Original subtitles

Hi, I'm Dennis Quaid.

I've been concerned about this glaring issue with our country's civilian

infrastructure since I first learned about it 10-plus years ago.

I'm pleased to take a role in this important project.

This is a very serious situation, but it's imminently fixable.

Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts.

But let me tell you, this movie can and will have a happy ending.

You ever stop and realize how fragile all this is?

Wouldn't take much to throw us right back into barbaric times.

All you'd have to do would be eliminate electricity.

New York, one of the biggest cities in the world, plunges into darkness in the

blink of an eye.

It's just after 4 p.m.

on August 14, 2003, and an unthinkable disaster becomes reality.

A cascade of power failures shuts down electricity in southeast Canada

and across eight northeastern states.

Cities like New York are brought to a complete standstill.

Hundreds of people are trapped in subway tunnels, while the traffic above becomes

a nightmare of gridlock.

In all, 55 million people lost power for up to two days. The main culprit,

a sagging high-voltage power line in northern Ohio that brushed up against an

overgrown tree.

Eliminate electricity.

That's all.

But completely.

So, no electricity, no lights.

You're back to candles and lanterns, campfires and bonfires.

Batteries couldn't be recharged.

Generators couldn't be refueled because fuel is pumped electrically.

So is water, by the way. So no lights, no fuel, no water, no computers. And

computers run everything.

Police wouldn't help you. They'd be gone at the first sign of trouble. They'd be

home protecting their own families. So would the Army and the National Guard.

You'd be alone. You'd be on your own. You'd be SOL and JWF.

You might think George Carlin was funny.

but this is hardly a humorous subject just listen to esteemed u.s senator

angus king there's a weird calmness about this hearing this is

not calm the russians are already in the grid this is not a

threat this is happening we are under attack we are in a very dangerous place

i just think this has to be an emergency an urgent situation what would the

catastrophic consequences be at a human level if you tried to live in a non

-electricity world given the way we build our civilization?

Nine out of ten of us wouldn't make it if an attack on the grid resulted in the

power going out and staying out for a year.

This extraordinary claim came from an EMP commission, a congressionally

mandated commission that operated for 15 plus years and was staffed by the best

and brightest scientist in the country.

The commission performed exhaustive studies, including experimentation and

testing, largely eliminating the need for further studies.

It's not difficult to imagine how our entire world could quickly turn to

chaos. Think about the millions of people in hospitals and those requiring

medicine for their daily survival.

The running water we depend on comes from municipal water systems that

require power to operate.

The rule of three survival theory tells us that humans can die after three days

without water.

Heat, gas for our cars, transportation for food restocking, all of it

relies to some extent on electricity.

But no one likes to focus on what could happen if it all suddenly is taken away.

The veil between civility and brutality is razor thin. So imagine what will

happen if there is no food, no power, and no money, and no transportation for

three weeks, three months.

Only people with guns and the boldness to go and take what they need to survive

will live. The vulnerability of the power grid is clear. Look no further

than to what happened in the state of Texas in the winter.

of 2021 texas's grid collapsed which should serve as a cautionary tale for

everybody else in the united states mike maybe lived through it at his home in

fort worth texas he's a retired command sergeant major in the u.s army with two

deployments to iraq under his belt these days he's a citizen warrior when he

learned about the vulnerabilities of the nation's grid he devoted himself

to raising awareness of it and resolving these weaknesses.

I filed over 200 different filings with the federal government related to

protecting the electric grid. We had 210 fatalities as a result of that grid

collapse. We had millions of people under boil water orders because the

water was unsafe.

Three days after the blackout, I took pictures of the empty shelves.

There's no water.

no bread, no frozen pizza. We were literally minutes away from the

blackout causing such severe damage that it could have taken weeks or longer to

get the grid back up and running.

Our top story, 4 minutes and 37 seconds. That's how close Texas was from a total

power grid collapse last week. It was confirmed today at the ERCOT board

meeting.

This four-minute and 37-second time frame is crucially important.

We were that close to a devastating and prolonged crisis.

There's a major difference between a short-term grid-down scenario and the

power grid being out for months at a time, where tens of millions of citizens

can die.

