Warning that mammoth nationwide blackout could last 18 MONTHS as power grid’s appalling weak spots exposed

The United States is at risk of a nationwide blackout that could last 18 months, according to the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Jon Wellinghoff became aware of the alleged vulnerability after a shooting at a Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s San Jose substation, according to the The New York Times Magazine.

He conducted a power flow analysis that modeled the large-scale effects of knocking out the most critical substation in each of America’s three power grids: the Western, Eastern and Texas interconnections. He said this led him to discover just how easy it would be to cripple America’s power supply.

‘We came up with some very astounding numbers,’ Wellinghoff said. ‘If you knock out nine total substations among these three grids, you can black out the entire United States.’

It does not matter which nine substations are taken offline either, he noted, as long as each one is among the 10 most important for its region.

Alternatively, bad actors could blackout the three interconnections individually.

‘I mean, it’s not like there are particular substations,’ he explained. ‘You just have to figure out what are the top 10 critical ones in each of those interconnects – which to do that, it’s probably something that a bunch of 12 year olds with the Internet could do pretty easily.

‘All you have to do is look at a map of the grid and figure out where most of the wires go into the substations – that’s a critical substation.’ 

Once he made that terrifying discovery, which came back in 2013, Wellinghoff briefed the White House, Congress and the Department of Energy.

‘I basically wrote a memo about what happened and gave it to everybody I could to explain to them that we need to do something immediately,’ he said.

It warned that a blackout caused by lost transformers could last 18 months or longer.

The Department of Homeland Security then sent a delegation around the country, urging utilities to increase security at their substations.

‘We did a nationwide tour to alert owners and operators about the vulnerabilities,’ said Caitlin Durkovich, the then-assistant secretary for infrastructure protection.

But with more than 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and roughly 55,000 substations scattered across the country, ‘there is awareness that you can’t protect everything.’

A year later, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, an industry-led public-private entity charged with protecting the grid, published a ‘reliability standard’ for utilities. This required them to assess their substations and prepare a plan to defend them from physical attacks. 

How to do so was left to the utilities. 

If the United States were to experience a year-long blackout, the results would be catastrophic.

At first, critical infrastructure like sewage plants, water treatment plants and hospitals would be able to remain operational as long as they have enough diesel or natural gas. Those with emergency radios could also listen for updates from one of 73 Primary Entry Point Stations, which are supplied with 60 days of generator fuel.

But once the diesel ran out and natural gas pumps shut down, it would become more difficult to restore the grid, considering so many utilities rely on fossil fuels to ‘black-start’ their generating units.

At that point, ‘the supply of food, water and fuel would degrade within days,’ according to a 2010 report prepared by NERC and the Energy Department.

It added that ‘communication of information to the general population would be greatly complicated by the loss of cellphones, internet access and television’ and ‘the economy would virtually shut down as electronic transactions could no longer be processed.

‘After several days, widespread social unrest and confusion would ensue.’ 

The United States would then have to rely on international aid for food, fresh water or diesel, while the federal government focused on repairing or replacing the damaged transformers.

If they found that only the cooling systems were compromised, it is possible that the international community could make some replacements relatively quickly.

But everything about the process, from sending the specs of the damaged transformers abroad to coordinating deliveries would be difficult, according to The Times.

As Mark Lauby, chief engineer of NERC, noted, even though energy represents just seven percent of the economy, ‘it’s the first seven percent because nothing else works after.’ 

If entire units had to be replaced, the situation would become even more dire as each one would have to be individually designed and built from scratch, a process that could take months, followed by the weeks required to send them across the ocean to ports that had hopefully found a way to operate on little to no power.

It would then be difficult to transport the 800,000-pound transformers across the country and the final installation would require specialized cranes and gantries that would be in short supply – as would be the diesel needed to run them. 

Lauby, though, has insisted that the network’s complexity and built-in redundancies make the kind of cascading blackouts predicted by the FERC ‘unlikely.’

Wellinghoff also acknowledged that America’s power grid has changed in the decade since his report, and said it is possible that new transmission lines have added resilience to the system. 

Still, the threat remains, as neo-Nazi groups continue to study the attack on the San Jose substation as a model and tensions rise between the United States and its adversaries.

China has already been caught installing a backdoor software in one large power transformer being shipped to a federal utility in Colorado, the Times noted, and earlier this month, Iran was linked to a recent sabotage of water systems in several states.

Durkovich now worries America’s enemies will feel emboldened to consider substations a valid target.

‘The United States is actually normalizing attacking critical infrastructure within Venezuela and Iran,’ she noted. 

The risks also seem to be greater now than they were a decade ago due to supply chain shortages during the COVID pandemic and the increased strain on the power grid due to the massive data centers being built.

When the San Jose facility was attacked, it took the electric utility 27 days to bring the substation back online using a group of ‘troublemen’ – experts in grid repairs – to replace the cooling systems on the broken transformers.

But since 2021, the average wait time for a large power transformer that you can find at a major substation has grown from less than a year to 128 weeks – with some lead times growing to five years. 

Adding to the problem is the fact that vast numbers of transformers already installed on the grid have to be changed. Manufacturers estimate that some 75 percent of distribution transformers, the smaller units on street corners and atop telephone poles, are past the end of their expected service life, which maxes out at around 50 years.

The average age of the country’s large power transformers, which often have a shorter lifespan, was also estimated 12 years ago to be between 38 to 40 years.

Meanwhile, demand for transformers in 2027 is expected to be more than double that in 2020 due to massive data centers. 

Yet domestic manufacturers can only produce about 20 percent of the transformers purchased in the United States; a half-dozen other countries, including Mexico, South Korea and China supply the rest. 

Those domestic manufacturers are now hindered in their efforts to build more due to the tariffs on copper and aluminum, according to Chris Hart, chief executive of transformer manufacturer Central Moloney.

‘Costs are up almost 20 percent,’ he said. ‘We need relief on all of the metals.’

Transformer manufacturers are also struggling to find master craftsmen that can create the individualized transformers needed for each substation. Hart claimed that some of the new hires are missing out on even the most basic of skills.

‘We literally, in some of our facilities, begin our training process with lefty loosey, righty tighty,’ he claimed. ‘If all of the business for transformers across the globe shifted back into the United States, I don’t think we could staff it.’ 

Amid these difficulties, there are fears the United States does not have a comprehensive plan for how to respond to a nationwide blackout.

In 2015, Congress ordered the NERC to study the idea of a strategic transformer reserve, but the idea was shelved in favor of a voluntary utility-led equipment-sharing program, The Times reports.

NERC also holds biennial war game exercises called GridEx, simulating how utilities and various local, state and federal governments would respond to a more limited outage, but participation is optional.

The federal government may now need to consider a plan in which only a few power plants far from the affected substations are able to restart in the event of a nationwide blackout, as suggested in a 2018 report to President Trump.

The president has since invoked the Defense Production Act to allow the government to directly support manufacturers of grid equipment, including producers of electrical steel.

Peter Lake, who until late last month was the senior director of power for the White House National Energy Dominance Council, urged transformer manufacturers to ‘come talk to us, come to the NEDC, come talk to the DOE.’ He noted that the federal government had a ‘range of financial tools that are available’ to support the manufacturers. 

Meanwhile, a company called Amperesand is developing a solid-state transformer made of smaller modules that can be easily replaced if they are damaged, while their input and output voltages can be controlled via ‘power electronics.’

And Jared Delello, who directs government activities for Delta Star, a transformer manufacturer with four facilities across North America, said his company is expanding production with an explicit aim to ‘solidify the US’s position at the forefront of AI development.’