After many years of essentially never worrying about power delivery, the past decade has brought an accelerating number of service interruptions to the citizens of the United States and steadily raised concerns about the sources of their energy alongside renewed interest in details of the system’s functioning.
Those of us who have been working in the energy sector for some time have been the perennial Cassandras, grumbling to various degrees about how broken the US power sector is, how rapidly aging its still-impressive grid infrastructure, and the near-mythical sums that will be needed to shore up service much less rebuild entirely.
Despite occasional bouts of hopelessness at the scale of the task, I most often believe that the citizenry, the companies and the markets of the US are capable of fixing the problems and actually leading the twenty-first century in establishing the most reliable, most secure and most cost-effective large-scale power production and delivery system in the world.
I still believe that, even as the risks proliferate constantly. One that has emerged as particularly sleep-robbing in recent years has been the potential for a large-scale cyberattack that could disable increasingly interconnected infrastructure systems that are often lacking the latest or most responsive cybersecurity.
A successful attack on the entire US power grid is the driving force in a new narrative television movie from the National Geographic Channel called “American Blackout.” I went to an early showing of the movie, which because it is filmed on hand-helds and blends actual footage from previous large-scale events like Katrina and the New York blackout, feels highly documentary in style (at least until the happy-ish, tidy ending).
In introducing the film, the head of the National Geographic Society noted the idea that contemporary society is always only about nine missed meals away from real chaos. The breakdown in food delivery systems was probably the most striking driver of consensus collapse depicted in the film, though a number of other issues from distributed backup generation to communications reliability were also raised.
The film’s hand-held style gave me a bit of a stress headache, but the fact that comparatively mainstream media organizations are addressing this problem in a fairly responsible and fact-driven way is extremely encouraging. If you get a chance to see the movie, I highly recommend it – I’d expect a good run of increased flashlight, battery and bottled water sales after it shows at the end of the month (just in time for Halloween!).
Republished with permission from Peter Gardett’s website.
Peter Gardett, Founding Editor, Breaking Energy, has spent over a decade covering all areas of the energy industry including coal, electricity and renewable fuels. As Senior Correspondent, and later Bureau Chief for Argus Media, he led teams developing new editorial, analytical and pricing products for the energy and commodities industries and also covered financial news for an audience of high-level energy executives.
