Lights Out! Can America Survive an Attack on the Electrical Grid?

Ted Koppel’s book Lights Out! Is four years old as of this writing, but if you think that makes the scary picture he paints obsolete, think again.

Ted Koppel scares the pants off anyone who cares.

Looking for updated info on the vulnerability if the U.S. electrical grid, all I could find was a number of news articles reporting that the grid had been infiltrated by a foreign powers in 2017, deep enough to shut most of it down at any time if they so desired.

I also found lots of articles and videos about how Koppel thinks the NYT, MSNBC, WAPO and other liberal-slanted publications are openly anti-45. Koppel has apparently been on Fox News saying so, and he’s very critical of the degradation of American journalism and the shift from actual news to 24/7 punditry and outrage.

OK, well, yeah. I’m not a fan of Fox News, and when I read that two of Koppel’s best friends are Henry Kissinger and Orrin Hatch, I confess it did send a little shiver down my spine, and not in a good way.

But that’s all ad hominem, isn’t it? Let’s get back to Koppel’s concerns about the grid, which, as laid out in this book, are absolutely terrifying and well-documented–documented it used to be, back when we had journalists and reporters and so forth. It turns out that the U.S. leads the world in the capability for cyber attack, but when it comes to defense, we are not so great.

Again, yeah. The 2016 election illustrated that, and though I’m not exactly a right winger, I have to agree with Koppel that the American public’s love of outrage is taking us down a dark, dark path. There’s outrage addiction on both sides, and the outrage is all so tribal that not much on the side of rationality and issue-focused discussion squeaks out.

Imagine your outrage as a spiked chain with a rope on it, and every time some entity wants to get you riled up, he, she, or it just gives that chain a yank, and boom! Twitter storm, marching in the streets, screaming at the Thanksgiving Day table… you’ve all been there, I know you have.

Aren’t you just sick of it. Why can’t we take a break from foaming at the mouth and focus some energy and analysis on our vulnerable infrastructure?

Because we don’t believe an attack can happen, or we kind of know it will happen but it’s so scary to think about and so expensive to fix, we can’t bear to think about it let alone make plans.

Think you could survive a 6 to 12 month electrical outage that covered many states? Unless you live on a self-sustaining ranch in Wyoming or you are a Mormon, you probably won’t survive that. Sure you can lay in months of dried food and bottled water, but after it becomes clear the lights aren’t coming on anytime soon and after grocery stores run out of food, someone is going to show up at your door and take your dried food away from you. Maybe they will kill you, maybe they won’t.

Why read this stuff then? Right now, there are so many different ways we are all going to die by our own stupid hands, it seems almost masochistic to focus on the details.

I think Lights Out! Is worth reading because it reframes our view of global tension, war, and our digital age. While most of us are busy looking at puppies on Facebook and arguing with strangers about whether or not the gold standard is or is not batshit economics (hint: it is), Russia, North Korea, and Iran are stacking up all kinds of cyber-ways take us out, totally cripple us, make our endless stupid opinions irrelevant. Right now.

If you think that sounds a bit hysterical, look up ‘EMP attack’ on the Google, in between watching piano-playing kitty videos. Iran could do that to us now. So could a number of small, crazy adversaries. Kind of makes conventional warfare look quaint, once you get the gist of it.

Koppel offers no good advice for how to survive apart from 1) be a gazillionaire and prepare obsessively, 2) live on that self-sustaining Wyoming ranch, or 3) join the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

Don’t want to do any of those things? Me neither.

Here’s a few suggestions I would add: 1) get off the Facebook, 2) vote, 3) call your Congressional Representatives. 4) Read.

Also, specifically read about systems of the decentralized electrification of everything.

Decentralized electricity is produced by the consumers who use it, usually on a small scale. The excess can be routed back to a grid, but if the grid goes down, decentralized production continues. This makes such a system much more resilient in the face of a cyber attack.

This model is currently being used successfully in Africa and South America, and is successfully bringing electricity to remote places. The problem with switching to such a system here is not technological, it’s political. The current system is based on top-down structures based on profit, and to make things worse, the power industry basically regulates itself. With profit first and foremost, the industry is loathe to invest billions to protect the grid from something that hasn’t happened. Yet.

A columnist for Forbes took Koppel to task for not pointing out systems of diversified electrification in his book. Also, he called him a fossil. Both those things are basically true, but I couldn’t help thinking that right now we don’t have either thing—a non-vulnerable top-down grid OR a system of diversified electrification.

Also, calling Koppel a fossil is kind of snarky. Such is the state of political discourse in 2019.