I'm surprised that this article doesn't even mention the ongoing, continual attacks on the civilian Ukrainian electrical grid, in a concerted effort to take it out with thousands of cruise missiles and loitering drones.
Perhaps not all countries will be as determined as the Ukrainians are in their constant repairs, but even with half of their generation capability destroyed, and so many substations targeted, the effects are much like rolling blackouts.
My son has Ukrainian language lessons with teachers both in Donetsk and Kyiv several times a week, and only a single lesson has been missed despite the constant destruction that is ongoing. I'm astounded both by the resilience of the grid and the resilience of Ukrainians. I hope that if such a situation ever happens to the US, we will prove to be as resourceful.
This piece also completely ignores the ongoing changes to our grid as it is being revolutionized by distributed energy resources and storage. Soon, islanding of homes, and the spread of more micro grids, means that a lot of the older reasoning in this article won't make much sense. Already, many critical infrastructure from hospitals to data centers plan for independence during outages. This will become increasingly common as the more electric vehicles allow for vehicle to home usage, as well as charging directly from home solar. This is what wealthy people do today, and costs are falling to make this accessible to all. There's even a chance that islanding might be cheaper than the alternatives for a significant chunk of homes in the future.
Already the grid costs us more than electricity generation, something like $0.08/kWh of the average electricity price of $0.13/kWh in the US. As generation from renewables gets cheaper, and storage gets cheaper, and the grid remains stubbornly expensive, more and more people will be looking to abandon it for energy independence on their own, or in smaller micro grids.
I have a friend whose mom lived in zaporozhya until 2 weeks ago, and the rolling blackouts were the reason she finally fled the city, despite months of explosions. The blackouts were getting more severe, and when you live on the 11th floor with no elevator, no water, no heating, no way to warm food, life is very difficult.
For sure it depends on the circumstances. Being on an 11th floor of an apartment building would be difficult. I wouldn't want to live there because although it is apparently still there, I'd be afraid it would be a massive target for artillary.
So in places like that, sure, you'd want to move out. And hopefully other Ukrainians are taking people like her into their own homes, because otherwise, what would one do if they have nowhere else to go?
> I'm surprised that this article doesn't even mention the ongoing, continual attacks on the civilian Ukrainian electrical grid, in a concerted effort to take it out with thousands of cruise missiles and loitering drones.
I would guess that it was an intentional decision to avoid. Grady goes to great lengths to prevent anything political in his videos, and the Ukrainian war happens to be politically charged in America currently.
The Russian war is actually one of the least political things in the US right now, there is great bi-partisan support, and it's hard to imagine anything else that garners such broad support from all but the most fringe of fringe (the left-right red-brown alliance against Ukraine is so tiny that it can barely be found).
But it is a very timely issue. Maybe in a couple years, after it's no longer timely, he will dive into it a bit more, such as with the Oroville dam failure, when there's a lot more solid retrospective data to look at.
My experience differs. The right leaning members of my family strongly support Russia and the left leaning strongly support Ukraine. It’s caused a lot of strife in my family. And I don’t think the right folks feel like they’re on the fringe. They do watch a lot of Fox, but they’re not Q folks, afaik at least.
I've seen discussions from a specific professor going back years (long before the actual invasion) talking about the dangers of exactly that. After it happened this specific person (forget his name) then started talking about how it was a consequence of the things he had been talking about for years.
You can disagree with the guy, but he's an academic who apparently has an expertise in that area, and I question whether or not you're dismissing it due to your own political bubble rather than because there may be some truth to it.
Absolute nonsense, Russia will invade what they call "little Russias" because they believe they are superior and that the people in those land belong to them, and that the resources belong to them. NATO has nothing to do with Russia's urge to invade and oppress other cultures, but NATO is a way for such countries to defend themselves. So if a professor claims to have expertise and not understand these basic facts that all former USSR states understand, then the professor is just repeating Russian propaganda.
For example, on national TV in Russia this week, they are laying the groundwork to invade Kazakhstan right now, claiming that they need the uranium for Rosatom and that the "same nazi process in Ukraine could happen in Kazakhstan," meaning that the President of Kazakhstan is refusing to be a puppet of Putin lately.
These dynamics are extremely clear to anyone who spends even a small amount of time talking to someone from Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Chechnya, etc. But those voices are almost never heard, and instead Russian propaganda gets the air time.
That's an argument to authority, but there are many many more authorities that would disagree vehemently, and could back it up with specific statements. For example, Timothy Snyder, who is a historian specializing in the area, but really any sort of fair sampling would find that most Russian Studies professors would not be willing to uncritically repeat Kremlin propaganda like the "realist" school of international relations.
Plus, the idea that Russia had to invade a country to stop NATO expansion, if that's what's being asserted, is so farcical because countries want to join NATO to avoid getting invaded; it's a rather comical reversal. NATO expansion would stop really quickly if Russia would cease wanting to conquer neighboring countries; saying that Russia has legitimate security concerns just means that someone believes all these sovereign nations bordering Russia are not actually sovereign and should be part of Russia, which is again just repeating Russian imperialism as being right because it's right.
Plus, Putin has been pretty explicit in his writings on Ukraine, as he pretends to be a historian. Putin just wants to eliminate Ukraine as a nation and force Ukrainians to be subservient to Russians, it's all there out in the open in his writings. Denying this is kind of like trying to argue that Mein Kampf wasn't Hitler's real thoughts, and that Germany had to invade Poland and then the USSR simply for their own security concerns.
But if you can recall the name of this academic, it will be pretty quick to refute the specific claims made by other authorities in the area.
I honestly can’t comprehend how it is possible to support Russia in the US after the Cold War and Putin. I literally have a blank space in my mind when thinking about that.
I agree and my guess is this “support of russia” is really just opposition to sending billions to Ukraine. Some might argue that’s the same thing, but to many on the right it’s not.
> The $21.7 billion in Pentagon funding is “for equipment for Ukraine, replenishment of Department of Defense stocks and for continued military, intelligence and other defense support,” according to a summary table accompanying the supplemental request.
And anyway, if the USA wants to keep benefitting from their empire they have to pay the costs to maintain and expand it. No more money, the empire shrinks and other countries take what's American now.
It's so weird to me. I thought this was a part of MAGA. The world being dependent on the US military industrial complex is a core part of how the US was in any way considered to be great.
You'd think it'd be a good thing to realize how good US weapons are and for the PR that is being created.
There are lots of dark money flows from Russia to these politicians, at least for any that I have bothered to check. Fortunately they are extremely fringe at the moment. But it is far far cheaper to buy these politicians than it is to build a fighter jet, far far cheaper to buy social media influence and campaigns than it is to buy cruise missiles.
Russia's propaganda machine was caught off guard because Putin grievously miscalculated in ability to take over Ukraine, and kept the invasion so secret that there was barely any propaganda. But the propaganda campaign is kicking up again, and you can see it in some of the ghost comments on HN, even.
The USA de facto surrenders to Russia in the Ukraine war and Europe starts to buy gas from Russia again (if the USA can't protect us we have to buy protection somewhere else). Russia use European money to start buying European politicians again. Eventually they'll politically control all of Europe. Maybe not the UK.
China gets East Asia because a retreating USA must be seen with suspect there too.
The USA maybe keeps the Americas, which however are not very happy with them even now (the countries that don't speak English.) Some countries will try to jump ship to Russia and China. More colonial wars to follow.
Overall effect: reduced reach for American companies, products and services. A small side effect: we won't be here to discuss this on HN but on a site of another country/language. Eventually: switch to a different worldwide common language (France experienced that demotion around the 60s/70s - French was the previous lingua franca) and further reduction of reach. Eventually: a poorer USA.
Seen from outside the USA this doesn't look MAGA to me. The opposite of it. Hard to assess the impact on inequality, healthcare, tuition, etc. Maybe the USA will go the way of the European Nordic countries or they'll implode. I won't get into that.
Are political control of all of Europe and East Asia (a term that refers to 4-5 countries...) things the US has now?
Note that Wikipedia's statistics have China comprising just over 90% of the population of East Asia. In what possible world would China not be in control?
By analogy to the Manchus, you'd need an invasion from Japan or, I guess, Korea, that was supported by the PLA.
Political control of Europe is not a thing the US has now, but a friendly climate, yes. The avoidance of leadership capture by Russian assets, more importantly, which keeps the climate more friendly.
I disagree on that, I think they fully support Russia and Putin, meaning at this point in time Russian imperialism, and the money is just an excuse that is palatable.l to the public. These same politicians will praise and push for increases military spending that is two orders of magnitude higher, for no definite strategic purpose. The only reason for them to complain about the money right now is because they are trying to support Russia without saying they are supporting Russia.
There are plenty of folks who support “states rights” (to slavery) but don’t support fascism. They just don’t realise that they are fascist themselves (government by corporations, profit before people, find some minority group to blame for all your problems, etc)
There are also folks caught up in pro-fascist organisations simply because they want to express their general anger at the world for not living up to their expectations.
> The right leaning members of my family strongly support Russia and the left leaning strongly support Ukraine.
