Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System Part 2

My Summary of the 2012 National Academy of Science report written for the Department of Homeland Security: “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System”

There are many Really Stupid Energy-Electric Grid Interdependencies that will make terrorism, outage from natural disasters and other failures much worse

Here are some other factors that I think will exacerbate the problems in the future as the system ages and there’s less oil to fix all the growing problems of society:

Natural gas power plants are fed by natural gas pipelines that use electricity to keep the natural gas flowing. So when the electricity goes out, the natural gas will stop flowing to power plants. Terrorists are also likely to take out natural gas transmission lines when they attack the electric system as well. Natural gas pipelines used to use the natural gas flowing through them to power the continued flow of natural gas.

Refineries are fed by oil pipelines that use electricity to keep the oil flowing. So when the electricity goes out, the oil will stop flowing to refineries, and there will be no fuel for ships, trucks, barges, cars, or airplanes.

Gasoline stations need electricity for the pumps. So even if a business or home has had the foresight to buy back-up generators, they won’t be able to get gas or diesel fuel because most gas stations don’t have backup power.

Coal supply chains. Coal travels an average of 848 miles by rail to power plants. Railroads heavily depend on signals, which will be out in an electric blackout. They too are vulnerable to climate change (rising sea level, heat buckled rails, etc.), failing infrastructure, and declining coal supplies. Trains deliver 70% of coal, and a lot of it: over 1 in 5 railcars are carrying coal – over 40% of the weight trains haul. In 2008, 7,710,000 carloads with 878,600,000 tons of coal were delivered by train (AAR).

Microprocessors can’t be made if the electric grid isn’t up or delivers low-quality electricity. The grid can’t function without microprocessors. Over 10% of electric demand is controlled by microprocessors,by 2020 it’ll be over 30% (EPRI, 2003). The electric power system was designed to serve analog electric loads and doesn’t always provide the quality power required by digital manufacturing assembly lines and information systems. A nearly imperceptible 1-second variation in power quality due to transients, harmonics, and voltage surges and sags at a semiconductor-fabrication plant can ruin an entire 30-hour batch of microprocessors and sometimes the manufacturing equipment, and take several days or more for a fabrication plant to recover and resume production again. Any device with a microprocessor is vulnerable to the slightest disruption of electricity. Billions, if not trillions, of microprocessors exist in electronic devices.

I believe that chip fabrication will be one of the first industries to fail, not just from electric grid outages and/or poor quality electricity. Microprocessors have the longest supply chains, single points of failure in both nations and machinery, require silicon, water and chemicals of up to .9999999% purity, at least 60 minerals (many of them rare), $10 billion dollar clean rooms, and much more. (For details, see my articles The Fragility of Microchips, Microchips and fab plants: a Detailed description, High-tech can’t last: limited minerals and metals, and Motherboards in Computers – too complex to make in the future).

The biggest threat to the electric grid isn’t even mentioned in this report: lack of fossil fuels, uranium, and hydro-power to keep it going

We’re running out of the fossil fuels, uranium, and dams that keep 94.2% of the electric grid running: Coal 37%, Natural gas 30%, Nuclear 19%, Oil 1%, and hydropower (6.2%). We are at (or near) peak coal, peak natural gas, peak uranium, and peak oil.

Most “renewable” power comes from hydro-power, which isn’t really renewable, because dams fail when their short-lived concrete crumbles, and silt up within 50 to 200 years. Within the next 20 years, 85% of U.S. dams that cost taxpayers $2 trillion dollars will have outlived their average 50-year lifespan.

Renewables can’t keep the electric grid running either:

Wind and solar are too sporadic and unpredictable, and their lifespan is only 20-30 years.
According to Steven Chu, former US energy secretary, “Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large-scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30% of electricity.” We’re a long way from figuring out how to make low cost, high energy density, fast response, and safe storage devices.
The grid must stay within an extremely narrow range of 59.98 to 60.02 Hz to prevent blackouts. This limits the use of intermittent renewables like wind and solar, because the more you add, the more unstable the electric grid gets (Halper).
Adding renewables doesn’t reduce the use of fossil fuels, and can do the opposite, because additional natural gas combined cycle plants need to be built to kick in suddenly when the wind dies.

