Boston had its water supply killed for a couple of days because the main line into the city broke and the backup is currently under constructions. It really wasn’t a big deal. Sure, people initially panicked and bought ALL THE WATER. Then they chilled out. It turns out that cities are designed to transport massive amounts of goods into them, and a suddenly needing to supply a few bottles of water to each resident is childs play compared to what cities have to import each day.
I am not saying that a city losing power is fun. I am just pointing out that you could easily cut power to New York, probably the most vulnerable city in the US, and the city wouldn’t collapse. Some types of economic activity would slow temporarily, but the city would remain cohesive. After two weeks, you would start having problems not because of supplies, but simply because of slowed economic activity and people getting antsy about being in the dark. Again, it isn’t going to be a collapse. Which is why I don’t find this stuff scary.
If you organize that sort of raid, you expose your organization massively. The US can easily eat having a city blacked out for a few days without blinking. It happens every single year when hurricanes roll through. You could bomb an American city and it would jump right back onto its feet. Seriously, the US gets hit by hurricanes each and every year, and they are all vastly worse than what any terrorist could ever contemplate inflicting. So you expose yourself to put on a fraction of economic hurt that isn’t going to cause the US to shift its policy in the slightest (or if it does, probably in the opposite direction of what you want), and you end the functional existence of your organization.
Terrorist are not scary, and I say this as someone living inside of a city that has been hit by terrorist. Cancer is scary. Drivers who drive like shit while I am biking are scary. When I am drunk, my stairs are scary. Terrorist though? They are vastly less scary than something boring and mundane, like lightening.
I’m all for fixing our grid, but not because of terrorist. Terrorist have absolutely nothing on a good New England snow storm or an East coast Hurricane. Shitty weather and changing technology is a reason to improve our grid. Terrorist are not. Terrorist rate below the boogeyman in terms of “shit you should planning for”.
But there wasn’t a blackout, because of redundancy.
Redundancy that is necessary because of storms and human error.
I will not get breathless about the danger here, what we have seen could easily be the work of one disgruntled person, and usually is. Sure it’s terrorism, but i seriously doubt it is international terrorism with the aim of crushing local business.
One thing you’ve got to consider is the built in costs of what we have. For example, something is going to bring power into the substation where Indian Point (a nuclear power plant 35 mi north of NYC on the Hudson) is located, because that’s where the power lines already are. It’s a tiny space (relatively) in a packed suburb, but trying to move that node is impractical. Likewise, the 345kV transformer that exploded at ConEd’s sub on 14th St really can’t go anywhere - it’s next to a river, so burying it might not be a real possibility. In our case we have enough room to bury the transformers but the financial costs would be gigantic to bury ours. We could build concrete blast walls for those, but doing the same for our breakers isn’t really a practical possibility… the minimum approach boundary (the point where the 345000 volts can spontaneously jump the gap and vaporize things) is 8.67 feet, making a buried chamber a real challenge (this distance would have to be followed on every single component or we need to transition it all to oil filled dielectrics.)
Do take a look at the Swedish PDF linked above - while the language is probably impenetrable to you, the pictures and diagrams might be enough to get the gist across: They house their transformers in concrete buildings, and have put a fair bit of thought into making them hard to sabotage: No direct sight lines to the equipment even when the doors are open; all cables must enter in ways that wouldn’t give a useful LOS even if they were pulled out; as much as possible it should be hard to throw anything into the building.
Personally, I like the concrete stoplogs they use for one of the walls - you lift them out with a crane to remove a wall, move the transformers in/out, and lift them back in. Hard to attack, easy enough to work with (since you’ll need a crane anyway).
As for why Sweden has put that much thought into sabotage/attack-proof substations, well. I probably shouldn’t psycho-analyze our dear brothers/neighbours, but they did take the idea of war with the Soviets quite seriously. (At least their nuclear weapons program didn’t go any further than building a few combined generator/breeder reactors and mining some uranium to prove that they could be self-supplied if required.)
What would really take the cake is if those who tried this dry run attack were also people who said they were “infrastructure photography buffs” crying about their right to photograph.
Not really, EVERYTHING that is essential to life support has backup power. Hospitals, for example.
Once again, this is false. All communication systems are required to maintain a battery backup that lasts for 48 hours without power. Phones and cell phones would still function. Communication would not be down.
