US power grid is in danger of catastrophic failure

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In the future, the US power system must become more resilient if it does not want to fall prey to the catastrophic failure that no doubt threatens it, writes the American online publication OilPrice.

Prolonged power outages in Louisiana after Hurricane Ida are a reminder that the grid must be more reliable, especially if more services, such as electric cars, depend on it in the future. The power system is already directly responsible for providing a wide range of services in homes, offices and businesses, including space heating, air conditioning, food preparation and refrigeration. It also forms the basis of many other critical systems, including oil and gas, water supply and sewerage, transport, communications, public and medical, which cannot function normally without it.



In a hurry for electrification and zero emissions policy can inadvertently increase vulnerability economics and society in the event of a long-term power outage over a large area. Instead of several closely interconnected but separate systems for electricity, gas, oil and transportation, there will likely be only one very tightly integrated system in the future, increasing its vulnerability to catastrophic disruptions.

The risk posed by the consolidation of previously separate systems into a central system prone to a single point of failure has been understood for decades. In particular, the tighter systems get, the higher the risk that an unforeseen problem in one part could spread to everything.

A failure in a combined system can have dire consequences. Now people can cook food on gas, but this will become impossible with total electrification in the future. Even diesel generators at nuclear power plants have 1% of failures, and in private households this figure is even higher. If there is a failure in the winter in the future, people may freeze, and if in the summer, the food will quickly deteriorate. Therefore, the energy system of the future must receive such a reserve of strength so that no cyberattacks could seriously disrupt its operation, because not only industry and the financial sector, but also the lives of hundreds of millions of people, will depend on this. Short-term outages, of course, cannot be ruled out, but long-term power outages should not be, summed up the media from the United States.
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  1. GRF
    GRF
    0
    6 September 2021 06: 18
    Oil Price Magazine is concerned about the alleged rejection of oil and gas, and everything was reduced to threats from hackers ... (Which, by the way, without electricity, also cannot survive)
    Shy ones.
  2. boriz
    boriz
    0
    6 September 2021 23: 13
    They should not be afraid of hackers.
    The scary thing for the United States is that there was no GOELRO, Comrade Stalin, who created the EEC (which even such a Frankenstein as Chubais could not completely destroy).
    An example is the collapse in Texas last winter. The surrounding states refused to help with electricity, they themselves were not enough.
    At the same time, the Russian UES in the same winter found electricity even for non-brotherly Ukraine. The situation was end-to-end, at the limit of cross-border networks, but passed without rolling blackouts.
    Moreover, Ukrainian dispatchers have connected to our networks, spitting on the ban on the export of Russian electricity. You never know what Kuleba and Zelensky are chatting there. Dispatchers have their own internal instructions for dealing with such situations. They followed it. The phantom influence of the USSR still remains. Well, common sense. In the position of such dispatchers, anyway, they do not hold anyone, these are not the stools of the President 404 or her own Foreign Ministry, on which anyone is put.
    So it is in the United States. This is a conglomeration of almost independent states, no one thinks for the whole country. And it is not the state that deals with energy, but private offices.
    So, wang repetition of collapses, like Texas. For the governance of the country will only get worse ..