And again, the question I'd ask, what have we actually, we've taken it

seriously, what have we actually done?

other than literally admire the problem.

All of us need to fully understand what's at stake here so we can get

involved and push for action so that our critical civilian infrastructure can be

protected from all threats.

Now, it's hard to imagine a more bipartisan issue.

A grid down scenario would have a devastating impact on every one of us

and our children's and our grandchildren's futures.

That's why at the end of this film, we're going to provide an action plan

that will put us on the road to resolving this vulnerability.

Now stay tuned and remain hopeful. But for now, let's take a closer look at

what this complicated power grid is all about.

For most of man's history, the planet and its inhabitants had only the light

of the sun.

and then fire to manage the needs of life.

It wasn't until the 19th century that with the invention of electricity and

modern power gave us control over our environment.

Electricity spread was rapid.

First the cities, which started to glow.

Power then came to rural areas, slowly at first.

But soon, the entire country had access.

In a matter of decades, life in America took an extraordinary leap forward.

Homes, factories, businesses, streetlights, everything became

connected to the constant source of life which became known as the grid.

It's considered one of the great feats of 20th century engineering, designed to

move power from a wide variety of sources.

Plants driven by coal, hydroelectric, natural gas, and nuclear.

And in recent years, green energy sources such as wind and solar.

all of it creating electricity that pulses through a fragile labyrinth of

thousands of substations and transformers across high-voltage power

lines and into every corner of our society.

The electric grid is actually operated by about 3,000 different companies, both

public and private sector, involved in the generation, transmission, and

distribution of electric power.

There are three independent regional grids, the Eastern Grid, the Western

Grid, and Texas Grid. And now, increasing demand combined with aging

infrastructure has left America vulnerable, not just to temporary

blackouts, but to potentially devastating wide-scale power failures.

It all starts...

with massive high-voltage transformers that interconnect power lines across the

country.

These transformers are considered the workhorses of the grid.

Their function is to convert raw electricity from power plants into

higher or lower voltages for uses in homes, offices, and factories.

The extra high voltage transformers are huge.

There are hundreds of tons each.

You have to shut down a freeway to deliver them.

And you have to move stop lights and power lines and street lights just to

get them down a road through a city to get them delivered to the installations.

In a grid down situation,

There's just going to be no chance of getting extra high voltage transformers

on site and installed.

Our chief vulnerability are these big transformers. And if you lose them,

you've basically lost the whole grid.

And they're not manufactured in this country anymore.

You're talking about 18 months to replace one transformer.

And this country can't survive for 18 months. It probably can't survive for

six months without electricity.

What's really troubling, experts say, is that utilities have been buying some of

these critical high-voltage transformers from China and putting them into our

grid. We knew about 300 large Chinese transformers that we had imported

into the United States, and we knew that at least 200 of those were embedded in

the electric grid.

marketing job, they're underselling other sources.

Why isn't there a requirement that somebody check to see whether it has

some kind of a backdoor, some type of vulnerability, and there's no

requirement that you check it?

Mike Mabee calculates that Chinese transformers now provide 10% of the

electricity provided in New York City and 20% in Las Vegas, based on

advertising claims from Chinese companies.

Top former energy official claims an attack on an American power grid was

terrorism. The attack was the most significant incident of domestic

terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred in the U.S.

Metcalf, California, 2013.

Just outside Silicon Valley.

This was an unprecedented and sophisticated attack on a grid

substation. Unidentified gunmen using AK-47s attacked some of the giant

transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley.

Shortly before 1 a.m., someone cut telephone cables near the substation.

About a half hour later, multiple gunmen quickly fired dozens of shots at 17

transformers inside the perimeter of the station.

Fifteen minutes later, transformers began to fail. But officials managed to

avoid serious disruptions by rerouting power.

The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission investigated the incident and

concluded, with the aid of the U.S. Navy SEALs team, that this was probably a

terrorist attack.

The Wall Street Journal reported that one minute before the police arrived,

the attackers disappeared into the night.

No one has ever been arrested.

Recently, we saw another one in Arizona.

Diesel fuel set to a timer, ready to blow.

