Lights Out: Top 7 Threats To America's Power Grid | The Daily Caller:
Revelations
earlier last week that hackers linked to Russia attacked and
took down the Ukrainian power grid are bringing to light once again major threats to the American power grid.
“There’s this combination of federal and state-level programs that are aimed at shutting down reliable baseload generation, such as coal, while propping up expensive and unreliable wind and solar power,” Chris Warren of the Institute for Energy Research told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “This includes policies such as the wind PTC, solar ITC, state renewable portfolio standards, and EPA regulations like the carbon rule.”
American homes, industries, and businesses are deeply dependent on reliable electricity, so threats to the consistent delivery of electricity put modern life itself at risk.
“This perfect storm of policies will unavoidably raise electricity prices on Americans and seriously threaten grid reliability,” Warren continued.
From the Environmental Protection Agency crusade against to cheap domestic energy and to renegade rodents, here are the top 7 threats to the American electrical grid.
1: Environmental Protection Agency
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repeatedly attempted to implement regulations that
shut down coal and natural gas power plants.
At the same time, the agency
openly encourages solar and wind power, which also puts stress on the power grid.
Independent groups have suggested EPA regulations
could be responsible for shutting down up to 81,000 megawatts of power generation capacity.
That is the equivalent of shutting off the lights of Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado and Idaho.
Such action makes the power grid more vulnerable to other disruptions.
And the agency
proposes so many new regulations that it creates uncertainty among investors, which effectively prevents the construction of additional conventional power plants that could stabilize the grid.
2: Terrorism
Snipers opened fire on an electrical substation supporting the power grid in April, 2013, near Silicon Valley, California. Substations are critical links in the power grid which make it possible for electricity to move long distances.
It took utility workers
27 days to make repairs and successfully reactivate the substation.
No one has been arrested or charged for this crime.
Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, called the incident “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred.”
It takes
more than a year to manufacture a new transformer, and transformers aren’t interchangeable, as each one must be individually built specifically for its location.
The country’s roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build, often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds.
3: Cyberattacks
“The threat to America’s power supply from a cyber attack increases every day,” Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science Committee, told TheDCNF. “If just one major city were attacked in this way, the economic and societal consequences would be devastating.”
The increased networking of electrical grids worldwide allows for various time and money-saving features which make the day-to-day operations simpler, however they also make it easier for the grid to be hacked.
Lots more to worry about! Read on!
