Courtesy Don Loucks
Contributing columnist to The Statesman
Part 2 of a 3-part series
By now we have a pretty good handle on the many shortcomings Texas experienced during the greatest winter storm event since 1899. Back then there was no technology as we know it now. Weather forecasts depended upon barometers, measurements of wind and cloud cover, and communication by telegraph. The storm of 2021 is historic in its own way.
The near-cataclysmic failures we experience the week of Feb. 14 were not purely of technology. Rather, preparation and planning fell short. The bottom line is that we lacked preparation.
Preparing fully for “black swan” events is expensive. One such rare event is the outlier point on the bell curve that makes the gamble against it happening sometimes seem worthwhile to ignore. That gamble to save some preparation costs came 4 minutes and 37 seconds short from complete grid failure and potentially costing thousands of Texans’ lives.
The short time interval was all that remained to cut enough power demand from the Texas Grid before the remaining power generation plants were all forced offline, perhaps for weeks or months. The grid cannot be restarted like a stalled car by turning a key.
Had it happened, ERCOT said the state could have been in the dark for weeks if not longer.
In an urgent ERCOT board meeting on Feb. 24, CEO Bill Magness described the winter weather as “a devastating event. Power is essential to civilization.”
This is worth serious thought. It is probable that the concept of total electric power loss is inconceivable to most Americans. How many times have we automatically flipped a light switch on during a brief power outage and were surprised when no light came on? Or when the water stopped flowing, this latest time for days at a time? Can a months-long or even years-long outage even be possible?
The near-total collapse of the Texas Power grid was a tiny taste of the horrific damage a total, catastrophic loss of the national power grid structure would be like.
And that total loss is entirely probable, and has already happened in America.
In 1859, a coronal mass ejection (CME) occurred which was observed by chance by Richard Carrington from his observatory in London. He saw sunspots that emitted extremely bright lights which then disappeared. What Carrington witnessed was a massive CME launched from the sun and headed to Earth.
Now known as the Carrington event, its effects on Earth ranged from the Aurora Borealis being observed as far south as Cuba to telegraph stations set alight, wires melting and communications disrupted for several days.
Now consider the degree of complexity – and delicacy – of our present-day computers and communication technology. A CME as powerful as the Carrington event today could cause trillions of dollars in damage worldwide, according to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, who wrote in Forbes last year about a possible catastrophic solar flare striking Earth.
The winter storms last month did not destroy computers, the internet, communications hardware or transportation systems. An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) mimics the effects of a CME, and both a devastating CME and/or a man-made EMP are entirely possible today.
EMP generation can be accomplished by detonating a nuclear explosion between 18 to 50 miles above the Earth’s surface. A complex interaction of the blast with the atmosphere will create an EMP that will short-circuit any micro-circuitry as found in computers, cars, trucks, pumping stations, power lines, hospitals, aircraft – nearly everything in our lives.
The essential step in protecting against the potential destruction caused by an EMP or CME is basically the same as protecting against the cripple winter storm we recently experienced, only on a much larger scale.
The weaknesses of our power grids must be re-evaluated. Grids can be hardened for EMP protection, but no one has wanted to spend the money to do so. Emergency plans must be examined and updated and hardware acquired to anticipate and be ready for that black swan event that history has shown can happen.
