The United States is at risk of a nationwide blackout that could last 18 months, according to the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Jon Wellinghoff became aware of the alleged vulnerability after a shooting at a Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s San Jose substation, according to the The New York Times Magazine.
He conducted a power flow analysis that modeled the large-scale effects of knocking out the most critical substation in each of America’s three power grids: the Western, Eastern and Texas interconnections. He said this led him to discover just how easy it would be to cripple America’s power supply.
‘We came up with some very astounding numbers,’ Wellinghoff said. ‘If you knock out nine total substations among these three grids, you can black out the entire United States.’
It does not matter which nine substations are taken offline either, he noted, as long as each one is among the 10 most important for its region.
Alternatively, bad actors could blackout the three interconnections individually.
‘I mean, it’s not like there are particular substations,’ he explained. ‘You just have to figure out what are the top 10 critical ones in each of those interconnects – which to do that, it’s probably something that a bunch of 12 year olds with the Internet could do pretty easily.
‘All you have to do is look at a map of the grid and figure out where most of the wires go into the substations – that’s a critical substation.’
Once he made that terrifying discovery, which came back in 2013, Wellinghoff briefed the White House, Congress and the Department of Energy.
‘I basically wrote a memo about what happened and gave it to everybody I could to explain to them that we need to do something immediately,’ he said.
It warned that a blackout caused by lost transformers could last 18 months or longer.
The Department of Homeland Security then sent a delegation around the country, urging utilities to increase security at their substations.
‘We did a nationwide tour to alert owners and operators about the vulnerabilities,’ said Caitlin Durkovich, the then-assistant secretary for infrastructure protection.
But with more than 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and roughly 55,000 substations scattered across the country, ‘there is awareness that you can’t protect everything.’
A year later, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, an industry-led public-private entity charged with protecting the grid, published a ‘reliability standard’ for utilities. This required them to assess their substations and prepare a plan to defend them from physical attacks.
How to do so was left to the utilities.
If the United States were to experience a year-long blackout, the results would be catastrophic.
At first, critical infrastructure like sewage plants, water treatment plants and hospitals would be able to remain operational as long as they have enough diesel or natural gas. Those with emergency radios could also listen for updates from one of 73 Primary Entry Point Stations, which are supplied with 60 days of generator fuel.
But once the diesel ran out and natural gas pumps shut down, it would become more difficult to restore the grid, considering so many utilities rely on fossil fuels to ‘black-start’ their generating units.
At that point, ‘the supply of food, water and fuel would degrade within days,’ according to a 2010 report prepared by NERC and the Energy Department.
It added that ‘communication of information to the general population would be greatly complicated by the loss of cellphones, internet access and television’ and ‘the economy would virtually shut down as electronic transactions could no longer be processed.
‘After several days, widespread social unrest and confusion would ensue.’
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