new report from the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration. Only 0.2 percent of U.S. electricity during the year came from solar-power sources, and another 4.1 percent came from wind power…Coal-fired electricity production, which rebounded last year after two years of decline, was the nation’s leading source of electricity in 2013. It produced 1,585,998 million KWH—up 4.8 percent from the 1,514,043 million KWH produced in 2012.
…The combined output from all wind and solar power sources in the United States was 176,917 million KWH—or about 4.36 percent of the nation’s total supply.” (H/T: CNSNews)
I can’t even see the solar output on that graph – got a microscope?
