Economy
In reply to the discussion: STOCK MARKET WATCH - Monday, 20 February 2012 [View all]Demeter
(85,373 posts)THE TROUBLE with the future of power isnt that there is one big problem that could croak us. Its that there are a host of them, any one of which could croak us. Lets group them into three categories.
Bucket No. 1 involves what the insurance-policy fine print calls Acts of God. Here were talking about all those storms of the century that seem to be arriving with unsettling frequency. Although people can debate the reasons behind it, by now the trend is clear, says Tierney, a partner with Boston-based Analysis Group. Extreme weather events will be more common. In fact, the government recorded more extreme-weather disasters in the United States in 2011 alone than it did in all of the 1980s combined. And as the Halloween storm showed, even people in neighborhoods with underground power lines wont necessarily escape outages, because those lines are fed somewhere along the route by aboveground equipment...Whats more, Mother Nature can hit us with a lot more than just high winds and heavy snow. Consider the solar storm. Magnetic activity of the sun can cause severe disturbances in the upper atmosphere that can seriously damage our electrical grid, corrode oil and gas pipelines, and mess with high-frequency radio communications and GPS satellites. This isnt some science-fiction plotline. It took just 90 seconds for a 1989 solar storm to cause the collapse of the Hydro-Quebec power grid, leaving 6 million Canadians without power for up to nine hours. A 2008 NASA-funded report noted the risk of significant damage to our interconnected grid in light of the forecast for increased solar activity. The 11-year solar cycle is expected to peak in 2013, and just two weeks ago we saw one of the biggest solar-radiation storms in years. Although that event left us unharmed, one model predicts that if we suffer a solar storm similar in intensity to one back in 1921, which was 10 times bigger than the 1989 Canadian storm, more than 130 million people could be left in the dark.
Lets call Bucket No. 2 Acts of Terrorists. Among these, theres the old-fashioned physical attack on the bulk power system, either at its source of generation or somewhere along its transmission route. Theres the newfangled cyber attack on the computers controlling our interconnected grid. And then theres the otherworldly-sounding attack by an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, weapon...Analyst Sue Tierney is far more concerned about cyber threats. No bomb needed - just serious hacking qualifications, and these days it seems everybody knows a gloomy 17-year-old whos got those. In what is widely believed to have been an Israeli-American covert effort, the Stuxnet computer worm was unleashed on the Iranian nuclear program in 2010, ruining about a fifth of the centrifuges the country uses to enrich uranium. It would be naive to think our country wont eventually find itself on the other side of a similar attack....
Finally, Bucket No. 3 is the Ailing Grid itself. In many places, the infrastructure is as old and stooped as a pensioner. As it is upgraded and its capacity is expanded, our rapacious need for more electrical power races to max it out once again. Many of the new sources of power that were promised as solutions for tomorrow - think nuclear - now seem dated and misguided. Whos going to greenlight a new nuclear power plant around here after what happened in Japan? As it is, there are mounting questions about the future of nuclear power plants in Massachusetts and Vermont, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is pushing to close down that states Indian Point nuclear plant, which helps light up Manhattans skyscrapers. Indian Points backers are pushing back, producing pamphlets that depict kids doing homework by candlelight - burn those pencils, baby - and moms preparing dinner while wearing headlamps....