Yeah, I doubt anyone really supports Russia, it's more like you are projecting them NOT supporting Ukraine and wasting money in that blackhole of corruption as "supporting Russia".
"You are with us or against us" - there is nothing in between for Democrats/NPCs.
All of the above? They feel Russia is a defender of conservative values and has been treated unfairly by NATO and was pressured into a proxy war with the West.
Odd, I know lots of right folks and none support russia, they just don’t support sending more money to Ukraine, either bec they believe the accurate reports of widespread corruption (which Biden himself attested to 6 years ago) or bec they’re isolationist and don’t really believe our interventions have helped “spread freedom” anywhere. And would rather we dedicate our resources to bettering our own clearly failing country.
A similar list could be compiled by Russia for destroyed/captured Ukrainian equipment. This doesn’t negate the fact that there is rampant corruption throughout the entire Russian military.
Here’s an idea: tax the rich and pay off our debt. Don’t tax ppl and spend the money right away. Maybe stop trying to do the same things that have been clearly failing for decades. Throwing money at random problems in hopes it will solve them hasn’t worked and probably never will.
Your Kyiv teacher is lucky. Blackouts vary a lot between regions and even within a single town. We have a distributed team and track blackouts in daytime, 8am-8pm. A couple of people had no blackouts so far whatsoever, a few had about 40 hours off out of 60 last workweek. The median is somewhere between 25-30.
It is getting worse gradually.
Perhaps worthy to note that the timing of the invasion coincided with an EU-Ukraine test of syncing up their power networks. A wholesale switch of Ukraine away from synchronisation with Russia and permanent synchronisation with the EU was planned later in 2022. Interrupting this switch, and the Ukrainian resilience against Russian manipulation through power was likely a reason to start the war when it started.
I believe so too [1]. Of course, Russia and many others believed that by mid march, the war would be over and that the change would not have completed. I'm relieved that those initial expectations collided with Ukrainian resilience.
> Soon, islanding of homes, and the spread of more micro grids, means that a lot of the older reasoning in this article won't make much sense
This. Not only is it not mentioned in the article, it seems to be largely absent from the minds of planners, as the development and implementation of micro grids is mostly ad hoc and haphazard. But the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, as well as the increased likelihood of natural disasters (tornadoes, floods) should make the support of microgrids priority number one.
I assume the tardy adoption is because microgrids is still a fairly new technology, and not some nefarious plot by central governments to keep people dependent on their centralized systems. Right?
Unfortunately, the massive influence of central grid profiteers make the obviously beneficial (especially in times of disaster and war) move to micro grids progress at the slowest possible pace.
The thing about microgrids is that maintenance falls onto the owner.
You still require specialized knowledge and perhaps team of people who can handle it to maintain the microgrid and repair it.
You still require supply chains for the complicated parts that cannot be easily replaced, mostly batteries and inverters. In a shortage situation, central grids will be under pressure to be fixed immediately, but your single set of wind turbines or solar panels might not be.
So the way I see it, microgrids would be maintained by cities and communities instead. The level of distribution would make it similar in action to the times of old coal power plants, one per city.
> I'm surprised that this article doesn't even mention the ongoing, continual attacks on the civilian Ukrainian electrical grid, in a concerted effort to take it out with thousands of cruise missiles and loitering drones.
It doesn't have to, because the past 83 years has proven, over and over again that strategic bombing does not work. [1] And so far, this war is once again, proving that same point.
The purpose of those missile and drone attacks isn't to win the war by making the Ukrainian army unable to fight. The purpose is either terror, positive domestic Russian propaganda, or, most likely, it's just something keeping the Russian Aerospace Force generals busy.
[1] It doubly doesn't work when you aren't actually bombing the warmaking industrial capacity of your opponent (Which in this case is located in North America and Western Europe).
But with regards to destroying an electrical grid, it would be a very topical intro to the idea. And there's some interesting info, in that destroying a grid is proving to be much harder than one might expect. Russia is a particularly incompetent foe, much like the Pakleds in Star Trek, but even with their massive armament, and being able to target an indefensible number of positions spread over an indefensible geographic area, they have not yet been fully successfully in their technical aims of grid destruction.
And to fail at the technical aim, while also accomplishing the exact opposite of your social aim (Ukrainians are more resolved, rather than demoralized), is utterly embarrassing and pathetic.
All good points. A small note: there's yet a many orders of magnitude difference between the whole power consumption, or even only residential power consumption, and the storage available in distributed sources. Even projecting ahead a few years and counting what's likely to be built. I'd guess between 3 and 5 zeroes, in most densely populated cities.
If anything, I think the bulk of the flexibility will come from the addition of new greener power sources, plus NOT shutting down the old ones but keeping them either at a minimum or suspended.
The eco legislation in Europe in the past years is the perfect example of how not to do things. They kept going with more stringent regulation after covid, lockdowns and massive financial aids, when the likelihood of an economic crisis was high.
In my country (Romania) in a moment of revolutionary enthusiasm, the local law passed to fulfill the wider european legislation had specific phrasing to permanently close existing power plants, with no option to ever reopen them. Talk about misreading the flow. And now we're a net importer of power, even as we're one of the most power-rich countries around.
The densely populated cities are going to be the hardest to transition - but in rural and suburban areas it may already be cheaper to generate and store your own power than to get it from the grid, most of the year
If I have to start generating my power now, with no preparation and a failed grid, I think my only option is logging and burn wood. At least I can cook with that and heat a room.
maybe that’s true today but within five years I bet the economics will have pushed you and your neighbors to install at least some amount of solar and batteries
That was already planned for but I don't know if I could rely on the sun in winter when maybe it's cloudy for a couple of weeks, plus the shorter days.
You need capital to be able to generate "your own power", the same goes for storing it. Most of the people from the rural parts of Eastern Europe don't have access to that capital and most probably will never have, for the simple reason that they are (relatively) quite poor.
I doubt it. I suspect they're thinking of bank loans, but resourceful fintech already have solutions for getting by without a loan. I see similar business models in Africa, so poverty is not an argument against it.
> I doubt it. I suspect they're thinking of bank loans, but resourceful fintech already have solutions for getting by without a loan. I see similar business models in Africa, so poverty is not an argument against it.
UA24 is prime example, the crowdsoured funds have helped disburse funds collected in both fiat and bitcoin (after a massive influx from various crypto communities early on in the war) for on the ground purposes; Zelensky just got confirmation of the EU and US funds last night and spoke [0] of a website tat was launched for centers for citizens to go that will have access to heat and electricity throughout the country in pharmacies and grocery stores as the shelling continues by Russia and keeps causin blackouts (Russia struck again today causing blackouts all the way to Moldova) .
It's possible, and i really hope such a thing never happens anywhere else, but their is a reason why Bitcoin was the prefered way of getting funds into the country when the UA central bank put capital controls on the first day of invasion: BTC was there since the Maidan Revolution in 2013 and had been battle tested, so when the Russian invasion happened it was battle tested and it was deployed to start doing evac and other emergency services that continue to this day.
In short, despite the inept bleating from so many in these circles: Bitcoin (the network) isn't solely the affectation of techbros and grifters in Japan or the Bahamas, it was battle hardened in conflicts and environmental catastrophe.
I fear, however, that despite these microloans geopolitics plays a much bigger role in getting infrastructure put in places like Africa since China has been exercising it's soft=power colonialsm policy for decades in order to pay off despots and have access to rare-earths. It's just another example of how the technological side of things may have been resolved, bu things like kleptocracy and nepotism prevent it from having the impact that it can and should have at addressing an issue.
That's a misguided view. Giant amounts of money were pumped into rural parts, mostly under EU agricultural funds, cohesion policy and other similar programs.
The issue with those was that they were indeed very ecologically dirty, especially the lignite mines from Gorj. You can actually see the devastation that they have brought on the ecosystem even from satellite images [1]. I agree though, if one takes a step back and looks at the whole thing (i.e. if you add the socio-economic conditions) this was a very bad decision.
I personally don't think renewables will be able to fill the gap for us. For one thing, transporting all the wind-generated power from the likes of Dobruja to Western Romania and Transylvania using existing power-transport infrastructure is no easy task. Second, I don't see solar taking over, for the simple reason that the fields from Southern Romania which it would best to use for such task are of greater use to agriculture (from an economics pov, that is).
On a more general note, we, Romanians, already have past history related to this, not a successful one at that. I'm talking of the period after the 1970s oil-shock crisis and of the '80s in their entirety, when the then government was very aware of the energy problem and was also very actively trying to tackle it and, in a way, solve it. That's why the discourse that we now hear from the West is in many ways familiar to us Romanians (only cars with odd numbers which should be allowed travel during weekends, energy "rationing" etc), i.e. because we have been in that place before them (and failed).
There are several books from that period who explain the problem in detail and which also write about possible solutions. Most of them are from Editura Politica, such as Energy in a finite world [2], published in 1983, but one of the best, imo, is this one: Energy, whereto? [3], published in 1978, a book which has a very comprehensive list of almost all of the solutions that were available back then. It's very interesting that they also talk about shale gas, and about how it's not a recommended solution because it generates mini-earthquakes (they might have also mentioned the heavy water-use as a negative, I don't remember exactly).
