Last April , an unknown number of gunmen , armed with what were probable AK-47s , crept through the iniquity near San Jose . Their target ? A power station that provide electricity to Silicon Valley . phone business line were cut from a manhole and more than 100 round were fired , knocking out 17 transformer .
We still do n’t recognise who was behind the flak , but the precise , military - way maraud has some usefulness experts worried that this was a dress dry run for a larger blast against America ’s ripening and vulnerable electric grid .
Today Jon Wellinghoff , a former top energy functionary and chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time of the California incident , is sound the dismay in aWall Street Journal clause . Wellinghoff order that pick apart out just a little number of substations like the one in California could cause a blackout that plunges much of the res publica into darkness .
We take electrical energy for granted in our 21st C lives now . It seems to arrive , as if by magic , to power our devices instantaneously and continuously But in Sojourner Truth , the galvanic grid is built onfragile strong-arm infrastructure , which is as vulnerable to physical attack as it is to hacking .
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To illustrate the weakness of the galvanic power system , we ask to await no further than the dimout in 2003 that left much of the Eastern US and Canada in darkness . There was no malicious aim there — just Tree . Yes , trees . Maggie Koerth - Baker , author ofBefore the Lights Go Out , explain it bestat BoingBoing . Her description is a bit long , but it lay out how electric storage-battery grid work and why they are vulnerable . A seemingly small , local consequence can wrench into a large blackout :
I care to say that the gridiron is a lot like a slothful river at a waterpark . It ’s not a billet , it ’s a loop-the-loop — power plant associate to client and back to power plants again . And like the slothful river , it has to go within sure parameters . The electrical energy has to move at a constant speed ( an analogy for what the engineers call frequency ) and it has to flow at a constant profundity ( analogous to voltage ) . In order of magnitude to maintain that constant fastness and constant deepness , you have to also maintain an almost perfect correspondence between supply and demand … everywhere , at all times . So when one generator run out , the electricity it was supplying has to come from someplace else . Like a flow flowing into a raw channel , the load will shift from one chemical group of transmission lines to another .
But , the more electricity you endure along a power line , the hotter the power personal line of credit get . And the hotter it cause , the more it droops , like a basset hound dog in a passion wave . If nearby trees are n’t trimmed , the lines can slump too close to the branches — which create a short circuit . When that find , the loads have to shift again . All of this disrupts the amphetamine and the astuteness on the river of negatron . The more lines you fall back , the more likely it is that the remain lines will , themselves , droop into something . The more lines that brusque , the more office plants have to shut down to protect themselves from fluctuations in frequence and emf . The more clock time you have to agitate load around , the more the grid starts to get away from you . In 2003 , six transmission melodic line went down in a run-in , several of them major channels for the stream of electrical energy . Those losses were what turned a small series of mistakes into a catastrophe .
The attack on California ’s Metcalf Transmissions Substation took topographic point at 1:30 am , when requirement for electrical energy was low , and electricity could be rerouted without put too much nisus on the organization . But a well - timed approach in the good afternoon ? That could have turned off Silicon Valley ’s big businessman and even caused a cascade blackout . The repair to the station took 27 days to touch on .
At the clip , local newspapersreported the incident , per Pacific Gas and Electric ’s argument , as the attack of “ Vandal . ” The FBI has since enquire and tell they do not think terrorists are behind the onrush . No suspects have been announced .
galvanizing post across the country cover 12 of incident a year , mostly the work of “ metallic element thief , disgruntle employees or blase hunters , who sometimes take potshots at small transformer on utility poles to see what happens,”according to the WSJ . But the utilities industry had never find a coordinate attack like the one at Metcalf . We can only hope it ’s get a line a lesson . [ Wall Street Journal — BoingBoing ]
Image credit : Matej Kastelic / Shutterstock , FocusADay / Shutterstock
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