A significant portion of my business involves working at generating facilities, from one turbine peaking stand alone units, to massive generating stations that supply New York City with 25% of its power. All of the stations I work out are fenced and/or walled and well lit, with guarded gates for entry, even prior to 9/11. After that, the level of security varies. At the small, one gas turbine type units, that generate maybe 20-40 MW apiece, the security is limited to what I just described with maybe some closed circuit camera systems. Some of them are actually operated remotely and are manned only sporadically. Damage done to one of these would have little no effect on the grid as a whole. These days, at some of the larger stations (2,000MW and up) you need a Homeland Security clearance to enter - something called a TWIC card. To get this card you are fingerprinted and undergo a background check through the Department of Homeland security. Even without that requirement, these large stations are patrolled by armed security, and everyone there has been trained to keep an eye out for outsiders. I need to wear a badge or tag at all times, and folks are constantly asking if they can help me or what I am there for. People know if you are not an employee. Having said all that, it would not be difficult to sneak into one of these large facilities through or over the walls or fencing. It would be difficult to remain undetected for long, and even if you did, it's not as easy to damage one of these facilities as you might think. There are only so many vital points at which an explosive or other interference will have any effect, and those are hard to get to, and take a detailed knowledge of these facilities. They are also usually built within massive structures, and are usually far enough away from the road that it lends an extra layer of security.
It's not the plants that are the problem... attacks at a plant are somewhat easy to mitigate (as Misanthropic has outlined). The problem is in the remote grid distribution lines... those monster high-tension wires that you see in the middle of nowhere. Take out a key 2 or 3 of those and you can cause complete shutdown of a major part of the grid. Remember when NY / NorthEast lost power a few years ago? That was because of some tree branches falling on some transmission lines. (And a software bug that didn't throw the right alarm, but the point stands). It didn't happen because of a generation plant blowing up. Same goes for the chaos of the ice storm in Quebec that left people without power for months... it wasn't the generation stations, it was the transmission lines. Way, way easier to take out, and the only thing guarding them are some deer and coyotes.
It is much much much more likely that a storm or natural disaster, human error or equipment failure will cause power outage than a terrorist or cyber attack. They spend money towards those areas that have the actuarial likelihood of happening. Fortunately, the ACME Roller Skate, Bird Feed and Bomb division has filed for bankruptcy.
Last numbers I remember seeing showed that just climate-related grid failures resulted in $33 Billion in damages (including lost productivity, etc).
Yep. And, even though power companies are publicly regulated utilities, they are in business to make money and perform well for investors. They aren't going to double your rates to make a half-ass attempt at protecting a generation station from the unlikely scenario of a bomb going off. They are going to put money towards doing things to be immediately ready to get your power back on when something like a storm happens, since they are losing money every second your meter's not turning. (They will support Homeland Security, FBI, local law enforcement, etc. efforts to prevent any kind of terrorist plots, though, and let specialized, militarized assets paid for with tax dollars cover for any vulnerability.)
The east coast power thing was solely caused by improper load shedding. If the control system had worked as intended the outage would have been much smaller or insignificant. The Quebec ice storm wiped out huge amounts of transmission infrastructure that had to be rebuilt, the fact they got it back up and running in months is pretty amazing. Transmission lines go down for all sorts of reasons: lightning strikes, flash over on the insulators, animals making nests in the towers, mechanical failure, maintenance, etc. Most of the time you aren't even aware of these things happening. I went to school with a power lineman who had issues at a substation one time with squirrels jumping across the lines, sometimes a squirrel would jump between phases, close the air gap enough to cause a flash over, and trip a circuit. It was more a pain in the ass cleaning up burnt squirrels then anything else. I live in a city of a million people, and I believe the utility here has 4-5 main substations (so 4-5 feeder transmission points), a co-gen plant, and a gas turbine generation facility. To disconnect us from the grid completely you would need to take out 2-3 towers at each location, along with the other generating facilities. Sure not impossible, but pretty hard to do. When we had a major flood here in 2013 at least 2 of those main substations were under water and we didn't have any disruptions of power. I mean beyond the houses/businesses that were underwater as a result of the flood. The transmission network is designed with lots of redundancy, and unless something catastrophic happens that can remove large portions of the grid, it will survive.
My understanding is that there are 3 main grids in the US with a few main interconnects between them, and power is shared/distributed between them. What would happen if, say, 50 towers along those interconnects were taken out? Would that not cause enough destabilization or failure within the system to have things shut down? How much damage would it take to cause enough destabilization for things to go into safety mode? I remember having a discussion with a friend of my dad's who was one of the senior grid engineers at Bruce Power and he was talking about some potential scenarios (the talk started with "what safeguards are in place if terrorists attack the nuclear facility" and beers). What I came away with was that big failures are easily handled, as are a few smaller ones, but a relatively low number of distribution line failures in some key areas would bring the system down due to over-saturation of available routes. What's your take on that?