Of course, when the mini-earthquakes did indeed happen in the early 2010s when we try to extract shale-gas in Eastern Romania the powers that be all acted surprised, like "how could all of this have happened?". It's not like there had been actual books written about the subject 30 years prior by people who most probably were still around in one way or another. Which would bring me to one of the most important problems we now have, i.e. the lack of specialists on the subject, but this post is already getting too long.
We actually have a pretty awesome energy mix in Romania. It's a hard thing to rank, but we could be in the top 3. A lot of hydro, a fair amount of nuclear and we're expanding the nuclear, and a bit of hydro as well. Plus quite a bit of wind, and an almost-working program to encourage private individuals to install solar and sell back to the network.
Yes, as part of that mix we had some horribly dirty old school plants. I'm not contesting that they should be replaced per se - but the current thread is about flexibility, and the way it was done left no wiggle room whatsoever. And now we have absurdly high energy prices, Moldova is in danger of going dark, and we probably could be doing more to export power to Ukraine. All because some politicians guessed wrong, at a moment when it was already pretty clear this whole direction is dangerous. The local legislation happened, I think, only last year.
It's not a new story, politicians making bad decisions. Doesn't mean they shouldn't be called out when they do, especially when it's costing all of us. And speaking of, what they should really do now is unlock the solar power program - which on paper forces the utilities companies to buy back power, but in practice allows them to drag their feet indefinitely.
The coal power plant however gives you little flexibility for all the maintenance cost.
Can it burn wood? Nah. Biogas? Nope.
Do you have coal everywhere? As we found in Poland it's a scarce resource controlled mostly by a few parties and hard to store and transport in required bulk. I wonder how much of your coal is imported.
The proper replacement would be biofuels, if anything.
> transporting all the wind-generated power from the likes of Dobruja to Western Romania and Transylvania using existing power-transport infrastructure is no easy task
Do you mean, lack of capacity in the power lines to that regions?
> only cars with odd numbers which should be allowed travel during weekend
That was also the norm in Italy during the oil crisis. It was done more recently as an anti pollution measure too.
> Do you mean, lack of capacity in the power lines to that regions?
Yes, more exactly reaching full capacity for the existing power/energy transport infrastructure. Which transport infrastructure is not bad per se, and that's another big plus for the government that used to rule until about 30 years ago, but most probably it wasn't built with this new energy source in mind.
I would have dug deeper for a source of the Romanian power transport network, but taking into consideration the existing geo-political conditions most probably that information is getting more and more sensible by the day, so I'll leave that sharing to someone else.
> That was also the norm in Italy during the oil crisis.
Yeah, I had a geography atlas published in 1982 who also had maps related to the major countries' economic infrastructure, so to speak, i.e. where most of their industries were located, where were they generating their power/energy, stuff like that. Being the kid that I was, with no internet access because the late '80s and no TV program to speak of, I of course devoured it, so that I can remember from those maps that Italy and France each of them had one tidal power unit installed, France somewhere around Bretagne or Normandy, Italy somewhere on the Tyrrhenian coast, near Grosseto (I might be slightly off with the Grosetto thing, though).
So, yeah, different countries were trying all sorts of unconventional stuff back then (in the late '70s - early 80s), but I do have the feeling that the cheap energy that I don't know how exactly (maybe Eastern Europe getting rid of its entire industry after 1990?) was available again starting with the 1990s made us forget almost all of that, on an institutional level.
Despite real world examples constantly showing the opposite, from civil wars, famine, large scale disaster and all-out war, people still believe that somehow 3 weeks in the world turns into The Walking Dead or something. Not gonna happen, society in the 14th century survived the plague.
I have a friend who works for a major power company in the US. They told me there are severe supply chain issues that are making it difficult to order new replacement parts for electrical infrastructure. As critical infrastructure they do have stockpiles of replacement parts, but they are limited. I wonder how long Ukraine can sustain these repairs.
One of the major issues with the Ukraine power infrastructure is that it was set up back in the day by the, well, Soviets, which means most of the equipment dates from Soviet times, which also means most of the repairs/replacement work can only be done by factories located in the former USSR. Most of those factories are now located in present-day Russia, which is where the major problem comes from.
Speaking of this, I'm not sure how the three Baltic states handle this. Granted, they're way smaller compared to Ukraine and they had at least 20 years (since their NATO accession) to try and untangle themselves from all that, but until now I haven't seen any article written on this subject.
Apparently to some degree they've been modernizing through the help of Western energy companies like Alstom. I have no idea how widespread this is though.
Sincere question so please don't overreact as if I'm trolling. Why is your son learning Ukrainian! I could make a couple guesses but the subject is understandably too sensitive I'd like to just inform myself as to something I may be missing! I detest ignorance, above all especially my own.
Long digression away from energy here: My wife is Ukrainian, and we have two бабусі (grandmas) living with us now due to rockets making their Ukrainian home uninhabitable. So Ukrainian is actually the dominant language in my house, though I only know a tiny bit, since I grew up in the US. The lessons are speech therapy, not merely learning the language as itself. But the therapy immediately transfers from Ukrainian to English. When he figured out pronouns in Ukrainian from the lessons, he immediately started using I/me/you correctly in English. His particular speech pathology allows for acquisition of many languages very quickly once he is taught the concepts (he's roughly equally strong in English, Ukrainian, and Russian now, and is quickly picking up the very small amount of Spanish I know).
I suggest a far simpler technique in the modern society: just use a long list of crapware vulnerabilities.
Instead of expensive missiles just use cracked from the factory EVs, smart ovens, boiler, p.v. inverters, ... to simply create peaks loads (both demand and demand drop) and you have crushed the enemy "smart" grid without much effort, physical damage and still having it functional if you want to invade.
Oh, did you see the crappiness level of EVs crapware? The push toward more and more IoT?
Ukraine's electrical grid has been under severe cyber attack for years by Russia. I suspect their defenses have come pretty hardened, and Ukrainians are no slouch when it comes to software.
If Covid has learned me anything, it's that people are not resilient at all and love to give it blame for their own problems. It worried me how many people thinks Covid has had a permanent impact on their lives. It's negligible imo..
Coming from India and as someone who has lived, growing up (in the 90s), without power for hours and days...trust me you are going to be deeply inconvenienced but not going to die.
We had hand fans (hot climate) and fire in large bowl shaped vessels (when cold). Nights without power are spent sleeping on terrace. We had oil lamps for light in the evening. Most night activity would siege by 8pm max to wake up early at 4am ish.
For water we have wells and ponds. Flushing...well what's that! Indian toilets were made to not need lot of water flushing or people simply used nature toilet!
No fridge (fresh food ftw), no vacuum (brooms and mop only), no elevators, no mixer grinder! But we lived. People adapt
Society would collapse and go back in time...however people are more resilient.
I think the experience you've described mostly works out because the infrastructure has developed (or not developed) in conjunction with unreliable power. It would be a pretty different story in a dense US city: there are no wells to draw from, no simplified infrastructure designed to operate with minimum power or water, etc.
In other words: mature infrastructure is both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. Countries that haven't as fully established their dependence on large-scale public infrastructure won't suffer as badly under a grid collapse.
From Iraq, we went from zero power cuts in decades to no power at all within two weeks in the gulf war in 90, as NATO countries attacked all our civilian power stations. Life became horrible but we adapted. In some cases there were fights between people no different than the fights you saw in western countries over toilet rolls during covid, but I wouldn’t say it was a total society collapse. People will always find a way to adapt.
Iraq's pre-war HDI was 0.560[1]. The US's in the same year was 0.865[2].
People will indeed always find a way to adapt! But I think these comparisons are fundamentally suspect: there really hasn't been think kind of mass-scale infrastructure collapse in a country nearly remotely developed as the US (or Canada, or the EU). The closest thing would probably be the war in Ukraine, and even there the infrastructure failures are relatively localized.
Similar story here - when NATO bombed Serbia (we were part of Yugoslavia in 1999) we had similar experience. We had 4 hour blackouts per day, not more luckily, as everyone had a lot of frozen food that could go bad if blackouts were longer.
Similarly I do not like authoritarians and therefore feel very bad for North Korean citizens. However I don’t understand why they are not allowed (or Iran, or any country) to build their own nuclear weapons.
Many countries have nukes - what is their right to have them? Shouldn’t every country have the right to mutually assured destruction?
I wish nukes would go away, but morally speaking if one country can have them then all countries can have them. It’s power politics after that.
> Shouldn’t every country have the right to mutually assured destruction?
not really. If you didn't already have nukes, but your regime is much against the west, i'd argue that it is the right thing for the west to deny it from them. I am attaching no moral argument to this - simply a practical, utilitarian argument.
The reason russia has free reign to invade ukraine is _because_ they have nukes. Iraq invaded Kuwait just the same, but was pressed back in a war - imagine if they did have nukes; it would mean that Iraq could've acted with impunity, and they'd control all of the oil resources that was Kuwaits'.
