Puerto Rico's problems: are you next, and what could be done to save you?

On a technical level, it is well-established that the whole US power grid is in real danger this year of being shut down as badly as Puerto Rico, a real disaster we need to understand better and face up to. (No electricity for months to come, suddenly no food.) For example, James Woolsey (former CIA head under Clinton) says that Kim may be poised this year to do an EMP attack which would shut down half the generators in the US, and I have given details and citations for a cyber threat even worse at www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf. 
Why hgve our leaders done nothing to correct problems which could actually be corrected quite easily? 

As people start to realize this is real, even for the political leaders living in DC, one leader has asked a group of us:

I wouldn’t know the first thing about this, but is it possible to put parts of the grid, not just wires but smaller if not larger transformers underground?  And if that were done, would it help much?

Thanks very much, ...

At some level, the real problem may be a gap in communication between the engineering people and the mysterious politically shielded process of stakeholder influence in the Senate. Nobody in the latter seems to know the first thing about the EMP threat to burn out and shut down half the big transformers, or the cyber threat to burn out and shut down half the generators, on the continental US. There are only a few parts of the US (like Texas) where the water threat to the grid is anywhere near as serious, but a better understanding of the CONSEQUENCES of losing electricity for a long time might help a little, maybe, in getting policy-makers closer to reality on nature and importance of the EMP and cyber threats. 

For the EMP threat... putting wires underground is expensive. In October 2001, I organized a joint NSF-EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) workshop on urgent opportunities to harden the grid, at EPRI headquarters in Palo Alto. For transmission, underground wires cost about ten times the ordinary wires, which were already hard enough to get build because of issues of regulatory barriers and costs running into the billions BEFORE any multiplying by ten.

But there are much simpler and easier technical fixes. Under the Congressionally chartered EMP Commission, an engineer named Kappenman worked with others to develop (and I think patent and incorporate) much cheaper, easier and more reliable fixes. The estimate was on the order of $100 million to harden the ENTIRE US grid from all kinds of EMP (other than lightning, which was already being addressed in other ways). When I hear Woolsey on TV talking about how Kim could shut down the US with one single H bomb, and about how Kim does know this and is preparing to do so, I find myself really wondering about the sanity of people who could have engineered the fix ten years ago, and did not. Part of me says -- I am not a professional politician; I do well enough in passing information on to people who are, for someone who is more a scientist, engineer, economist and Quaker than politician; but even so, the total failure to get even such a simple fixable problem fixed makes me ever more enervated in the face of equally fatal problems in other areas, likely to kill us all if we don't learn better how to walk a straight line.

With EMP, the required fix to the grid is not only cheap and easy but known to the House. More precisely, Congressman Trent Franks (with strong support from folks we knew like Roscoe Bartlett) introduced a bill, the Shield Act, which passed 3-1 in the House (obviously bipartisan), which would have hardened the grid against EMP, years ago. 

Franks is a conservative Congressman from Texas, so of course there was nothing socialist or weird about his solution. The bill would simply have empowered and mandated FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates interstate gas and electric transmission systems) to ADD EMP resilience to the many other existing reliability standards enforced by FERC. Just one more health and safety kind of standard, less expensive than others long on the books. At a (one time) cost of $100 million, it would end up as about a $1 one-time charge to the average rate-payer (if as a rough guess we have 100 million of them in the US), with maybe a continuing cost of 10 cents per year thereafter for maintenance. Just part of the cost of having a reliable source of electricity.

I remember very vividly an important "inner circle" meeting of Franks and other supporters of the Bill at the Senate Visitors Center, where even the top people in the House in both parties were deeply mystified about why the Senate simply did nothing with an easy matter of life or death which they could have taken care of quickly. There was a lot of speculation. My natural response was; "Holy cow! If even THESE guys are baffled about what is going on, what are my chances to figure it out... with Specter now gone from the Senate." But my year working in the Hart building did give me SOME basis for my own guessing... and I remember how Reid operated, with his own view of the Stakeholder System, which is probably similar but worse under McConnell. On the tombstone of the US, will it be written "Death by shared new procedural ideology"?

Could McCain save us somehow, as the most reality-oriented guy left now that Specter is gone? Or will Murkowski, Cantwell, Kaine and Schumer be the last remains of hope?

Anyway, the fix to save us is easy, and it may be all it would take is for the right Stakeholder (maybe BP could do it) to gently tap the shoulder of McConnell or whomever, and note that Franks is still alive and happy to reintroduce the bill. I don't know.

BUT: the cybervulnerability is just as urgent, and even bigger as a threat. (Folks in the House speculated: maybe senators just wanted to solve EMP and cybervulnerability of the grid TOGETHER. But clearly waiting for A before B and B before A is a dumb and even fatal strategy here!!)

It is EVEN MORE technical than EMP. At www.werbos,com/NATO_terrorism.pdf (published in a book in the NATO series), I give technical details of that threat and of HOW TO fix it. It certainly depresses and enervates me very deeply that we show no signs of progress in making THAT fix either. It is so obviously a matter of national survival that I find myself wondering about the patriotism of the powerful folks who have chosen to do nothing here. (Yes, I share the deep worries of the public about the "swamp," but I often wish Trump had a better understanding of what it actually is.) But my son in law, who is closer to the specific technologies, suggests it is simply a case of old fashioned cover-your-ass psychology. More specifically, in the 1970's, when the Multics operating system was being developed (in front of my eyes literally), there was a collaboration of folks who really knew what a computer is and of folks who really know what a theorem is, yielding among other things "the orange book." (If you look up Multicians on the web, you will see I am just one junior member of a larger group, if they haven't all died of old age yet.) THE ESSENTIAL FIX of open machine-verified compliance testing of operating systems for critical infrastructures (starting with power) requires that kind of crossdisciplinary cooperation, which may have simply been lost with time (just as we may have lost Boeing's hot structures capability crucial to economic access to space either for missile defense or power generation). It COULD be reconstituted, and not take all that many years, but when key people in power do not want to admit what they have lost and what it would take to fix... well, maybe that's the political problem which needs to be solved somehow or other.

But again, I am not so involved in such politics any more. I was invited to Trent Frank's meeting due to connections which are pretty much gone now. Tomorrow I do go back to revisit IEEE HQ in DC again for the first time in a long time -- but only to give a technical talk to the aerospace electronics society, focusing on exciting nuts and bolts related to IT.