The electronic nightmare scenarios

 Massive power outage hits San Francisco, shuts down businesses, BART station, traffic lights

A massive power outage in San Francisco on Friday morning caused a blackout in neighborhoods across the city, from the Financial District to the Presidio, forcing the closure of businesses, a federal courthouse and a BART station, officials said.

A spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said at least 90,000 customers lost power.

PG&E also said that it had not identified the cause of the outage.

But it might be a good time to remind ourselves that America's power grid is so vulnerable to sabotage and attack that even Scientific American says that it keeps the Pentagon up at night.

A report last year [2015-DS] prepared for the President and Congress emphasized the vulnerability of the grid to a long-term power outage, saying “For those who would seek to do our Nation significant physical, economic, and psychological harm, the electrical grid is an obvious target.” 

The damage to modern society from an extended power outage can be dramatic, as millions of people found in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The Department of Energy earlier this year said cybersecurity was one of the top challenges facing the power grid, which is exacerbated by the interdependence between the grid and water, telecommunications, transportation, and emergency response systems.

And The Hill reported a year ago that a power grid attack is a nightmare scenario.

The threat of an attack on the nation’s power grid is all too real for the network security professionals who labor every day to keep the country safe.

“In order to restore civilized society, the power has got to be back on,” said Scott Aaronson, who oversees the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC), an industry-government emergency response program.

While cybersecurity experts and industry executives describe such warnings as alarmist, intelligence officials say people underestimate how destructive a power outage can be.

The most damaging kind of attack, specialists say, would be carefully coordinated to strike multiple power stations.

If hackers were to knock out 100 strategically chosen generators in the Northeast, for example, the damaged power grid would quickly overload, causing a cascade of secondary outages across multiple states. While some areas could recover quickly, others might be without power for weeks.

But the greatest threat is from the electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) emanating from a near-space atomic detonation. In one instant, power grids across most of the country could be rendered useless. Some estimates of deaths caused, not by the atomic blast but by the years-long effects of sudden reversion to a 18th-century way of life, are in the many millions.

Just last month former CIA Director James Woolsey wrote that,

... former senior national security officials of the Reagan and Clinton administrations warned that North Korea should be regarded as capable of delivering by satellite a small nuclear warhead, specially designed to make a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack against the United States. According to the Congressional EMP Commission, a single warhead delivered by North Korean satellite could blackout the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for over a year—killing 9 of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse.

Two North Korean satellites, the KMS-3 and KMS-4, presently orbit over the U.S. on trajectories consistent with surprise EMP attack.

Ninety-percent of Americans dead? I would not go that far, but more than 10 million, certainly. Probably multiples of that.

So why does North Korea have two satellites in polar orbits, each traversing over the United States several times per day?

Having been a nuclear target analyst in my military career, I find this simply horrifying.

Update: There are many more threats to the country's grid than just EMP or conventional sabotage. "In 1989, for example, 6 million residents of Quebec lost power for nine hours following a geomagnetic disturbance from a solar storm."

What about truly massive solar storms? These are usually called Coronal Mass Ejections and if large enough the ejected solar mass, not just radiation, can penetrate the earth's atmosphere. A "significant flare" occurred less than three years ago.

Much larger CMEs than this have reached earth very recently.

Solar storms would primarily affect the power grid, and are not likely to harm things like computers.  Also, solar storms would only disrupt communications temporarily, and would not be likely to cause direct harm to communications equipment (except for satellites).   An extremely large solar storm, though, would induce geomagnetic currents that could destroy a substantial fraction of the very largest transformers on the power grid (possibly over much of the world).  If this happened, electric power loss due to a large solar storm would be out for a period of years and possibly decades.  Unlike nuclear EMP, such a solar storm is an eventual inevitability.

The last solar storm that could have caused this level of damage happened in 1859, before the power grid was in place (although in 1921 a large solar storm, of briefer duration than the 1859 event, occurred which affected a much smaller area of the planet). The power grid has only been in place for a fraction of one percent of human history, and a really large solar storm (of the size and duration of the 1859 event) has not happened in that time.  There is a general assumption that any solar event that is similar to, or larger than, the 1859 solar superstorm will simply never happen again, although there is no justification for such an assumption -- in fact, we know that this assumption is false. There is a good possibility that such a large-scale solar storm will happen in this century. If it happens in the current situation without adequate spares for our largest transformers, a large part of the worldwide power grid (including 70 to 100 percent of the United States power grid) will be down for years.

Those transformers are custom manufactured for each site. They are not pieces that simply roll off an assembly line. But reverting to an 18th century lifestyle isn't the half of it. We'd also revert to an 18th-century economy. Absent the US national grid alone, to say nothing of Europe's grid and western Asia's, the worldwide economy would simply collapse. Very hard and very fast.

The net worth of the typical American would simply vanish because money today is almost purely electronic. SFGate reports of an ice cream store whose owner kept the store opened despite having no power - may as well sell as much ice cream as possible before it melted, right? But "sales were few and far between."

“No one pays cash anymore,” he said, spoon in hand as a siren wailed outside. “I’m angry. I’m annoyed."

Charge and debit cards are not money, they are promissory notes, basically IOUs. In an EMP or CME, you might have had $50,000 just sitting in your savings account, but not any more. The ledgers would still show it but they are mostly electronic, too. And banks don't keep much cash on hand, anyway. Same for international commerce and currencies. They'd be shut down.

Life would become nasty, brutish, and short very quickly. Civil violence would reach unimaginable proportions as commodities (like food and drugs) become immediately scarce. It would be a zombie apocalypse, minus the zombies.