I agree from a western perspective. In a power struggle of west vs. various eastern alliances, it is in the west’s interest to prevent the spread of nukes.
From a plain and simple moral perspective, IMO every country has the right to build them. Preventing that is about what team you are on rather than morals.
It is a mistake to think in moral categories regarding to international politics.
Morale is something a group-in-power uses to control (or influence) the public. Like fear, greed, or compassion. Morale is not a basis for political decisions or political analysis.
Every country's ruler wants nuclear weapons. And every ruler wants the other rulers not to have the bomb at the same time.
To force the others not to develop the bomb, you must put pressure on them. A good way to put pressure is... to have the bomb.
> why should you submit to THEIR moral argument of denying YOU of nukes when they themselves have it?
As the parent poster explicitly states, there is no "moral argument" made there, it's a very utilitarian realpolitik argument that allowing you nukes is risky enough that for any western politician respecting their countries' interests the right choice is to enforce submission with all kinds of means (economic, military, espionage).
In my opinion, the situation where only a few powerful countries with quite stable institutions have nukes is better for humanity than the situation where every country has their own nukes.
Just consider the number of coups
or wars going on every decade: if everyone the incumbent leader knows that they can just press the red button and wipe out their opponents, of course it would en up happening one day, and could trigger a chain reaction.
This risk of "president goes mad" (don't look at the button Vladimir) is minimal when as few countries as possible have nukes.
Of course, this goes against the social justice between countries - but wait, does that concept even exist?
uh,,,, trump doesn't fall into the "president goes mad"? wasn't he the single guy who walked away from iran deal when even iran was willing to satisfy their end and EU urged US to reconsider but trump refused? could that not have solved "A LOT OF OUR PROBLEMS" and problems of ordinary citizens living in iran? but no. trump had to fuck this one up and looks like he wants a second run.
For most normal countries that aren't engaged in a power struggle against the world order it is probably safest for them if no one else can have them.
The problem with nukes is that any one competent holder of nukes can basically trigger mutually assure destruction, so more actors are likely going to be more dangerous than the danger from the current holders.
>>> For most normal countries
That's quite a racist thing to say. There is no such thing as normal and abnormal countries!
>>> aren't engaged in a power struggle against the world order
The US has been engaged in several coups around the world, but you will of course conveniently ignore this and pretend these countries are struggling to defeat the US.
>>> The problem with nukes is that any one competent holder of nukes can basically trigger mutually assure destruction
Counter point. India and Pakistan have not engaged in war since them both becoming nuclear powers. The US and Russia unlikely to go to war because of the ir nuclear powers! If every country had them it's likely to make the world safer.
I would posit that the climate and the season matter enough to be a solid moral distinction in this case. Civilian lives depend on gas and electricity in all scenarios, but they depend on them ~much more in a Ukrainian winter.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq is very controversial, even in the West (thank god for free speech and freedom of press) and I'd imagine many people on Ukraine's side also didn't agree with the second Iraq war. Might be different in the US, but it's certainly the feeling I get in Europe, even though many also simply have no opinion on Iraq.
uh... the same freedom of speech that is currently wanting to skin assange alive for making public war crimes commited by americans and yet instead of taking action against the actual aggressors, the messenger is being charged. cool....
btw, what i meant to say was, "iraq invasion" as you put might be "controversial" but there was no blowback of them as is being done to russia. the EU just either let US do its thing or even joined their side so yeah, controversial is short selling it.
Iraq, afghanistan, libya.... on and on. the US leaves destruction in its wake and its "just controversial" but no sanctions or arming the opposite side.
Oh, also, yemen has been decimated by saudis for years now but because they happen to be US allies, everyone just turns a blind eye. but iran needs "revolution" and "ukraine needs to be saved from russia"..
i am saying the two narratives do not depend on the ground realities, if people die or live. It just depends on the narrative that the US wants to push. That may be fine for the US or EU but everyone else just remembers.
I think you're underestimating the resilience that people and systems have built up in countries where power is unreliable.
For example, I'd be willing to bet that most household don't even have candles or a battery operated flashlight.
When power has been nearly 100% reliable for as long as you've been alive, there's no reason for you to worry about those things and you don't build that resilience.
Someone in Alaska is probably more prepared for surviving a power outage than someone in Manhattan. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that life might continue as normal far longer in remote areas than it would in big cities in the event of a major outage.
If you are thinking rural alaska, possibly. Your typical US suburb is build of houses that don't do well without HVAC in neither the winter nor the summer. The amount of gasoline that needs to be spent to go shopping is high, and you can't expect gasoline to do well either during a grid collapse.
I don't have high expectations of Manhattan in the winter, but I'd bet on them over, say, Kenosha, or the Kansas City suburbs.
If it’s winter in the USA, houses could be wrecked since it could be well below freezing and the pipes could burst. Dangerously cold freezing temps also introduce a real risk of life and limb. Fires can be made, but if there’s a blizzard happening, keeping a flame going might be very difficult.
This works if you live in a house, but lots of people live in apartment buildings where they don't have access to the necessary valves. The building's superintendent could theoretically do it, but it's a huge task for a large building.
> And, you add some antifreeze to your toilet, after you flush it to empty the tank.
If we're talking catastrophic, persistant, total grid collapse, you won't want a flushing toilet. It'll be time to start doing nutrient recycling instead of relying on industrially applied fertilisers to crops -- because that infrastructure depends largely on the other and will inevitably collapse too.
> Coming from India and as someone who has lived, growing up (in the 90s), without power for hours and days...
Most people in the West will most probably catch a disease, if nothing else. Meaning if you live on the 8th floor, like I do, it means that if you have no running water for days and weeks on end then you cannot literally flush the shit down the toilet. Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of people who live just like me in the same city (i.e. in apartment blocks) and that's how you get nasty diseases.
On the other hand my parents who live in the countryside 2 hours away from where I live will be just fine. They depend on wood for heating, the village where they live still has a functioning manual water-well or two, my parents grow most of their own food and have basic provisions for at least 6 months, they'll manage.
> On the other hand my parents who live in the countryside 2 hours away from where I live will be just fine.
Until the "have-nots", who until recently were really enjoying being the "haves", turn up with their guns.
That's when it'll all get very feudal and very nasty, as the people with guns suddenly realise that not only do they have power, they don't have those laws that used to stop them acting out whatever violent fantasies gun-owners enjoy, and shooting people will probably be the least of it ...
Living in New England, the blizzards knock out power in harsh cold conditions. A few years back we went without for over a week, and there was no water either since our water came from a well with an electric pump.
We built a fire in the fireplace, cooked over candles (and mostly ate food that didn't need to be cooked) and melted snow for more water. Lounged around in a big pile of blankets playing with our cats, reading books, and talking instead of using TV, computers, and cellphones. It was chilly, and there was a bit of media withdrawal, but it wasn't really all that bad.
But for sick or disabled people who need electricity for their oxygen machines or to run their electric wheelchairs or other things, it could be bad. And without a fireplace (which many people don't have, and we don't have now), it would likely have gotten too cold.
yeah, as my name suggests, i live in a place where "today", as in 23/11/2022 i have a 9 hour electricity cut "EVERYDAY" in near to 0C temperatures. It is winter and snowing most of the places. Heck, the places that are snowing get close to zero electricity for days and when it does come back, at best 3-6 hours.
People adapt to living in harsh conditions. as you said, "creature comforts" take a hit but you don't just die from having a collapse in the grid.
many days during bitter cold, our water pipes just freeze for weeks and we resort to using up saved up water (that we already save in big buckets as a habit) and ending up doing commando style wet tissue rub in place of a facewash, on and on....
It's not fun but when things improve, everyone laughs it off
People can adapt, but the real question is how quickly. If you go from virtually 100% grid availability to a complete long-term outage, many people won't be able to adapt quickly enough and will die, especially in large cities.
Depending on how long the outage is and how many people die, civilization doesn't necessarily collapse. But the adaptation process isn't going to be fun.
If you only go to rolling blackouts, people will most likely manage, except for those with certain health conditions. But that's a very different scenario, since it implies that there's continuous control over the grid.
Obviously, people would not die. What was the expectation? That we will die within a day after no power?
Electricity is not human's natural basic need like water and oxygen. But civilised life will be extremely terrible, society will collapse, that's the story.
As explained in the video, people can definitely die after just a day without electricity if not prepared: medicines that need refrigeration, connected to a machine for life support, freezing/heating to death (people do die in major heatwaves/blizzards regularly), etc.
Sure those are usually not "guys in their 20s-30s" that is the majority demography of HN (I'm not saying everyone ofc...), but there's a lot of people a few steps from dying that a blackout could make them tip over.
I am pretty sure all current ICUs have backup power generators (both for equipment and Oxygen line pressure infrastructure). In addition most critical equipment used in hospitals has an independent UPS (ventilators, Infusion pumps etc.) that would extend it a few hours without power.