It doesn't need to be sophisticated because, unfortunately, a lot of these

systems were put together in the 70s and the 80s. So far, none of those attacks

have resulted in widespread power outages. Otherwise, well, you might have

heard about it. But their frequency has raised concerns about the security of

this obviously vital piece of our infrastructure.

This also raised concerns that these seemingly random events...

could be precursors of bigger things to come.

The attack was played down by PG&E, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company that

provides electricity to millions in the northern two-thirds of California.

It wasn't until March 2014, almost a year later, that the Metcalfe story

finally broke in the Wall Street Journal.

This attack did happen, but you didn't hear a peep out of the utility whose

substation was attacked.

The FBI came to the conclusion that the Metcalfe attack was most likely not a

terrorist attack in the end, probably just a disgruntled employee.

But what do you think?

The operation against the Metcalfe transformer substation represents an

engraved invitation for ISIS or any terrorist group or criminal gangs to

attack the U.S. power grid and put the nation into dark, perhaps for weeks or

months. In February 2022,

60 Minutes ran a story that took a hard look at the vulnerability of the US

power grid.

John Wellinghoff was chairman of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory

Commission, a small government agency with jurisdiction over the US high

-voltage transmission system.

Wellinghoff commissioned a study to see if a physical attack on critical

transformers could trigger cascading blackouts.

It was actually a very shocking result to us that there's very few number of

substations you need to take out in the entire United States to knock out the

entire grid.

Knock out the entire grid? That's correct.

How many would it take to knock out, putting the entire country in a

blackout? Less than 20.

The report was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. It found the U.S. could suffer

a coast-to-coast blackout. if saboteurs knocked out just nine substations.

That's right.

Nine out of 55,000 substations. Between 2010 and 2020 alone,

there were more than 700 documented attacks on this nation's electric grid.

Metcalf took place in 2013, and so immediately there was a call for there

to be some type of a physical security standard to protect the electric grid.

Unfortunately, that never really materialized. In 1981,

GAO came out with a report about how inadequate the physical security of the

electric grid was. Here we are talking now, 40 years later, about the exact

same thing.

on any given day according to experts there are thousands of attempts to

penetrate the networks that control systems across america's power grid and

the risks are only growing The more advanced and digitalized our grid

becomes, the more vulnerable it is to hackers.

Hacking is part of a cyber attack.

It is a way to get into a system, and then you can do all sorts of things. You

can sleep in that system if you've hacked into it. You can lay dormant for

years and monitor critical information that's being transmitted back and forth.

You can get a game, if you will, of how to get the system.

debilitated by watching it play out in its normal functions. There are a lot of

things that happen as a result of hacking.

The real danger is that our infrastructure, in particular our

electric power grids, are as vulnerable to cyber attack as the thousands upon

thousands of businesses, companies, government agencies that have already

been hacked over the last few months and even the last couple of years.

We've had these recent cyber attacks, you know, like SolarWinds and the

Colonial Pipeline and the attacks in the meatpacking industry. And do you realize

there is absolutely no requirement that anybody detect,

mitigate or remove malware from the electric grid?

The SolarWinds hack was, and really is, continues to be one of the biggest

espionage campaigns recently discovered.

When it comes to sophisticated cyber hacks on a national scale, it might

sound like the stuff of science fiction, except it's already happened.

A massive cyber attack in 2015 left a quarter of a million Ukrainians without

electricity.

Russia hacked into their grid and cut off power.

There were three attacks.

The first was the December 2015 attack in western Ukraine, where they took off

the power and light and heat in the middle of winter.

And they followed that up again one year later with a power outage in Kiev, the

nation's capital.

And then they pulled off the most destructive cyber attack the world had

ever seen, the NotPetya attack.

It was a destructive attack.

And it wiped out data, Ukrainian federal agencies.

It wiped out the ability for anyone to pull money out of ATMs to pay for gas.

It paralyzed railway services and post services.

It was the first ever automated blackout tool. And a push of a button can, like a

machine gun, hit all of the circuit breakers at the utility.

And that's what happened. You don't build a tool like this just to use it

once. You build it as a kind of...

repeatable attack that you can drop somewhere else and it will cause a

blackout again.