But it's still a problem, isn't it? Regardless of what colour of skin the person who brings it up has, when it comes to straight up murder, black people are by far the biggest threat to black lives, no? One problem I have with BLM is that while they rightly protest police racism and brutality, they are deafening silent on this point. And, given their name, it's not a small point. I'm so far removed from inner city America that this may be a hilariously stupid question, but are there really zero (or close to zero) summer jobs/opportunities for inner city kids, even if it means taking the train a bit out of the neighbourhood? My limited experience with huge cities like New York is that most people commute crazy distances away from home to work. Far more important, related question: how much of the gang problem could be solved if black men stayed with the black women they impregnate, if not romantically then enough to help raise the child? The numbers of single black mothers is astounding, way too high to be only, or even mostly, a result of unfair incarceration. I'm inclined to argue that it's a fairly straight line from single motherhood to poverty to crime to incarceration, since the first three are established fact worldwide. Obama mentioned black fathers abandoning their children at least once. I've never heard a BLM representative do so at all. After just a bit of research, I can tell I disagree with this writer on many points, but this article strikes me as fairly balanced, and utterly heart-breaking. I grant that being born in certain places absolutely means the deck is stacked against people (along with only having one parent), but is there a 'cops are racist' reason why someone would do a drive-by shooting of a home without knowing who is in it? Or for luring a nine year old into an alley to kill him in order to revenge his father for killing a 13 year old? The article gives a partial list of 40 black kids who were drive-by shot by black people in 2015 alone, and they aren't all in Chicago (Cleveland, Ferguson, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore). It makes it really difficult to not question why BLM is focusing entirely on racist cops, when that group appears to be the third or fourth biggest problem damaging black lives.
I can't imagine his constituents aren't too happy with this speech. Maybe I'm erring in my general understanding of what Republican South Carolinians might think about such issues. I think someone from South Carolina pointed that out. And they were the state who did a decent job handling a wrongful police shooting last I heard (too lazy to look it up). Good. I'm glad you think so. Welcome to the minority. Oh boy, do you think enough Americans get it? How long has this subject been debated on this board? How many people here even really agree that this is a problem? Not that many. Not in a meaningful way. Generally it amounts to, "It was their fault. It is the black community's fault. We can't do anything until they get their shit in order." Even you admit it's a problem, but you're not going to spend time crying about it. And solutions? God. There are a fucking lot of them we could try. I'd start with education. But like audreymonroe pointed out above, those solutions involve tax dollars and take political will to implement. Political will that is on another plane than anything going on in the minds of the majority of Americans. We need to do some hard things in this country to fix a lot of the things we do. Sadly, I'm not sure it will happen any time in the near future. People don't want it to. Most of the solutions I'd like to implement amount to liberal gubmint tyranny. If you want to talk about the throwing up of the hands, I would say look to the people who don't want to admit this is a problem.
I just want to point this statement out as the dumbest, whitest, and most old-man-get-off-my-lawn comment ever to be posted on this board. As a white English teacher, I feel comfortable saying that the "barely literate" rappers you're complaining about are more than likely more literate than most everyone on this board in a lot of ways. They do more with words than most of us ever will. Maybe I'm just mad because I want white America to take responsibility for this:
The grids in North America are interconnected. When I was in school a teacher called it the horseshoe of power. Basically all the grids in North America are connected together and then at the end of each leg there's a DC-DC inverter tie that connects the legs to each other. I can't speak to the amount of damage that would take, but the distances between those interconnects is quite large. I think the scale of those distances makes this unlikely without a large coordinated force. Taking out 50 towers spread across states/provinces is a pretty big undertaking. The towers themselves are probably a 1/2 mile apart and you would probably need to bring down more than in one row to disable the line. The towers are also really strong, driving a vehicle into one probably won't bring it down, so it would take explosives to bring them down. In the ice storm it probably took tens of thousands of pounds of ice to pull them down. Then each grid will have it's own generation capability, so you would need to island the grid by disconnecting it from everybody else and then do enough damage to the internal infrastructure to shut it down. To go back to the example I used of the city I live in, it's roughly in a space that's 35km L x 25km W, with a main substation in each quadrant and some generation capacity. You would need to take out 8-12 towers outside of that area before each substation to island the city, and then start damaging the internal grid to bring it down. That's a huge undertaking, I couldn't imagine trying to do that across states or provinces. It's all about frequency, as the grid starts to get loaded down the frequency starts to drop, that's when they'll start bringing on more capacity and if it's at capacity already they'll start shedding loads, eventually leading to shutting the plant in if things get bad enough. The tolerances are pretty tight on frequency. A stable grid is between +/- 0.5 Hz of 60Hz. Anything more than +/- 1-2 Hz off of 60Hz and things are pretty bad. You would need to do enough damage so the base generation starts going offline to protect itself. It will be related to how close to peak capacity the system is.
Possible terror attack in France. A truck drove into a crowd of people waiting for a fireworks display. "Probably" 30 dead, 100 injured. There were reports the occupants of the truck also fired on the crowd. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/14/europe/nice-france-truck/index.html
Nice is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. The fireworks were for Bastille Day. I imagine this attack has some symbolism with that. The French people are so nice, welcoming, warm. They're like Canadians except they smell worse. All this is horrible.
I love Nice the most. Best part of my trip to France a while back. I think it's time we had a serious discussion about truck regulations.
Holy shit. If this is true, whatever they were planning was much, much worse then the initial attack. The Associated Press @AP 7m BREAKING: Christian Estrosi, president of the region, says the truck in Nice was loaded with arms and grenades.
Then again, it could be as simple as President Hollande's barber making $132,000 a year while the middle class is struggling.
This one hits a little too close to home. I've walked the same street shown in the video. (I'm sure this is telling) My first reaction, after sadness: I need to start carrying.