You would have to both have a formidable blackout and several days of lack of diesel supply for this scenario to materialize. Not saying it is impossible but definitely unlikely.
If you remove a noticable portion of the power generation, fuel reserves will be run down and depending on how many hours of power are lost per day, these places may not be able fully charge their UPSs each day.
Look to South Africa. They underinvested in their power generation for a few decades, and soon rolling blackouts became common and increased in frequency and severity to the point now where having no power each day is the normal (and it will only get worse from here)!
Would you happen to know what these are called (in any language)?
> No fridge (fresh food ftw)
Probably easier to say this when you live in the tropics. There's a reason humans are the only primates to make it outside of the tropics. Winter ain't easy! You'd definitely have to plan ahead and prepare your acorn flour and plant your tubers in places with cold winters
In Puerto Rico a few months back we lost power and water due to the hurricane. Living without power and water, even for a few days starts to have a severe psychological impact.
You don't realize how much of a luxury and a blessing it is to have clean running water until it's no longer available. You can't flush the toilet, freshen up, shower, wash your dishes, or wash your clothes.
If you don't have a backup power generator, all the food in your fridge starts rotting in a few days.
There are so many luxuries which we take for granted up until they're taken away from us. Nature is cruel and harsh.
I regard attacks on critical civilian infrastructure as strategically indistinguishable from nuclear attacks, and deserving of a similar response.
Edit: Why is this being downvoted. I'm right. One will kill 100k people instantly. The other will send them back to the Middle Ages. The former group might actually be the luckier one.
People are downvoting you without saying why. Nuclear deterrence is a dirty game, but one we're unfortunately forced to play. Liking it or not has nothing to do with it - not playing it has pretty bad consequences.
It's actually surprisingly structured, with pretty clear rules. Among them are "bright lines" and "fuzzy lines". A bright line is something which forces an automatic response nobody likes, and it's backed by a lot of commitment. Not responding to an adversary crossing a bright line trashes your whole reputation and strongly signals you're weak.
The problem with bright lines is that once you state them, the other guy is free to do anything up to your line. It's like posting your final price in a classified post - nobody will ever offer you more. A fuzzy line is the solution: you say something like "if you move forward, I will do things you don't like", without saying how much forward or what things. Which forces the other guy to tip-toe around. You see A LOT of this between NATO and Russia in Ukraine.
Back to your point - nuclear attacks are a very clear bright line. One might say the final bright line, written in neon. They should be treated as such, and not watered down - if you say "bombing a power station is identical to nuclear attacks", you may make bombing power stations very slightly less likely, but you also normalize nuclear attacks by the same amount - and this is VERY BAD.
Electrical production facilities have been considered by the US and its allies as dual use and as such, legitimate targets in their strikes against enemies for quite a long time. Anyone who has watched any US 'shock and awe' campaigns notices the power goes up very, very quickly.
As an American citizen, I'm very glad this wasn't treated as indistinguishable from a nuclear attack. I regret that no one was held accountable for initiating the war, but MAD would have been bad news.
I was and am against those wars, but I am not a pacifist. If a war is a 'just way' and should be fought (there's a whole scholarship on when wars are just, I have a high bar, but it can be met), there will always be targets that are 'dual use' and in that regrettable circumstance in my mind, those would be legitimate targets after a very careful calculus was made to weigh lives lost and saved by destroying them.
Most American military experts assumed the Russians would have started the war with a much more aggressive arial bombardment. It's just kind of how these things are done. I assume them doing this now is Russia paving the way for a more traditional operation to begin when the ground freezes. It's going to be a bloody winter. It's a tragedy.
> I assume them doing this now is Russia paving the way for a more traditional operation to begin when the ground freezes.
With what army? Most estimates state they have lost well over half of their combat power. Russia is not doing anything but slowly (or sometimes quickly) retreating.
You are downvoted because you are equaling nuclear attack with no power.
One is incredibly difficult to fix with permanent effects, other is minor nuisance and not that big of a deal to fix or even switch to life without power grid, you can just have own wind turbine/solar/hydro if you really need the power.
Also TIL Middle ages were like 100-150years ago, in some countries just decades ago, I'd say you could get by without power very easily even in 1950s. I am pretty sure my grandma didn't much need electricity for anything and she didn't live in Middle Ages. You can have mechanical pump in well, you can store stuff in cold basement and you can use oil lamp or candles for light in dark to cover the basics (water/food/light). Sure you would need to change the way of life, but equalling this to nuclear attack is just plain stupid.
As someone who admires Amish I find it actually appealing.
If I have to choose whether time travel to 1920s-1950s or live in nuclear war wasteland it's pretty easy choice for me.
I've travelled to places with no electricity (they jsut use generator in evening) and people were doing just fine over there and I was also not missing much.
No, but the farcical retaliation response that I replied to was in response to someone's experience from the devastation of a hurricane but chose to reply with a war like response
You're overestimating how much damage a few thousand nuclear bombs can do. Even just targeting every big city in the world you'd struggle to kill a billion people directly, though the aftermath may bring the total that high.
> the standard response to a nuclear attack ends human life on the planet.
No, it really does not. Mutually assured destruction - especially with current amount of nuclear weapons, which is an order of magnitude less than at the peak of cold war - means unacceptable level of casualties on both sides, however, even an all out launch-all-nukes NATO vs Russia war wouldn't even touch the regions where majority of human population lives. Sure, it would be an extremely horrific genocidal event, I personally would die, but even reducing population by half (to 1974 level) is nowhere close to "ends human life on the planet".
> Critical facilities like cellular base stations and data-centers often have an on-site backup generator. These generators have enough fuel to extend the resiliency beyond 24 to 48 hours.
During the 2019 hurricane here in Nova Scotia people stole the fuel (and even a few generators somehow), so don’t even count on that.
We had no internet, cellular, or landline service for days where I live as a result, much less power. The only reliable communication option in a true disaster is as it always has been, amateur radio.
At my cabin I have starlink, limited solar power and a generator with propane that comes on (power goes out a lot). Eventually I'll run out of propane and food (everyone has some emergency food supply for a few weeks at their cabin, right?), but I wonder how long I'd last with internet plus short trips in my electric car? I never planned for a post-gas future independent of the grid.
Starlink relies on starlink downlinks of course, I assume they'd degrade quickly, do they have generators, and what internet would there be to connect to. But I am independent of the grid for a week at least. There would be a transition period for society. I kind of regret not spending the bigger money for full house solar with battery backup. Then I'd really be in good shape for the end of the world, except for running out of food. And someone coming in and taking it away from me.
I think that last line is really the crux of it. Most of us would survive a “collapse” event exactly as long as it would take for people to get desperate. After that, all the batteries and canned food in the world will do you no good if you don’t have a remote and defensible location, ammunition, and lots of training. I have none of the above, so fingers crossed!
There is a counter argument out there that individuals/small groups that self isolate during extreme events/collapse of social stability tend to do much more poorly than groups that prioritize mutual aid.
Everyone who's been through true turmoil knows. Without a "village" around you you're dead. That's literally why villages formed as they did instead of people just spreading out.
This Death Stranding bunker meme is just clueless people playing survival.
I imagine in a really long haul disaster, it would really depend on the nature of the local community and your distance from society. If the local authorities want to impose order and redistribute your resources, a single person with a gun (I assume that’s what you mean) wouldn’t realistically be sufficient defense.
If you are far enough out and might only have to scare off, like, an occasional random drifter, that’s another story.
Or maybe you mean they should invest in their community and social network. Being seen as a local or at least familiar, and having a good reputation in the community seems like a really useful thing in this sort of scenario.
if the local authorities know they risk getting shot by every local they come to distribute resources from, they're far less likely to think that's a good idea in the first place
That never happens. I mean that always happens. Because we are cultured, democratically minded Americans, we are immune from the human passions that other people suffer from, that desire to take the other person's goodies.
Verizon is my absolute mad-lad hero in NJ. All of our towers had Natural Gas generators keeping the towers alive during Hurricane Sandy. I lost power and land-based internet, cellular internet and phone calls were alive and well thanks to those generators. Kudos to whatever NG company they used as well.
One thing that stood out to me in this video is that he claimed natural gas infrastructure can't run without electricity. It would seem obvious to me that you would have natural gas powered generators capable of sustaining the gas infrastructure.
I think this is what’s usually referred to as a “blackstart capacity”, and normally grid operators pay/ensure that certain operators maintain that capability.
The issue is that I imagine that just keeping an idle natural gas generator large enough for your pipeline + shipping terminal + whatever is not a trivial cost.
Also, however people test blackstart capacity for contractual purposes, I doubt it's a rigorous quarterly check of "can we start this up without outside support while the grid's massively overdrawn after a disaster of some kind shut us down in the first place?"
Just gotta keep your ham radio go box in an EMP-hardened roll of tin foil and have a good crank generator, and you should be good to go. In a grid outage even tiny transmitter powers will be able to get out. It's most power efficient to use CW (morse code) unless you plant to have a computer up and running to run the even fancier digital modes.
