In the latest official confirmation about the acute vulnerability of the U.S. electric grid, the Washington Free Beacon has revealed that a Freedom of Information Act request produced a fact sheet describing a 2012 Federal Emergency Management Agency interagency plan for severe space weather.
The FEMA
document refers to a 2010 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) that “an extreme solar storm could leave 130 million
people without power for years, and destroy or damage more than 300
hard-to-replace electrical grid transformers.”
According
to Dr. William Graham, President Reagan’s Science Advisor and chairman of the
congressionally mandated Electromagnetic Pulse Threat Commission, in the wake
of widespread and prolonged blackouts, nine out of ten Americans could
perish.
Importantly,
the level of damage described by FEMA and NOAA could be caused by what is known
as a G5 class storm, the last of which hit the earth in 1921. That
geomagnetic disturbance (GMD) is estimated to have been roughly one-tenth
the power of an 1859 solar storm known as a Carrington Event.
Congressional testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee earlier
this year established that the likelihood of another Carrington-class solar
storm, to say nothing of less powerful ones, striking our planet in the
foreseeable future is one-hundred percent.
In fact,
on December 5, Robert Rutledge, who directs NOAA’s Space Weather Forecast
Office, advised the DuPont Summit – a conference in Washington, D.C. on grid
vulnerability and steps needed to mitigate it – that such storms are as certain
as earthquakes and hurricanes, and should be planned for accordingly.
NOAA’s
2010 Strategic Plan was performed for the National Research Council and drew
upon a study by well-known experts in the field of geo-magnetically induced
currents (GIC) and their impact on the grid, Drs. William Radasky and John
Kappenman.
FEMA’s
fact-sheet notes, however, that unnamed engineers from the electrical industry
downplay the severity of predictions in the NOAA Strategic Plan.
Unfortunately, the industry has long withheld data on geo-magnetically induced
current flows that could shed light on the magnitude of the impact of even
normal solar weather on the nation’s bulk power distribution system.
Dr.
Kappenman, who is a member of the Secure the Grid Coalition, responded to the Free
Beacon report:
The
industry itself continues not to make publicly available important information
on observations of geo-magnetically-induced current (GIC) and power grid
impacts and failures that have occurred for smaller, more frequent storm events
that can be used to validate models to examine impacts for rare larger storm
events. This is somewhat like airlines withholding critical black box
recorder data from the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal
Aviation Administration.
The
Secure the Grid Coalition is concerned that such a lack of transparency is a
product of the U.S. electrical industry’s reluctance to harden its
infrastructure against such threats. The practical effect of industry
non-disclosure and opposition to providing robust protection to its own
assets is to cause important planning scenarios to be watered down.
That, in turn, has impeded consideration and adoption of standards meant to
mitigate such dangers, as regulators rely on assumptions that do not meet modern
scientific standards or independent and widely accepted threat assessments.
The
Center for Security Policy sponsors the Secure the Grid and its President,
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., noted:
The
evidence continues to accumulate that our most critical of critical
infrastructures – the nation’s electric grid – is exceedingly vulnerable not
only to certain naturally occurring phenomena, but to a variety of possible
enemy actions. The federal government knows we face, accordingly, potentially
nation-ending threats.
The House
of Representatives recently unanimously approved the Critical Infrastructure
Protection Act (H.R. 3410) that would require the Department of Homeland
Security to develop a plan for protecting the grid against, among other things,
the sorts of devastation a massive solar storm could inflict. In light of
the latest revelations from FEMA and NOAA, there is simply no excuse for the
Senate failing to assign top priority to approve H.R. 3410, ideally in the
remaining days of the lame duck session.
Secure
the Grid Coalition members are available for comment on the electric grid’s
susceptibility to severe solar weather events and other threats and what needs
to be done to protect it against all hazards. More information can be
found at www.securethegrid.com.