Two years later, when I went to Ukraine to interview the people who had run the

forensics on these attacks, what stuck with me is they said, listen, we don't

actually think we were the end target.

We think we were the test kitchen.

We think you, the United States, is the end target.

Only when it comes your way, the damage will be so much worse because we are

still not so automated here in Ukraine. In the United States, we had digitized

every nook and cranny of our critical infrastructure, of the grid, of our

health care system, of our pipelines.

And so when those same capabilities came for us, the Ukrainians said, you better

watch out.

because the damage will be so much worse.

I truly believe the next geopolitical conflict will either play out in the

form of a cyber war or will involve some major cyber component.

And the country that wins that conflict will look a lot like a digital Israel.

a country that can continue to run its most basic functions and services while

surrounded by hostile neighbors and hostile activity.

And right now, the United States is not that country. We would lose that

war. I'm convinced that at some point or another, it's going to happen.

The Chinese are in, the Russians are in, and the Iranians are believed to be in.

they could wreak untold havoc.

I was told that by the former chief scientist of NSA.

The head of US intelligence, Dan Coats, said publicly that the Russians were in

the control plane of our power grid and the Chinese had access controls of our

natural gas pipeline system.

Do you think that adversaries of the United States have the capability right

now to shut down the power grid?

Yeah, they do. I mean, I think that there are very malign actors who are

trying, even as we speak. There are thousands of attacks on all aspects of

the energy sector and the private sector generally. I mean, the meat plant, for

example.

It's happening all the time.

And the cyber threats facing this country are growing with dramatic

advances. Potential aggressors are exploiting vulnerabilities in our

security.

As we are seeing millions of security incidents on our critical infrastructure

every single day, we have caught Russia hacking into our grid.

probing our nuclear plans.

We've caught China hacking into our pipelines.

I covered those attacks.

We just declassified a report that said that the goal of those pipeline breaches

was to get a foothold in the event China would need to knock out our pipelines

one day.

We need to prepare for the consequences of a cyber attack.

We are not ready.

Tom Ridge, who was the first Secretary of Homeland Security, said to me, you

know, we are not a preemptive society.

We react to events.

There are days when I look at my three-year-old and I wonder what the

future will look like for him.

We have never been closer.

to a cyber-induced cataclysmic attack on our critical infrastructure.

There's no plan.

There are plans for hurricanes.

There are plans for snowstorms. There are plans for earthquakes.

There is no plan for a cyber attack that would be infinitely longer in duration

and more widespread than any of those natural disasters.

A lot of people, when they think of a nuclear war, what comes to mind is the

image of mushroom clouds, cities laid to waste.

But that may not be the way a nuclear war actually looks today.

So if you detonate a nuclear weapon 200 kilometers or higher in outer space,

people on the ground might not even know that it happened.

But it will send an electromagnetic pulse charge down.

and damage all the components critical to the electric grid.

In other words, a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere above the United States

could unleash a burst of invisible electrical energy that within a fraction

of a second could wash over this country and overload all of our most sensitive

electronic devices.

including the nation's power grid

an EMP

pulse is a very dangerous threat and it's a realistic threat it's something

that would basically if you're not nuclear hardened it will basically shut

down any digital computer that is operating in the in the range of the EMP

so if you set off an EMP a high-altitude burst EMP

Basically, every light in this hotel is going to go off, every computer is going

to go off, every cell phone is going to go off.

That's what an EMP does.

From a very low-yield nuclear detonation, from a very simple, small

missile, or even a weather balloon launched up 20 miles above the Earth,

can be absolutely devastating to the transformers and the rest of the

electrical infrastructure.

I was asked, as a STRATCOM writer, to respond to an EMP attack.

And the answer is yes, because we have nuclear-hardened satellites, nuclear

-hardened command and control shelters. We can respond to that. But our nation

as a whole has not really looked at the critical infrastructure that could be

damaged by EMP.

And we need to kind of take a look at that entire threat.

Entire cities could go dark in the blink of an eye.

Texas State Senator Bob Hall has been aware of EMP for more than 50 years.