Doing CW QRP at 1 watt in the right conditions will cover a huge distance, especially if the power has gone out. It really doesn’t take much when you get down to the absolute minimum viable setup.
Indeed but at the same time, weapons and ammunition begin to look far more valuable than communication. I'm trying to reason through how valuable information would be in a grid-down scenario. Presumably, all the major roads would have check-points operated by the prevailing authority and would confiscate any valuable goods one learned about over the air. It seems to me that having access to defensible food and shelter is vastly more important over the first period of time until things have stabilized at a new local maximum.
I mean when disaster happens weapons are always a top of list item even above food since they are a means to sourcing it (and not just in a killing animals kind of way).
I would not be leaving my property, I live hours from the nearest city, and 30 minutes from “town”. There would be little benefit for me in attempting to travel. I would still like access to information if possible, buts it’s definitely not at the top of the list.
Heard the same thing happening during some long post-hurricane power outages in the USVI where my family lives. Generator stolen from the main cell tower for a chunk of the island, very selfish and expected now.
A lot of old Cold War preparatory war game scenarios start with EMPs blanketing the continental US. It only takes a few (like 1) nuclear weapon detonations in thin atmosphere (a few dozen km up) where the primary heat transfer mechanism is radiative (vs. convective, conductive) to cause enough EMP to take out pretty much the entire continental US grid.
The military is fully hardened against EMP. Civilian infrastructure, not so much.
"The EMP robustness of the civilian infrastructure of the United States can be summarized far less equivocally: it is entirely non-existent. Our civilian telephony, electricity, broadband communications and electronics plants are all naked to our nuclear-armed enemies. They were neither designed, nor engineered, nor constructed nor are they operated so as to survive nuclear explosion effects, even at very great distances – for the 'invisible hand' of the marketplace provides no incentives for EMP robustness, nor penalties for failing to so prepare. Large electric power and telephony systems are known to fail under the effects of solar storms, which impose far smaller electromagnetic stresses than are known to arise from high-altitude nuclear explosions of even modest scales. Consequently, even a modest, single-explosion EMP attack on the U.S. might well devastate us as a modern, post-industrial nation."
People thought I was nuts in 2021 when the lockdowns continued and I bought enough tools to survive such an event. I figured, people aren’t working, things gonna break. Lol
For reference, some basics would go a long way — survival straw to filter water, 3 month emergency food storage, fire starting kit, water collection, etc. for those in the country it’s really not much. A solar generator with a big battery could probably work for those in the country (with a well). For those in the suburbs you’ll need enough to hunker down for a few weeks (and guns). For the city, you need an escape plan and a place to go.
A true grid collapse would be insane. Most people don’t know how to do any of the basics all our families did only a generation or two ago.
How many people can? How many know how to preserve meat for long periods without a freezer? How many know how to grow food and store it?
I’ve spent the past couple years learning some of these skills and preparing the tools.
To be clear grid collapse is inevitable on a long enough time horizon. Being prepared with food, water and shelter is a bare minimum.
Hell I barely know how to change the oil in my car because I never had someone teach me and only recently got to a place in my life where I realized that sort of thing is important. I'm making headway, slowly but surely, but something like growing enough food for a family or acquiring meat, let alone preserving it, might as well be trying to get to the moon.
I think everyone’s in their own situation. Easy stuff:
1. Start a garden this year. Learn the basics. A big garden is just the same principles at a larger scale.
2. Just start doing everything yourself. Go on YouTube and watch how to do X and do it. It’ll build general knowledge of how things work. Saves money, builds confidence, generally good skills regardless.
3. There are survivalist camps if you’re hard core (don’t think it’s necessary, but some people might like it idk)
4. Start curing / pickling your own food. Some simple examples: but everything from the store to make salsa and try that. Make your own bacon (very good) by buying pork belly. Country ham can be delicious and fairly straight forward. Just be sure to follow guides. The USDA publishes guides on canning for instance
>something like growing enough food for a family or acquiring meat, let alone preserving it, might as well be trying to get to the moon.
Funny to think that for our grandparents, that was just a typical Tuesday.
They did pickling, canning, preserves, all that stuff. Some might've done smoking and curing. Kept a spare freezer stocked. After the Great Depression, they weren't going to be caught empty-handed again.
Two generations later, we learned nothing from them and look at that as comparable to going to the moon. Wow.
But yeah, I don't know how to do any of that either. To learn, talk to some older people, I guess?
> How many people can? How many know how to preserve meat for long periods without a freezer? How many know how to grow food and store it?
I do. It doesn't matter. I'm under no illusion I'd be able do defend myself and my food when I'm outnumbered and outgunned, being on alert 24/7. All it takes is one mistake and it's game over.
That’s the reality… become friends with your neighbors and if anything bad happens you can work together. Good to do in any case.
I also don’t think people will be as violent after the first 3-4 weeks without water or food. Simply put, those who collaborate have a higher likelihood of survival. There’s only so much you can steal.
If / when this situation arises be prepared and it’ll give you a buffer to survive longer. Have the skills to keep surviving after that and make friends who do as well. Make a plan to meet said friends. That’s really all you can do. It increases your odds
But is the military hardened against deserters, starving soldiers, starving military families, and so forth caused by civilian infrastructure collapse? I doubt it. If you can’t feed or heat/cool people, alliances quickly change - especially if you have no way of tracking who becomes AWOL.
As far as I know, military bases don’t have their own nuclear reactors or coal plants.
EDIT: Apparently the DoD requires diesel backup with enough fuel to last… “one to two weeks.” Meh… if I’m an EMP-empowered nation who hates the US, the grid looks tempting… sure, they can counterattack, but if you make investigating difficult and spread enough pandemonium… all you need to do is keep the government haphazardly distracted and confused for two weeks and you win…
> As far as I know, military bases don’t have their own nuclear reactors or coal plants.
Well the nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers have power plants, and a few military bases used to be powered with nuclear (Camp Century, Ft. Greenly, McMurdo Station). But your point is reasonable. We'd be able to counterattack militarily, but it still would not be a happy day, nor a lasting integrity.
You... really don't want to challenge the US federal government to a game of war.
I mean, it's possible to win, but it requires 10-20 years and having quite a bit of your country destroyed (and possibly a couple countries near yours). Or at least, that's what's required when you can broadcast what's going on to the populace to turn them against the war. What it takes to defeat the US military when the populace can't communicate electronically is actually much more poorly defined.
This is really only a good strategy for countries with low-levels of infrastructure and a ruling faction with a strong ideological commitment against the US. So, places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Also, there's a decent stockpile of food for feeding the soldiers (and probably their families, although someone else might be able to speak to that better).
> As far as I know, military bases don’t have their own nuclear reactors or coal plants.
FYI, Eielson AFB in Alaska has a coal plant and is working on an experimental nuclear microreactor installation, the first of its kind that the military plans to expand to other bases.
> is the military hardened against deserters, starving soldiers, starving military families, and so forth caused by civilian infrastructure collapse? I doubt it.
That's where Article 90 of the UCMJ comes into play,
Any person subject to this chapter who willfully disobeys a lawful command of that person’s superior commissioned officer shall be punished—
(1) if the offense is committed in time of war, by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct; and
(2) if the offense is committed at any other time, by such punishment, other than death, as a court-martial may direct.
Right… but if a military base loses power, and the soldiers are starving, you may find that you quickly lose the ability to enforce the UCMJ effectively. And the moment you lose even a bit of control in such a situation, it will unravel potentially within hours.
The UCMJ works great when you can shame a soldier, have a Justice system to rely on, can seize assets or pay, have superiors in other states, and so forth. When it’s pandemonium everywhere… not much to keep it enforced especially when it gets really bad. The system works when a solider has something to lose… but when soldiers feel they have nothing to lose, heck, risk starving and actually losing more by staying…
I think you are overestimating the probability of a scenario where soldiers under duress will mutiny, rather than harden their resolve and commitment to the mission. We have both historical (Japan) and contemporary (Ukraine) examples of this.
We want civilian EMP hardening not just for a nuclear war, but also for an unexpected solar event. We want to be able to handle whatever nature throws at us, our fellow apes combined.
I just rounded off my most recent expansion to 120kw peak production with 500kwh storage, all EMP hardened to well above carrington event levels.
Most of you have a house full of IoT crap dependent on AWS (region) to function.
A grounded steel garbage can with aluminum lining can actual work fairly well as a faraday cage. You can put emergency electronics in there (radio, backup batteries, collapsible solar panel, old laptop, lights, etc).
That's only like 300 * $100 for the panels if you buy them used. That's less than a Model 3. Installation usually costs far far more than the panels. If you have plenty of room and you can install them on the ground, and you are remote enough you can do it without permits or permits are easy to deal with (so really this means not California or New York) and wind isn't a huge concern (so not the Atlantic or Gulf coast) and your neighbors aren't constantly in your business (so not Texas) then this is easily done by someone who has a strong interest, a moderate income, and is a little handy. It is especially easy if you live somewhere so dry that wildfire is not a huge concern, and of course you need enough sunny days for it to be economical somewhat (although with this many panels you could live off this setup even in an Alaskan winter). My guess is they live in New Mexico or Nevada.
