Expert warns one coordinated strike could leave U.S. grid with 18-month blackout
The potential for a coordinated attack on the U.S. electrical grid could lead to catastrophe, as one expect speculates that current infrastructure would be completely wiped out for as long as 18 months.
This wouldn't just be your average blackout, as critical systems and anything that uses electricity would be rendered useless without emergency action or backup, leaving the world's most powerful nation hypothetically exposed to a rather major vulnerability.
For most other nations this would take a pretty significant attack, likely over a prolonged period of time, yet one well coordinated action across nine separate key power substations could completely shut down the country.
Not only would this cause chaos on an individual level across the country with people's lives fundamentally changed, but it would likely serve as a precursor to additional military action from one of America's strongest foes, proving to be the preparation before the knockout blow.
One attack could wipe out the U.S. power grid
As reported by the New York Times, this significant vulnerability was identified in analysis conducted by Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), as he had spotted a potential weak point that adversaries could exploit in an attack.
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He discovered that wiping out nine critical substations across the three grid intersections in America – the Western, Eastern, and Texas Interconnections – the country would be left without power.
"We came up with some very astounding numbers," Wellinghoff explained. "If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States."
It's not any particular substations either – which makes it far more dangerous – as Wellinghoff indicates that any nine across the ten most important within its corresponding region could be targeted, making it even more difficult to orchestrate preventative measures.
"You just have to figure out what are the top 10 critical ones in each of those interconnects. Which, to do that, it’s probably something that a bunch of 12-year-olds with the internet could do pretty easily. All you have to do is look at a map of the grid and figure out where most of the wires go into the substations — that’s a critical substation.”
How would this lead to an 18-month blackout?
This would obviously be scary enough on its own, but the aging and complex nature of high-voltage power transformers on the grid would mean that it'd take roughly 18 months for things to be restored back to normal, which is a prospect that's hard to come back from.
Infrastructure across the United States is often custom-built, heavily backordered, and hard to replace, meaning that there's only a certain amount of money that can be thrown at the issue before you run into potential blockades.
Combine this with the rapidly growing power demands of new technology like AI – alongside its burgeoning importance in the political sphere – and this vulnerability would leave America incredibly exposed if a sophisticated attack was carried out.
Avoiding this issue is understandably not a simple task, yet it has still been suggested to implement greater security at key power substations, continued investment in backup infrastructure, and the implementation of localized renewable power systems like solar or batteries to lessen the current reliance on nationwide systems.