When he was in the Air Force as a young man, after attaining an engineering

degree at the Citadel, he was called on to protect our missiles from

electromagnetic pulse.

He's so deeply concerned about the existential threat it represents.

He's fought for protective legislation for more than a decade.

but the legislature failed to act in three different sessions.

I ended up on assignment at Norton Air Force Base.

The Pentagon came to the program office and told us that we had a new threat

that they had not known about before but was extremely serious and actually was

rendering our missile system, the Minuteman, totally impotent until we

fixed it. There was a, I call it a crash program, and I was picked to...

be the project manager to get the missile deployed as a hard missile.

The power of an EMP is potentially devastating and it's an open secret

among nuclear capable countries.

We actually know that the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians have in their war

plans the first strike plan to take out our electrical power system with an EMP

attack. It's not speculation.

We know that. We learned it about the Russians when the USSR collapsed.

There were a number of defectors that left Russia and came to the United

States. So they showed up here with boxes, suitcases full of data showing

what the Russians planned to do with an EMP attack, what the Russians had given

in information to the Chinese.

We've listened to Kim Jong-un of North Korea threaten an EMP attack.

This man goes by the name of Riza Khalili.

It's a pseudonym he uses to protect his identity.

He was born in Tehran, served in the Revolutionary Guard, and worked as a

paid spy for the U.S. inside Iran.

He's become one of this country's most outspoken voices, calling for the

overthrow of the Iranian government.

They launched a ballistic missile off of a vessel in the Caspian Sea

successfully. There is no other reason to launch a ballistic missile from a

ship than for the EMP purposes.

So these actions are very alarming and points to the fact that they're quite

aware of EMP and our weaknesses to protect ourselves.

The thought that they could destroy tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans

and effectively take... United States. How? By detonating a single nuclear

weapon, not even very precisely, but just somewhere in space over the middle

of this country.

These are fanatics who believe that the demise of America and the destruction of

Israel. will trigger an event where the last Islamic Messiah will appear, kill

the rest of the infidels, and then Islam will rule the world. And that's where

the danger lies.

Iranian scientists have been present in North Korea when North Korea detonated a

nuclear bomb, and they are jointly working together for arming their

missiles with a nuclear warhead.

Too often, the U.S. seems to have two modes of response to a problem.

Before the problem occurs, The U.S. ignores it.

After it occurs, the U.S. tries to throw enough money at it to put things right.

Trouble is, if the power grid goes down, there isn't going to be enough money and

time in the world to get it working again.

Well, you know, if 9-11 didn't teach us anything, then I don't know what will,

because the next attack on U.S. could be the end of America.

If there was a system-level EMP attack today, what would be the survival of the

electrical grid system?

It really wouldn't survive at all. It would not survive.

Right.

An EMP attack would not have to come from a state actor with a high-altitude

missile blast, as there are actually smaller weapons of war available, which

could take out individual critical substations.

There are these non-nuclear EMP weapons.

There's an item called the EMP suitcase, and it looks just like a suitcase.

It could be operated by a single individual with little or no training.

We've arrived at a place where a madman, a terrorist, a criminal could topple the

technological pillars of civilization for a major metropolitan area all by

himself.

Today, we have two satellites that were launched by North Korea, one in 2013 and

a second one in 2016.

They're on a polar orbit from south to north and cross the United States

several times a day.

We've monitored those satellites since they've been launched, and there's never

been any data sent back from those satellites.

That means one of two things. Either they were both total duds.

Or they are weapons waiting for a signal to drop a nuclear weapon.

There are many who are complacent about the potential motivations of our

adversaries and believe they'd never risk an attack on the U.S. because a

counterattack from the U.S. would destroy them. But what those skeptics

may not appreciate is that a cyber or EMP attack can be disguised even

Not only is Russia playing around with these capabilities in Ukraine, they're

playing around with attribution.

They're seeing if they could launch an attack on a system and not immediately

be blamed for it. And when you can't tie back an attack to the actor, how do you

respond?

There's another threat looming out there that could also knock out the power grid

to the same degree as these other threats. And in this case, there's

nothing anyone can do to stop it.

It's called geomagnetic disturbance, or GMD.

