This could happen at any time due to a solar flare. The coronavirus has made it pretty clear that America is completely unprepared for any sort of major deviation from "normal".
> There is no published model disclosing how these numbers were arrived at, nor are we able to validate a primary source for this claim. Testimony given by the Chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission, while expressing similar concerns, gave no estimate of the deaths that would accrue from a prolonged nationwide grid collapse.
I'm highly suspicious that that number is exaggerated in order to inspire action on what still seems like a worthwhile issue.
Unfortunately discussion in this thread will be dead before anybody will finish comprehensively reading that report.
With the recent failure of the federal government during what should be a significantly easier to manage emergency, I find the 90% to be more believable than I would have just a year ago.
[1]: https://www.powermag.com/expect-death-if-pulse-event-hits-po...
As context, I spent three years driving right around Africa, and before that two years driving from Alaska to Argentina. I've seen my fair share of collapsing infrastructure (Congo... Mali... Sudan, etc.) and what happens in just a few days without electricity.
In less developed countries the impacts are actually much less than they will be in our developed countries, because the people there are used to things failing, and their lives go on regardless. i.e. many people have beasts of burden to carry loads and farm, they have bicycles or walk to get around and they grow their own food.
For us, it won't be so easy.
- Very quickly all the perishables in the stores go bad, and food shortages become very real very fast.
- ATMs don't work - therefore no cash for anyone.
- Gas and diesel are very hard to get out of underground tanks without electricity (yes, you can hand pump it or use a generator... but how many of those are sitting around ready to go?)
- Communications go down - no cell phones, no internet, no radio, no TV. It's extremely hard to get accurate information in that scenario.
- Soon everyone is just focused on survival, so many other basics fall by the wayside. Garbage collection. Sewage, drinking water, medical supplies and much more all stop working.
- In places with low population density and where people have some "homesteading" skills this might not be so bad - they can just shoot a cow once every few weeks or whatever. In downtown LA, NYC and Chicago, it's extremely bad.
In just a few weeks you have mass hysteria, and things go downhill fast. Just look at the scenes in the big box stores when COVID-19 hit of people getting violent and stockpiling toilet paper. Now imagine how desperate everyone would be if the power was out, and in all likelihood will be out for months.
As a teen, back in my fancy country, there was a highly unusual power outage in my country, in summer (which is really nothing extreme over here). Nonetheless, it caused chaos. offices had to be closed because there was no air conditioning and office windows couldn't be opened, trains had issues, people panicked, etc. I remember even back then thinking that if shit would ever properly hit the fan, I'd head to a place where at least the populace wouldn't panic. It's a societal panic and chaos that I fear more than having no power or water, or a 'proper' rule of law. Broadly speaking.
Not to me. The real number could be even higher, at least for the USA population.
Without electricity, here are just a few things that come to mind:
1) no water to your house. Have fun drinking out of the nearest river. There won't be a hospital you can go to when you get cholera or dysentery or heavy metal poisoning.
2) have fun using a chain saw (you do have one?) to chop down nearby trees so you can cook your food. How many cans of spam do you have right now in your pantry?
3) One tank of gasoline. The one in your car. That's it. Gas stations can't pump out of their tanks. It wouldn't be hard to get the 10,000 or 20,000 gallons out of their storage tanks by portable pumps. It's a day or two worth of gas. Many stations get daily gas deliveries, they don't have much inventory around.
4) No electricity means refineries can't operate. No diesel for trucks to deliver the gasoline that refineries can't produce. How many refineries can operate for long, if at all, without external electricity?
5) A lot of oil and gasoline moves by pipelines. These need significant energy for pumping along the way. No electricity, no pipelines.
6) No food being shipped from farms. No energy for factories to process it, e.g. refine grain and slaughter cattle.
7) How long can diesel-electric trains run with the diesel they have on hand? A few weeks? Of course, subways and overhead-electric trains would be totally non-functional.
8) Have fun in urban areas like NYC. I can't imagine what a place like that would be after a week or two without water or power and without working sewage.
I'll just stop right there. I could probably come up with another 100 things without really trying.
On the bright side, who will be OK:
1) A lot of the third world. People whose daily existence depends on subsistence farming can survive for years. Many of them don't have electricity right now.
2) Some farmers in the USA. They probably have hand-pumped wells (a relic from bygone days) and plenty of food on hand.
3) Some groups like the Mormons. They (at least on paper) prepare for those kinds of things.
4) People like the Amish. They would probably do OK.
5) Survivalists in general. They have stocked up on food, and they have guns. They will be happy to shoot you dead if you come to them to take their food. And if they run out of food they will be happy to go looking for you and shoot you dead and take your food.
Just 150 years ago none of this would have been an issue. We didn't have electricity and we had much lower population density.
But now, if we lose electricity nationwide for an extended period of time, we are way beyond fucked. We're mostly dead.
So yes, windmills will come to a halt because they are designed to. Or, more specifically, they will feather their blades and continue to rotate idly while not producing power in order to ensure adequate hub lubrication.