Terrorists: We are fully capable of ruining the electric grid without any help from you

The biggest threat isn’t terrorism (yet), it’s natural disasters, the aging electric power system, too much complexity, and lack of capital and energy to fix the system.

The Electric Power System is falling apart. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives our energy infrastructure a D+. The electric grid and most of our other infrastructure is old and falling apart. Both the average age and lifespan of power transformers is 40 years old, and much of the rest of the grid is at or nearing the need to be replaced, and this will lead to more and more blackouts. In the late 1990s, the restructuring and re-regulation of the U.S. transmission system led to a decrease in investment and now the grid operates at or near its physical limits, resulting in many parts of the bulk high-voltage system being heavily stressed.

Capitalism ensures most of the money needed to fix the grid will go to fat cats instead. Because of deregulation and over 90% of America’s infrastructure being privately owned, money that ought to have been invested in maintenance and improvements has gone instead to CEO’s, top executives, and shareholders.

Natural Disasters & Climate Change. Hurricanes will be fiercer and more frequent in the future, as will tornadoes, ice storms, extreme droughts and flooding, severe thunderstorms, and the coup de grace – rising sea levels. All of these will take the grid down more often and for longer periods over wider areas.

There are many other ways the grid can come down besides terrorism. Cyber or nuclear war, an Electromagnetic pulse, natural gas shortages, coal shortages, and oil shocks.

Too Complex – Too Many Owners and operators, over 3,000 entities to coordinate, many with conflicting goals and interests. The U.S. electric power industry today is composed of a wide variety of players, entities, and institutions, all of which play different roles, and the actions of individual asset owners and operators affect each other.

Deregulation has made the system unstable. Competition in the wholesale electricity market has increased the operational complexity of the power delivery system. Electricity is being shipped much longer distances over a transmission system designed only to provide limited power and reserve sharing among nearby utilities.

References

AAR. Association of American Railroads. August 2013. Railroads and Coal. Aar.org

EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute). 2003. Electricity Technology Roadmap: Meeting the Critical Challenges of the 21st Century: Summary and Synthesis. Palo Alto, Calif.: EPRI.

Halper, Evan. Dec 2, 2013. Power struggle: Green energy versus a grid that’s not ready. Minders of a fragile national power grid say the rush to renewable energy might actually make it harder to keep the lights on. Los Angeles Times.

LaCommare, K.H., Eto, J.H., 2004. Understanding the cost of power interruptions to U.S. electricity consumers. Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL-55718, Berkeley, CA, September. http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/EMP/EMP-pubs.html

OTA (Office of Technology Assessment). 1990. Physical Vulnerability of Electric System to Natural Disasters and Sabotage. OTA-E-453. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Related Articles:

Alice Friedemann. Electric Grid Overview. Energyskeptic.com
Makansi’s Lights Out. The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It Means to You
Munson’s From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity
Eric J. Lerner. June 2001. What’s wrong with the electric grid? American Institute of Physics.
Evan Halper. Dec 2, 2013. Power struggle: Green energy versus a grid that’s not ready. Minders of a fragile national power grid say the rush to renewable energy might actually make it harder to keep the lights on. Los Angeles Times.
Joel Brenner. 2011. “America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare”.
Richard Clarke. 2012. CYBER WAR. The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It”.
H. Byrd. 12 May 2014. Lights out: The dark future of electric power. NewScientist.com
Gail the Actuary. 7 May 2008. The U. S. Electric Grid: Will It Be Our Undoing? Theoilddrum
Richard Duncan : Olduvai Gorge – Civilization ends when Electric Grids Permanently Fail

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