Comment by burnt-resistor
4 months ago
Possibly the easiest way to bring any metropolitan area or region into the Stone Age for unknowable amounts of time is simply to destroy large, bespoke transmission (rather than distribution) transformers. Crazy people shooting out the cooling systems have done this several times.
Meaningful grid security means these items need rapid, standardized, domestic production capacity and cold spares distributed offsite and ready to be deployed should anything happen to ones in use. These are critical items that must not be neglected to reactive actions disaster recovery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid_security_in_th...
I live near Palo Alto and a transformer blew at the closest PG&E substation and it took six days to ship in a replacement and they cut electricity to the whole area for that time, I want to say last year or the year prior. So it’s not like they had to wait years as described in the article for new builds but I wonder where they got it from and how many do they have.
It might be easier for DC transmission components to be standardized. Sure, anything with complex controls has a lot more opportunity to fail to interoperate, but DC gear can often be configured for different voltage ratios and can much more directly control how much current flows where.
Maybe the grid needs a multi-source agreement for equipment like the network industry has for optics.
Yet another good reason for at-home solar and storage.
Does very little to offset things like no power for hospitals, refrigerated food distribution, manufacturing of almost anything.
Also the sewer system backs up after about a week because the pumping and lift stations need power to operate.
The water system shuts down because the tanks aren't reserve supply they're pressure support.
And solar plus storage will keep you running for maybe a week if you're conservative and mostly don't use anything...which doesn't help you if it's months till replacement.
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> no power for hospitals
Which have days worth of backup generator power
> refrigerated food distribution
Do you think refrigerated trucks trail big long extension leads to a socket somewhere?
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