We know we have been hit with what they call them sunspots, coronal mass

ejections is a more scientific term. The earliest we have of a massive coronal

mass ejection dates back to 1859.

It was called a Carrington event.

And you think, well, we didn't have electrical power then. Well, we did have

a telegraph system, and our telegraph system was fried coast to coast, and

even in Europe, sent telegraph operators to the hospital.

It burned up equipment.

Famed insurer Lloyds of London issued a comprehensive report about the risk of a

major geomagnetic storm to the world's economy.

Lloyds pointed out that a Carrington-level extreme geomagnetic

storm is almost inevitable in the future and also mentioned that the duration of

any outage could last up to two years and is largely dependent.

on the availability of spare replacement transformers.

This threat has now silently grown to where it is perhaps one of the

largest natural disaster scenarios that the country could face, that society

could face.

How likely is it that we're going to have a storm of the severity, let's say,

of the Carrington event? I don't think it's a question of if we're going to

have such a storm. It's a question of when.

This is sometimes referred to as a natural EMP because it has the same

devastating characteristics as a nuclear EMP, which was touched on earlier in

this film.

Most Americans have no idea, but in 2012, there was a massive disturbance on

the surface of the sun. This solar superstorm, considered the most powerful

in more than 150 years, sent a burst of energy hurling through space at over 5

million miles per hour, narrowly missing Earth by a

matter of days.

So, what's being done about it?

We did a lot of geomagnetic storm studies, assessments we call them, where

we looked at specific power grids, we looked at their past experience during

storms. and we looked at future in terms of what might happen.

We did work for countries of Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, parts of Japan,

and almost all of that early work was done overseas because most U.S.

companies weren't particularly interested.

We're extremely vulnerable.

In fact, we've been designing the power grid for decades without any awareness

of this threat environment.

Essentially, we're playing a game of Russian roulette with the sun.

We're at a juncture here where we can do it right and get the protection built

in, or we're in for a train wreck.

The threats are known.

They have been studied.

Commissions have been formed.

Reports issued.

So if we've been aware of these risks for decades,

How did we get to this place where the power grid continues to loom as a

critical national weakness?

Let's find out.

I can give you 1.2 billion reasons why this has not been fixed. And that is the

$1.2 billion that the electric utility industry has spent in the last decade

lobbying. our federal Congress, along with political contributions to members

of key committees that could enact legislation to protect the electric

grid.

The reality is, as hard as it may be to believe, the federal government does not

have any direct authority to require the electric grid to protect itself.

From the beginning, The electric utility industry has always been essentially

self-regulated. And although they've made some efforts to protect the grid

from all hazards, nearly every objective expert believes they haven't done

enough. A big part of the problem? The electric industry doesn't feel like

protecting the grid from outside threats should be their responsibility.

And no other government agency wants to step up.

Nobody wanted to take responsibility.

So the Department of Defense, for example, you know, would say, well, an

EMP from the sun is a natural threat. So that belongs to the Department of

Homeland Security.

That's not our responsibility.

The Department of Homeland Security would say, well, an EMP can be caused by

a nuclear weapon or non-nuclear weapons by terrorist attack. And so that's a DOD

responsibility. And the Department of Energy, you know, that is responsible

for overseeing the electric grid would say national security isn't our problem

at all. So it belongs to somebody else, not us.

Just as the physical grid has been pieced together over decades, so is its

regulatory system.

It's overseen today by two agencies, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or

FERC for short, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or

NERC. Their names are confusing, but the end result is not.

FERC has delegated its power to NERC, and NERC...

is a pawn of the electric industry.

In essence, the fox is guarding the hen house.

Any time we've seen anyone put forth even bipartisan legislation that

would mandate that utility companies meet the very basic standard of

cybersecurity, it has always been knocked down by lobbyists. But the

reality on the ground is that a lot of these utilities are managing these

tangled webs of software.

Most of it hasn't been updated in a decade.

They don't want the inspections that would come. They don't want the

oversight that would come with government. They want to continue to

regulate themselves and be opaque.

When the commission and others of us who've been raising the alarm about this

have asked the question, don't you have children?

