Articles in Power Grid
Emergency Light Bulb + Funny Video
I think this is a great product – it’s an LED bulb that has a battery inside, meaning you get 7 hours of light when your power is out – and it doubles as a flashlight! When the grid goes down at 2AM, and you figure it would be smart to flee to your safe spot – you don’t want to be stumbling around in the dark wasting precious time…
http://store.axiomled.com/AX_RUDOLPH_50_p/ax-rudolph-50.htm
In this video, leading presidential candidates Mitt and Newt discuss the merits of the Axiom LED Rudolph:
USDA Behind Bird Killings / Hoekstra on EMP
This time last year there was a lot of talk about mass animal die-offs. These things happen from time to time, but the cluster of events made it newsworthy. Turns out some mass deaths can be attributed to deliberate poisoning by US authorities:
A recent mass die-off event witnessed in Yankton, South Dakota was traced back to the USDA which admitted to carrying out a mass poisoning of the birds.
Read the whole story at Earth-Issues
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Congressman Pete Hoekstra was recently heavily involved in US Intelligence:
Mr. Hoekstra, as a former Chairman of the HPSCI one of the best informed men in the world, will share his views on the global threats Americans face, now and in the future. Here is a rare opportunity for our audience to question the man who, until recently, was taskmaster of our nation’s spy agencies.
On Wednesday, noon Eastern time he speaks with EMPact Radio, a weekly broadcast devoted to …
Michio Kaku: Power Grid at Risk in 2012
Michio Kaku on CNN last week, discussing what could happen in 2012. After he explains the peak of the solar cycle is coming up, he says:
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2011/12/27/exp-am-kaku-2012-science.cnn
Kaku:
“Every eleven years the Sun has a temper tantrum, throws a volley of radiation at the Earth. So far we’ve dodged the bullet, but we’re very young in the Space Age, we’re not used to having our satellites knocked out because of a solar flare, but it could happen”.
Interviewer:
“What are the implications of that?”
Kaku:
“Well, that means the Internet, GPS, weather satellites, all of it is on the Internet, plus telecommunications on the Earth could also be disrupted. In Quebec they had a blackout once because a solar flare hit the planet Earth… and our power plants are not reinforced. We physicists have asked Congress to pay a few hundred million dollars to reinforce our power plants, make redundant satellite systems, because at some point it’s …
Power Grid Down… What Happens to Money?
I’ll keep saying this until I am blue in the face: the US power grid is old and overloaded. A once-in-100-years solar storm can wreck it, and replacing all the transformers could take six months. The US government recently decided not to fund an upgrade. This could be the worst mistake the US government has ever made. If the grid goes down, there goes heating and cooling, and the USA has some extreme weather. Gas stations won’t work, and places that will be relying on diesel generators, like hospitals, could be without power within days. Water won’t be pumped any more. Most likely millions will die. And what about money?
The first problems are obvious. ATMs will stop working, and banks won’t have access to account records. That means no more cash will be distributed. Few people carry more than a week’s worth of cash.
Credit and debit card payment systems won’t …
When Fiction Becomes Reality
After 9/11 it was freaky to see that the tragedy had been predicted in popular culture, for example the debut episode of The Lone Gunmen. The most under-appreciated disaster scenario facing the USA and the western world is the loss of electricity. I will repeatedly bring this up, because the consequences will be so tragic, and the event can easily occur. The prime risk is the Sun, but terrorists, hackers and war are also potential sources. As we approach holiday seasons, consider reading a book on the topic:
The Great Collapse – When they use the EMP weapon to attack America, the result is the immediate and catastrophic loss of modern technology all over the planet… When societies begin to unravel, refugees flee the anarchy in the cities as people learn how to survive in a world without technology, a world for which they are not prepared.
Lights Out – Another novel …
GPS Disasters – More Than Just Navigation
As our world becomes more and more reliant on technology, so serious system collapses become more likely. I’ve been reading all about GPS jammers at New Scientist (the article is online at Gizmodo), and I learned that they affect more than just your Garmin or TomTom. Actually 90% of GPS receivers use the data for timing not location. If GPS signals are lost, these are some of the services that will be affected:
Cell phone towers
Air traffic control
Emergency pagers
ATM machines
Electric grids
Stock exchanges
…and navigation (obviously), but not just your car – think freight in a just-in-time environment, emergency services, shipping and train routing
The first four of the above services were affected in San Diego for 2 hours in January 2007. The culprit was later discovered to be a naval exercise nearby, where they blocked radio signals. However you don’t need to be the Navy to have the same effect. Truck drivers using …
Media Coverups
I guess mainstream media constantly makes decisions on what they should print/air. At one end of the scale they are a commercial enterprise, so they need to be popular, which means airing stories we want to see. Beyond that they also have a moral duty to share important stories with us, even if they are not popular. Also, they should really stick to the facts and avoid speculation and conspiracy theories – yet public speculation can itself become a story, for example the 2012 meme. While there are few facts regarding 2012, there are plenty of facts regarding how people are preparing.
Over at BlackListedNews is a list of 12 stories the media is mostly ignoring, some of which I had not previously heard of:
#9 North Korea’s Super EMP Weapon:
The Soviet Union conducted an atmospheric test of an EMP weapon in 1962 over Kazakhstan whose pulse wave set on fire a …
US Grid: Add Hackers To The List
The US power grid is extremely vulnerable, as are those in Europe. Primarily because they are old and over-burdened, but also because they are targets. If terrorists took out a number of transmission substations or control stations, they could cause chaos. Anarchy and suffering in the US could lead to global turmoil. Now, aside from the Sun and terrorists, Scientific American reports that hackers could potentially bring down a power grid:
Every facet of the modern electrical grid is controlled by computers. It is our greatest example of physical infrastructure interlinked with electronics.