> That's only like 300 * $100 for the panels if you buy them used. That's less than a Model 3. Installation usually costs far far more than the panels.
I brought it up more for the space requirements. That’s a physically huge system. Panels are only a fraction of the overall cost. Unless you have a massive commercial building somewhere, 300 panels are going to take up a huge amount of ground-mount space. You also need a lot of inverters, wiring, etc.
They also make claims about EMP hardening, which puts this into exotic build territory. Or maybe just a fantasy?
I don't think it's very hard to EMP harden anything that has a physical size less than a few hundred meters. The power grid is in danger because there is a huge potential created over very long distances. I think to be protected from EMP just requires isolation from large DC voltages, which can be done with an isolating transformer and some varistors? But something which is not miles long and isn't connected to the grid won't really be touched by an EMP anyway.
The creator of the grid collapse video also made a video about the risk of EMPs, and argued that while the impacts could be severe, the 'hollywood-style' devastation that many predict on the internet (and in this thread) is not likely.
EMP was mostly relevant for the time when there was no digital grid protection.
Powerlines worked as giant antennas picking up the VLF component of the blast, driving voltages in megavolts for a brief while. All tricky analog devicery which was used to control the grid in seventies had no protection.
Now, fast acting digital safeties will certainly be more robust.
This is one of those situations where there are no backups, and no one has any plans to make any backups.
A power outage disaster-hardened country has a populace that's deeply knowledgeable about self-governance, organized combat, agriculture, medicine, sanitation, power generation, engineering, textiles, supply logistics, and construction. If the citizens of a western country like the US somehow earned the free time and energy to start regularly studying and executing these skills for themselves and their neighbors, it would be disastrous for the profit margins of most industries. People would necessarily have to spend fewer hours in the workforce (@David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs") completing nothing worthwhile and more time running a nation-state without money changing hands at every transaction of labor.
I have given up any hope of "power-outage" hardening at a large scale and have resolved to stash my own house with supplies, although I'd be quite vulnerable to raids in the long term.
My family jokes that, while everyone stocks up on “survival” products… cigarettes and alcohol will probably be in high demand. Got video games, maybe some solar power (just enough for a TV and a Switch)? Parents will want those to keep the kids sane. Got Blu-rays, DVDs? When people can’t stream, you might get some good resources for them. Got a PC with some offline CAD software? Makes planning making things out of wood easier. And so forth.
That's a smart idea. Cigarettes, condoms, porn, gum, the sorts of things you bribe third-world soldiers with (often people with experience living without power for a long time.)
Edit: I saw you added CAD software; I actually think that people would go back to just drawing things on paper before they'd go to "solar rig to PC with CAD software on it". Civilization did run just fine without computers up until they crashed the scene, and most of the really memorable buildings were designed on paper.
Yeah… I don’t know how many CAD users there would be in the apocalypse. I’m just listing some everyday things we already have that are pseudo-prepper to do… ;)
EDIT: I just realized, how many people will have blank paper in the apocalypse? How many people print anymore? Man this rabbit hole never ends… For heavens sake though, digital media is so anti-resilient that it’s just crazy…
>My favorite is people who think gold and silver will matter. Nope.
Seems like they'd matter more than the electronic number of a non-existent/inaccessible bank account of one's so-called wealth?
But I agree that all such instantly barterable items are a better commodity.
In Japan there are 4 major natural disasters that occur on a semi-regular basis (earthquakes + tsunamis, typhoons + floods) so the society is fairly prepared for prolonged blackouts, even if there hasn't really been a major blackout for a while since the gvmt has also been preparing for those heavily.
People would have at least a stock of water bottles, and I've heard as a recommendation if a typhoon is coming to fill your bath as well to use as gray water (flushing, washing yourself). I believe that's also why most families also have a small gas stove (with gas canisters), the common usage is usually to have a small party dinner with the stove for cooking in the dinner table, but it's also very useful in case of blackouts and you can probably survive eating cooked rice+whatever you find for few weeks if needed. I don't know if people store other foods (cans, etc) for emergencies, I should probably inform myself a bit better.
While Japan hasn't been close at all of a major blackout disaster like this for a long time (AFAIK), I cannot imagine how quickly e.g. Tokyo could get into chaos if there's a major prolonged food, electricity or water disruption.
After the Texas winter fiasco, we had solar panels + backup battery (40kWh worth) + backup whole home generator installed. Thankfully enphase allows you to go fully off grid so if the grid is down, you can still use your panels & backup battery compared to the Tesla system which does not allow that.
The batteries can output up to 15kWh at once so it pretty much is "whole home" backup even if its just the batteries as long as you don't turn everything on at once.
Can't imagine an EMP, but i'm as prepared as I can be at least for Texas.
I can't really fathom living in a country where this is necessary. Is all of America's power grid this unreliable to where you'd need 40kWh of batteries just for one house?
We have geothermal + solar, but this seems overkill.
Growing in the 80s up on the rural olympic peninsula the power routinely went off for a couple of weeks after windstorms. Even still it will be off for a few days every year. There are just a lot of power lines and a lot of trees and they have to check the whole system before it turns back on though they usually get it on for the schools and grocery stores pretty quick.
Everyone has a wood or propane heat source. We kept a non cordless land line, it worked fine with out power and i guess the phone lines are lower on the poles and not high voltage so it isn't a big issue if one is on the ground.
One year we had to cook a turkey on top of a wood stove.
The article talks about phones correctly - at the backbone level it’s mostly VoIP now, which requires power. I bet some places have old mechanical switches that in theory can still be used, but those need some power as well. Landline is great for a localized loss where your central office still have enough power to run.
Circuit switched landline service is still very much alive. It isn't and hasn't been electromechanical for a very long time, but it's non-packetized in a very large part of the US, provided you actually get a service that legally qualifies as a landline (voip is unregulated).
A big factor in social resilience is cash, because the inability to
conduct commerce quickly leads to civil unrest. People will tolerate
no entertainment, heating, or light for weeks or months. The danger
is not with electricity itself so much as the tech that depends on it,
because when there's food in the shops, and fuel in the tanks, but no
way to buy it, force is quick to follow. Physical cash acts as a
buffer that can keep the world moving even in primitive conditions.
That's why I think the idea of a "cashless society" is one of the
stupidest ideas I have heard in my life so far.
I don't think cash would hold much value, there would be insane inflation due to hardly any value of cash and extreme demand after limited resources, cash introduction would be fine after maybe a year when people would get used to live without grid, but in first weeks/months it would lose all the value.
Have we got any historical data or decent models? I guess the problem
with this is there's no precedent to formulate a null hypothesis
against.
If inflation was a factor it would affect digital systems linked to
the same currency equally. Cash would still win out on availability.
My feeling is that, in the absence of digital systems, physical cash
would in fact gain value as a tangible asset intermediate to barter of
portable wealth.
Remember the main purpose of cash in my scenario is a flywheel to
buffer the economy until things come back online, not as a permanent
post-disaster substitute. The main thing is to stop needing the army
to guard food trucks or shoot looters. That's what we're undervaluing
about cash and what I think the bankers, in their zealous bid for more
control, are completely missing as a political dimension about how
real people and real societies work.
> Have we got any historical data or decent models?
Yes, Ukraine is the recent example. Cash still worked in occupied territories, that were cut off from communications. It is the only way to conduct transactions, even with inflated costs.
Ukraine ain't isolated island, so at worst you can still keep using dollars/euros which hold stable value outside compared to local currency. And occupied territories still had gov which performed functions for residents.
By cash I meant "money" in general, since obviously digital money would be eliminated by lack of grid.
Your piece of papers covered by nothing have no value, if there is no power and everything need to be produced by hand and it's very scarce. I will rather trade my crops for something else valuable than for some piece of paper in unstable society without grid, since I think long term/infinite collapse of grid would basically mean collapse of (central) gov. After all what can gov do for me without grid and money. I can see only local gov surviving potentially because it's made by people close to you who can actually help each other with something meaningful instead just words or worthless pieces of papers.
I'd be curious if it would be better to be in the city or the country.
My hunch is that the city requires more "inputs" to stay survivable (fewer food/water stockpiles available), dependant on inputs. However cities would also be the focus for recovery efforts and disaster relief.
On the flip side, the country has a greater store of natural resources per-capita (water, likely food, heat sources), however would be deprioritized for any kind of support.
IMHO it's better in the country. We have a backup generator setup that will run everything for a month or so 24x7 or much longer if we only run it a few hours a day. Well water. Propane heat. Deep freezer in the garage full of food. Fully stocked pantry. Our neighbors all have similar setups and we're all very supportive of one another. Our neighbors have large gardens, flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, chickens, etc....
People living in the country are both more used to being self reliant, AND more willing to to help our neighbors (in part because out here emergencies can easily become life or death).
In the country you can assume it'll take longer to get power back.
But, assuming an extended outage, it'll also be safer, and easier in the country. Until of course the city folk get hungry.