This is the problem with not having a full understanding of power. The vast majority of our power goes towards industry. So, the economic impact does exist. Manufacturing plants might go down for a while. However, as I said earlier, hospitals would remain open, planes would keep flying, trains would run on time and everything important would continue to function.
This is a huge misrepresentation. The reason that power companies hate co-generation or personal electrical generators is that it reeks havoc on their grid management. As the article explains, the grid is a weak and fragile thing. Now imagine taking this “weak and fragile” thing that is managed with great effort to achieve parity(power produced=power consumed) and throw in a whole bunch of random variables. That is the problem with solar cells and wind turbines. They introduce THOUSANDS of random variables which make it nearly impossible to manage with our current grid.
Power companies aren’t “evil monsters” who are just out to squash competition. This is best exemplified in Texas, of all places. Texas has a de-regulated power grid. There are three categories of power company: producer, distributor, reseller. No one is allowed to be more than one.
Distributor companies manage the power lines and local grid. They are paid a pre-determined rate by the other companies involved. In theory, there is no business advantage to a distributor opposing co-generation in a home. They simply run the grid. However, companies like ONCOR are very opposed to the idea. Why? They can’t manage it effectively and it creates a nightmare. They are taking measures to improve their flexibility(Broadband over power line, smart switching, etc), but we aren’t there yet. Just something to chew on when you get mad at the power company.
Anticipating having some time to kill last night, I fired up the generator, logged into Amazon and downloaded “Before the Lights Go Out” onto my Kindle.
Then the power came back on and I played a video game instead.
But I will read the book. Probably even before our next outage.
A) who said anything about hospitals? I’m talking about people freezing to death/getting heatstroke in their homes. Granted, it would mostly be the sick and the elderly, but it would happen. Even a lot of healthy, young individuals would die in a prolonged outage; most people do not know how to cope with extreme weather without electricity.
And B)
Once again, you ignore what I was talking about: A directed, purposeful, intelligent attack. Random acts have been known to cause blackouts that last for days. A purposeful attack could easily stretch that to a week or more. Even if all the communications infrastructure were able to switch to generator power before their 48 hours of backup went down, you’d still have the issue that everyone uses cell phones - which would largely run out of batteries in those 48 hours. Emergency services will still have communications, but the average person won’t - which is what I’m talking about here. Large cities that have a terrorist attack happen under those situations will devolve into mass panic if the populous have no way of finding out what’s going on. (Doubly so if they’re already panicky from 2 days without power.)
[quote=“pucksr, post:71, topic:21955”]This is the problem with not having a full understanding of power. […] However, as I said earlier, hospitals would remain open, planes would keep flying, trains would run on time and everything important would continue to function.[/quote]This is the problem with not having a full understanding of people, and our day-to-day dependence on power.
Hospitals would remain open, yes - but be so flooded with people suffering frostbite/heatstroke, on top of other injuries sustained from the mass panic, that they’d be in a bad situation. Add onto that the fact that their computers would all be down, and lights would probably be off (after a few days, their power reserves would be down to focusing on life-saving devices only).
Planes and trains? Would not be running. After 9/11 planes were grounded for a week+. You think the FAA wouldn’t ground planes during an ongoing terrorist action? Add onto that the fact that there’s a good chance the railroad terminals would also likely be without power, that means no computers for check-ins, no ticket sales, etc. Everything would grind to a halt.
The FAA grounded flights for 24 hours because they feared there might be another attempt at an air attack. If terrorists simply “knocked out some transformers” triggering a large blackout…planes would still fly. Probably with heightened security. Airports all have backup generators and regularly operate when there is no commercial power.
As per your “cell phones would die”. Most people have car chargers and most people would simply charge their phone off of their MASSIVE car battery.
Most? That seems to run counter to information from the FCC inquiry(FCC 07-177 pg 35) which indicates that companies like Verizon have an 8-hour requirement as their engineering standard and that most sites have far more than 8 hours provided by generators+batteries.
The FCC now requires 8 hours, though most towers already exceeded this requirement. They did this after Hurricane Katrina which saw multiple failures of cell towers. FCC-07-177
Where did you get the idea that they don’t require anything?
That FCC rule was shot down in 2008. There is currently no rule that requires cell towers to have back up power. There was some rumbling agin in congress after Hurricane Sandy, but there are still no requirements for Cellular power redundancy.
I stand corrected. However, common practice is to install backup power. You indicated that most have no backup power. I haven’t seen very many cell towers operating without some form of backup. Could you explain your reason for indicating that most have no backup whatsoever?