The Stuxnet virus that infected Iran’s nuclear program showed just how vulnerable machines could be to a well-crafted electronic virus.
The grid shares many of the vulnerabilities that Stuxnet exposed; being larger, its vulnerabilities are, if anything, more numerous.
A sophisticated attack could bring down a large chunk of the U.S. electrical grid.
The US grid wasn’t designed with security in mind:
A …
New Precautions for Power Grids
According to NASA this week:
In Sept. 1859, on the eve of a below-average solar cycle, the sun unleashed one of the most powerful storms in centuries. The underlying flare was so unusual, researchers still aren’t sure how to categorize it. The blast peppered Earth with the most energetic protons in half-a-millennium, induced electrical currents that set telegraph offices on fire, and sparked Northern Lights over Cuba and Hawaii.
…As 2011 unfolds, the sun is once again on the eve of a below-average solar cycle—at least that’s what forecasters are saying. The “Carrington event” of 1859 (named after astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the instigating flare) reminds us that strong storms can occur even when the underlying cycle is nominally weak.
An article in The Independent quotes Thomas Bogdan, director of the US Space Weather Prediction Centre, reconfirming how vulnerable the power grids of Europe and North America are:
The most vulnerable …
70 American Ancestors / Exploding Transformers
By using nine different genes, and real genetic data (instead of estimates) new research suggests that just 70 people crossed the Bering Strait 12-14K years ago. This means that the wiping out of megafauna in North America, especially the mammoths, is now less likely to have been by human hands. Therefore the odds of a cataclysm being responsible have now increased. More at the Daily Mail.
In the USA there appears to have been a dramatic increase in the number of electrical transformers exploding. These news items could become this year’s sinkholes – weird everyday events getting highlighted a lot in blogs and forums. My take on it is that the increase in the Sun’s activity combined with the extra strain on the US power grid since the last solar peak is the culprit. This would mean that any major solar storms in the next few years are still a major risk …
Solar Flare Update
The biggest solar flare in four years has sent charged particles hurtling towards Earth. ABC News says:
The radiation from Monday’s flare, known as a Coronal Mass Ejection, should pass the Earth today, Friday and Saturday. The charged particles will speed by at some 560 miles per second.
…What makes this storm interesting, said Joe Kunches of the Space Weather Prediction Center, is that there were actually three flares in succession — and radiation from the last and biggest of them is travelling faster than the particles from the first two.
“What’s the effect of the triple punch?” said Kunches. “Stay tuned.” Outbursts such as the current one are actually quite common, scientists say. But modern technology can be sensitive to solar storms; scientists say satellites, power grids and communications networks can suffer outages.
The worst that we can expect would be pagers not working, some minor power blackouts, planes on polar routes changing course, …
Power Grid Disinformation??
If you have been following 2012 in the broadest sense, you’ll know that:
1) A Coronal Mass Ejection (from the Sun) could wipe out the electrical grid in the USA and potentialy elsewhere.
2) The next solar maximum (and therefore heightened odds of a CME) is in 2012/2013.
3) The recent solar minimum was very minimal, suggesting the possibility that the response will be a major maximum.
So, is this article that ignores most of the above, disinformation? We can read this The Register which has a quarter of a million readers daily:
There have been a lot of scare stories in the media about electrical power grids in recent times, suggesting that it would be a simple matter to bring down a national transmission system by way of a minor cyber attack or physical sabotage – thereby bringing that nation’s infrastructure to a grinding halt.
There’s just one problem with that idea: it’s “a bunch …
Sun v. Trains: Sun Wins
Most 2012 talk involving the Sun covers things like a cataclysmic breakdown of a power grid, and the effects of solar bursts in 1859 and 1989. Most people are unaware of these more subtle effects from recent times:
Although it would take a truly massive space storm to cause a catastrophe, it is becoming clear that even modest solar activity poses a threat in our technology-dependent world. It makes railway signals go haywire and rusts oil pipelines to the point that they may leak, not to mention wearing down key components in power grids, which could drive up the cost of electricity.
In the far North of Russia, solar storms have caused train signals to switch from green to red erroneously – “Space storms may have the same effect on the rails as a train, generating unwanted electric currents that could cause the voltage between …
US Grid Concerns Continue
One of the leading voices in the 2012 Doomsday field, Lawrence Joseph, has focussed on the potential for the next solar cycle peak to wreak havoc on electrical grids worldwide, but especially in the USA. The reasons the USA is singled out are:
their grid is antiquated
their grid is overloaded
Even without the Sun being a factor, the USA power grid can still easily have a cascading blackout. The concerns have been acknowledged by the US government, and bodies like NASA. Some books and articles have pointed out how catastrophic a nationwide outage could be. Basically, if the grid has failed in many locations, repairing it could take up to 6 months. That’s 6 months without electricity that runs hospitals, pumps water, runs gas stations, and powers heating and air conditioning. It is quite likely that millions would die.
While President Obama is supposedly committed to upgrading the US grid, in reality it …
Space Storm Alert
It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
Rather catastrophic stuff for a New Scientist article! However the reason they are reporting it is because the threat is very real indeed. They …