It'll all be good-will and friendly neighbors in the city until the food runs out. Then lawlessness will go through the roof, and, I expect, the dystopian future of so many movies kicks in.
Assuming fuel is scarce, country areas near the city will be raided first. After the first wave of starvations all pretence at civilization ends.
For texas-grid failure, there's at least hope from outside. If the hunger can be averted, country-side remains safe.
But outside of texas is a whole-country grid. If that comes down hunger will kick in, and texas alone won't have the resources to help.
The situation will get _really_bad before it gets better.
Ideally the grid would have the ability to come up one station at a time, feeding, and being fed by, the immediate area. But its rarely going to be that simple.
As someone who lives "out in the country" I can tell you from experience that city people will walk right past a field full of food without even recognising that it is food. They're too used to seeing the polished, buffed and packaged thing that ends up in the supermarket.
Wheat looks like grass if you aren't familiar with it.
ditto potato plants - only the roots are what you want, and as they're invisible, if you don't know what a potato plant looks like, you'll have no idea you're looking at food, as OP says.
You can look at history. I am Italian, we had a lot of internal wars and lawlessness in the Middle Ages. Most Italian villages had defence walls. People usually did not live out in the farmland, they only went there during the day to work, then came back within walls in the evening.
The current city/suburbs/farmland concept will stop working in the event of societal collapse.
In the country it's also easier to be raided by people who know or suspect you have food and water. One house with nothing around it for miles vs an apartment in a huge building, is basically hiding in a crowd.
This is a smart instinct, but the ammunition only lasts so long. Someone deep in the boonies with a good stash will be okay, but anyone within 1-5 day's march near the cities had better be prepared to "stack 'em high' for a long time before the stream of starving city ex-pats slows to a trickle.
You'd probably be surprised by the number of folks who have tens of thousands of rounds. When ammo prices started going up, pretty much everyone I know who shoots at all started buying in bulk. Not saying everyone who has a gun is trained or mentally prepared to shoot trespassers for months on end, but I think a lot of people who think farms and ranches will be easy pickings haven't spent enough time with the folks who live out here.
I shoot recreationally, two guns in the same caliber, maybe once every two months, and have 4-5k rounds stacked in the closet.
If you shoot often, and have multiple guns in multiple calibers, 50k rounds is not difficult at all, especially if you have anything "weird" where you will likely buy as much of the ammo as you can find.
It really depends on how long the power is out. Crossbows were a fearsome weapon of war during the time in history when guns still weren't that accurate or easy to come by. If there's a gap between "people using manufactured ammunition they stockpiled" and "people figure out how to manufacture ammunition and gunpowder reliably like they were in the 1800s before power was ubiquitous", then a crossbow would do quite well.
I think it would depend on how "total" the collapse would be.
For there to be support, something still has to be working to coordinate it. And if nothing is working, it would be interesting to evaluate how long that would take to come back up. Meanwhile, I'd think the country would be better.
Specialization means the country is lacking too. Farmers may have a garden but they count on regular trips to the grocery store. OTOH farms almost universally have fuel tanks and generators and so can get by without the grid for weeks.
I think in a zombies scenario, the country is best. But in a real world scenario, I think urban or suburban is better due to the greater resources (gas stations with tanks, grocery stores stocked with a few weeks worth of beans, etc).
I also think defense is easier in the city as neighbors can band together for local policing, but I think farms would be at risk from criminals who have a gas tank and don’t mind murdering people with no one around to help.
Given that society has been around for about 200k years and power grids have been around for about 100 years, I think there would be a bit of disruption but it will be temporary and then things will adapt. People will sell conversion kits to change refrigerators over to using big blocks of ice, steam ships will harvest ice from icebergs. I doubt horses will come back though, presumably even without a grid factories will operate with local generators or solar/wind power farms, and trains don't need the power grid to deliver goods.
This resonates very much with the Connections[0] series by James Burke. It's an old series, but well worth the watch. Back then it already discussed what would happen if the grid would collapse, and how everything is interconnected. Now with the internet it has gotten even worse. I think the questions asked back then in the series are still very relevant and maybe even more so nowadays.
Longer than the far-too-many sci-books out there predict. I have lived in areas in the US that went without power for a week or longer...and without the ability to make power for at least that long (New Jersey, Hurricane Sandy as one example)
Society is more tolerant than most people think, and the grid is gradually becoming less of an issue thanks to alternative energy means like solar.
While many will suffer/not be happy if the lights went dark due to a grid collapse, I suspect we would survive.
I think this is different though. If you had a working car, you drive a few hours at most and it's life as usual. In my mind "total grid collapse" in this instance means that in New Jersey you know there's no escaping it - it's exactly the same in DC and Atlanta and LA and Chicago and everywhere in between.
While I agree the impact may be overblown in popular culture - or at least the speed of it - psychologically the weight of knowing the entire country is facing the same thing would be a lot worse than a week without power because of a hurricane.
I think everyone should turn off their power for a couple of hours (when convenient) just to see if and how well they'd manage. Because it's so easy to become reliant on something without realizing that it could go.
Powers gone off? Guess I'll put the kettle on and make some tea while I wait - no power. It's got a bit dark - put the light on. Listen to spotify? No songs downloaded and no data etc etc. And that's not even covering food preparation yet.
Going without power isn't nearly as bad as going without water. Shut off water for 24 hours and you'll quickly realize just how often you take it for granted.
The water is the problem. There isn’t any practical way to store more than about a week’s worth. People can easily keep warm and store food for a month but it’s not going to help if the water runs out after a week.
Depends if the gas is from a canister in your house or if you're relying on the gas grid which can also fail during a prolonged widespread power outage.
most city natural gas systems are powered by gas powered generators spread around. Multi week outages due to ice storms in the north east have rarely (if ever) caused outages of the gas system.
I think the examples here (India, Puerto Rico, Ukraine) are pretty different than the US. People in those cultures are used to much more hardship than people in the US.
In my community, there are lots of hills and water is pumped uphill by pumps powered by electricity. If the power grid failed for an extended period of time, I'm pretty sure it would be total chaos. Long lines to get water just to drink. Ferried by car, but when the gas runs out, that walk up the hills would be a killer.
Once water is an issue, I think social niceties would be out the window.
A distributed grid, including many renewables spread on the whole country territory (or even in many homes), and with a redundant topology (that would tolerate many many wire cuts), would really help, in particular in conditions such as during a war.
The thing about these discussions is that the situations they imagine are entirely avoidable, it would only take a complete revamping of our social isolation and dependence on monocultural agriculture / long distance food miles for starters.
That episode is less about unreliable power grids, and more about how easy it is to tear apart society by turning neighbors against each other over relatively minor things. Something that we've seen on a whole new level since 2015.
Indefinitely. Unless you have a very narrow definition of society.
People forget that things like industrialization and capitalism are very recent inventions, and throughout our species history we've had many many different ways of organizing ourselves.
Heck, the society of the 1970s is pretty radically different than today.
But I'm surprised to see fertilizer production not listed. Ammonia fertilizer is whole integer percent of electricity usage, and it's what enabled us to add 7 billion additional people on the planet. Without ammonia fertilizer, there will be mass starvation on a scale we've never seen.
People should be keeping a week off water handy if they live somewhere this is possible. It's not hard to, it's relatively inexpensive, and it's pretty much fire and forget.
If you live in somewhere threatened by climate or earthquakes or volcanos, store some food, water, and basic medical supplies!
The US has 3 separate grids… which isn’t actually a lot. I don’t really trust FEMA if something took out, say, all 3 (Texas being one). If you can’t pay your FEMA workers while their families are panicking, you are toast. Total collapse follows quickly.
With the exception perhaps of North Korea, every single one of these countries has a climate that you can mostly survive in outside, or with minimal protection. The comparison seems meaningless.
Perhaps not all countries will be as determined as the Ukrainians are in their constant repairs, but even with half of their generation capability destroyed, and so many substations targeted, the effects are much like rolling blackouts.
My son has Ukrainian language lessons with teachers both in Donetsk and Kyiv several times a week, and only a single lesson has been missed despite the constant destruction that is ongoing. I'm astounded both by the resilience of the grid and the resilience of Ukrainians. I hope that if such a situation ever happens to the US, we will prove to be as resourceful.
This piece also completely ignores the ongoing changes to our grid as it is being revolutionized by distributed energy resources and storage. Soon, islanding of homes, and the spread of more micro grids, means that a lot of the older reasoning in this article won't make much sense. Already, many critical infrastructure from hospitals to data centers plan for independence during outages. This will become increasingly common as the more electric vehicles allow for vehicle to home usage, as well as charging directly from home solar. This is what wealthy people do today, and costs are falling to make this accessible to all. There's even a chance that islanding might be cheaper than the alternatives for a significant chunk of homes in the future.
Already the grid costs us more than electricity generation, something like $0.08/kWh of the average electricity price of $0.13/kWh in the US. As generation from renewables gets cheaper, and storage gets cheaper, and the grid remains stubbornly expensive, more and more people will be looking to abandon it for energy independence on their own, or in smaller micro grids.