The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Things I (Don't) Worry About: The US Power Grid || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

I've started hearing rumblings about the American power grid and vulnerability to cyber attacks. Sure there's been hiccups throughout the years, but this one isn't keeping me up at night. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/things-i-dont-worry-about-the-us-power-grid

Hey everyone, Peter Zion coming to you from California's Pacific Coast where that smudge on the horizon is, I don't know, career or something. Anyway, today we're going to do the most recent of our ongoing series of things that I do and don't worry about. And this is one of those that's kind of in the maybe category. Specifically, do I worry about the stability of the American power grid and could it go down in a cyber attack? Well, let's start with a little refresher of how things can go horribly. horribly wrong. If you remember back to the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks over 20 years ago, we had a power search to the trip to system in Upper Canada that triggered a series of system failures that cascaded into the United States and ultimately knocked out a huge swath

between the Ohio River Basin and the eastern seaboard going up into Canada. And so New York, among other major cities, went dark for a couple of days. So, you know, the danger's real, but the problem there is whenever there was a surge or shortage in the local system, it could carry through the network to the next node, and if the next node couldn't handle that surge or shortage, carry on to the next one, the next one next one next one, the whole thing would burn out. So while there was certainly a very real concern back in the early 2000s of that, about that being weaponized against us, everyone's. certainly knew what the problem was and spent the next several years trying to patch up and especially putting kind of power brakes and firewalls in between the system so you would have a cascading failure in the case of attack so that's kind of piece one piece two is the green revolution and the advent of a lot of digital technologies and managing this system every time you

have another system that is digitized and every wind turbine and every solar panel has to be digitized to feed into the grid so you don't get surges there is another point to access where you could be hacked. But one of the pluses of having a green tech involved system is each individual power unit is relatively low compared to something like a massive coal-burning power plant. And so you might be able to short out some issues and you might be able to cause a brown out, but the idea that will cascade is not very likely because you can't take a singular, massive point of power production or consumption offline with a single hack. Does it make you hack proof, but it certainly makes the system more resistant, and even some basic cryptography

within the system can provide a degree of insulation that was not possible in an older analog system. The third thing is keep in mind that no matter how bad, how about how bad it gets, there's an upper limit to how much damage can be done, because the United States grid is not one thing. We've got three massive, nearly continent spanning grids. One basically goes from the Rocky Mountains west, one goes from the Great Plains East, and the last one is, to be perfectly blunt, mostly Texas. The connections among those three grids are very, very thin. There aren't a lot of wires that cross those seams. So even in the worst case scenario, you're only talking about a third of the country rough going down. But even within that, that makes it

sound a lot worse than it really is. Because most parts of the grid, most generation, most consumption, is within a much smaller network. Unlike most countries, we don't have a single power generator and provider. We don't have dozens. We don't have hundreds. We've got thousands. Most independent communities have their own power grid

with their own power generation and their own consumer base. And while there are links among those, many, many, many, many, many, it's not like they're all part of a single network. And so each individual community with each individual utility maintains their own system and has their own firewall. to prevent the sort of thing that happened back in the early 2020s.

Does that mean we're immune to hacking? Oh, God, no. Our defense in that is woefully insufficient. But it does mean that in order to take out an entire section of the grid, you have to hack hundreds, not thousands, if not tens of thousands of things, at the same time. And we've never seen that sort of courted action ever, because as soon as the alarm goes off that someone's being hacked, everyone else with each micro network is going to get a warning shot fired at them and

then others can respond as is appropriate so am I worried a little bit but it definitely doesn't make my top 100 list