There is a significant concern that, even in a scenario where all power plants are undamaged, it would take a significant period of time for plant operators and distribution system operators to restore service due to the need to more or less restart everything. Something very similar happened during the California power crisis and the great Northeast blackout, in which undamaged power plants were offline for an extended period of time due to the difficulty of restoring grid condition to normal.
Even under normal conditions of a stable grid, when power plants start (e.g. due to expected increase in demand) it takes hours from startup to connection to the grid. Most renewable generation methods (except hydro) and the newest natural-gas turbine plants can start much more quickly (e.g. 15 minutes), but this assumes that they will be connected to a grid which is operating at their design frequency, which would be very difficult to achieve if there has been a significant loss of generation.
And just to worry a bit more, a significant amount of electrical generation, especially in plants capable of load following (quick response to demand), is via natural gas. Natural gas distribution also relies heavily on compressor stations which run on, well, electricity. These stations have backup power capability but recent experience in the Southwest, during the 2011 winter, shows that this is not entirely reliable, and that severe events can disrupt the natural gas supply as well.
Windmills that e.g. farmers and other rural people install on their property would probably be OK. It should be easy to disconnect them from the grid and have them power local equipment. But without some sort of energy storage, it would be dangerous to try to operate on just windmill power. Too variable. Most equipment wouldn't deal with it very well.
But there is one other strong positive I forgot to mention. PV power. That's becoming more and more available. Such a massive change in just the last few years.
PV would let pockets of people do well. Also, having something like a Tesla car or Powerwall, coupled with rooftop PV, would be a game changer for those people. A setup like that could do pretty well if decoupled from the external power grid.
This is the nature of the US system of competitive federalism. States only coordinate with the federal government when either (a) it's politically expedient, because the ruling party in the same for both at that time, or (b) the federal government forces this issue, at which time lawsuits ensue.
It's helpful to think of the US as more a series of regions that sometimes fall under a shifting umbrella government than an actual, single entity.
Seems to me like our main difficulty deviating from normal is the fact that a 20% decrease in demand kills off 10% of businesses within weeks and causes 20% of people to instantly get behind on their rent. There's no slack in the system.
Actually, it is:
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/495519-maryland-gov...
“The National Guard and the State Police are both guarding these tests at an undisclosed location [because] the federal government seems to be interrupting supplies that are being sent elsewhere in the nation, and so I wanted to make sure that we received what we ordered,” [Illinois Gov. J.B.] Pritzker told reporters at an April 15 press conference.
"... the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week." [Emphasis added]
Is that enough of a trend for you?
I meant that aside from the conflict over PPE - which has happened more than once - I am not aware of instances of the state and federal government working against one another.
There's the Western States Pact (CA, OR, WA, NV, CO), and NY just announced an eastern states consortium (NY, NJ, MA, CT, PA, RI, DE).
Add to the fact that several states have had to take drastic measures like calling in their national guard to protect their own PPE shipments from being seized by federal agents, and it's hard not to argue that several states are in fact struggling against the federal government in a completely unprecedented way.
Can you explain why you believe that?
What's gained by coordinating Covid response in Spokane and Fresno?
The solution would be the states deciding among themselves who should get what, with the richer states being OK with getting less than they would otherwise get.
Interestingly, Germany is also a federal state. Yet we never seem to hear about federal regions of Germany disagreeing with each other and fighting with the Federal government like we hear about the US. Any Germans want to spill the tea on German inter-regional political drama?
This ain't true¹. Most of the landmass of the Americas is covered by federated states, sure, but the vast majority of states are unitary.
The more relevant factor is the size of the state's territory. With a few exceptions (like China), most big countries are federated, and most small countries are unitary.
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¹: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/Ma...
After doing some back of the envelope calculations, about 17% of the countries in the Americas are federated and 16% in Europe, so it's actually pretty similar. But countries in the Americas have a much bigger size disparity than in Europe which really makes the federated areas stand out.
It got cemented due to Slavery as we basically carved up the country between slaves states and free states, and ultimately fought a civil war to deal with this bifurcation.
It’s been our long history, it defined us.
Edit: Whoops, I did the American thing again and forgot there are other countries in the Americas.
For reference, do you hear about any internal German politics?
(Not to say that you can't see the faultlines in other European societies though. Ireland's parties inherit from her civil war. The UK has not entirely given up on anti-Catholicism, and has forgotten that its own most recent civil war only ended in 1998. I would put money on East vs West still being somewhat live in German politics, but conducted with a good deal more dignity)
Actually, no. If you want to read what happens in such an event, see section 3.8.2 of the PJM Emergency Procedures Manual.[1] You get DC current to ground in AC transformers, which results in saturation of the magnetic elements and transformer heating. It's a heat problem; it has to be dealt with in minutes, not milliseconds.
That document is addressed to the people in the grid control room. There used to be a training course on line which explained this in simpler terms.