Don't you have?

people that you want to assure survive and the answer of course is whether

they're government bureaucrats or whether they're electric power utilities

executives yes they do and yet the inertia the intention

that it'll be somebody else's problem it won't happen on my watch is so profound

what all this means is that there isn't a single person or independent agency

in our government responsible for the nation's grid.

There's no one at the helm keeping the electric utilities honest.

And as a result of that $1.2 billion of lobbying expenditures made over the last

decade, there's been very little accomplished in terms of legislative

fixes at the federal or the state level. The utility industry has made itself

untouchable.

is a veteran U.S. Marine and served as a Lieutenant Colonel with combat

experience overseas.

He currently serves as the Director of Infrastructure Security at the nonprofit

Center for Security Policy, now managing the Secure the Grid Coalition.

He's committed and dedicated to the mission of securing the U.S. power grid.

The Chairman of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee of

IEEE USA.

once made some comments about how other countries such as Israel and the UK have

appointed a single champion to be in charge of protecting their electric

grids. He made a comment that in America, it's Waldo.

Where's Waldo, right? And that's true. There is no one person who's in charge

of the protection of the U.S. electric grid.

The president could designate somebody, give them the resources, give them the

mandate to actually get out there and fix our grid.

When there have been a couple of legislative or executive order success

stories, ultimate progress has been completely obstructed by bureaucracies

at various departments, such as Homeland Security and the Department of Energy.

Two recent administrations have attempted to enact legislation with no

ultimate success.

President Obama argued strongly for protection from geomagnetic

disturbances, or natural EMP.

An executive order relating to GMD was passed in 2016, but there was terribly

ineffective regulator follow-through, creating essentially no GMD protection.

In March 2019, President Trump signed an executive order seeking protection

against electromagnetic pulse attacks.

This was codified into law with the 2020 Defense Authorization Act early the next

year. But since he left office, progress has stalled, bogged down by inaction and

endless calls for more studies, which simply go over the same ground.

Some of the most recent progress reports on these urgent issues have been as

brief as four pages long.

If you think that this EMP and GMD issue is just a right-wing cause, consider

what happened in the state of California in 2018.

Its legislature dominated by Democrats unanimously passed two bills that

formally recognize the urgent threats posed by EMPs and geomagnetic

disturbances. I think it's appropriate and important for California to make a

statement about this. This measure urges the President and Congress to work

together to implement grid-hardening measures to help ensure our nation's

critical electrical infrastructure is protected from threats of electric

magnetic impulses and physical attacks on the infrastructure.

The problem is, four years later, there's still been no concrete action.

For those deeply concerned about these issues, California's failure to follow

through has been a profound disappointment.

So just because there have been many in the electric power industry who have

fought against grid protection initiatives doesn't mean that the whole

industry is opposed to this. We've seen some electric utility industry members

take good actions. We've seen Dominion Power has done a lot.

to secure its infrastructure against physical attack.

Duke should be commended for its work. CPS Energy in San Antonio, Texas is

another one that should be commended.

People have thanked me for my service as a Marine, and there's nothing that I

ever did in uniform that would compare to the service provided by those people

who work hard to keep electricity flowing.

The failure to act leaves people like Mike Mabee outraged. For him, the path

ahead is doable and crystal clear.

The way we have got to fix the electric grid is by holding the electric utility

industry accountable for making sure that the grid is protected against these

threats. And we have to hold the US government and the state governments

accountable to make sure that happens.

It's not that we don't know how to protect grid assets from these threats.

The U.S. Defense Department has for decades protected important strategic

systems, such as our nuclear weapons systems and communication systems,

against nuclear electromagnetic pulse. There are military standards that show

exactly how to do this.

John Houston of Centerpoint Energy charged his engineers with coming up

with mitigation measures for EMP.

CenterPoint, using Siemens Siprotec protection devices, worked with Siemens

to develop a compact, scalable digital substation protection and control system

that can survive EMP, IMEI, and other hazards for a fraction of the cost to

create an entirely new substation. That's a success story, and we're happy

to say it's already available.

Unfortunately, despite the availability and affordability of EMP mitigation

measures, utilities have been slow to retrofit their substations.

We know exactly what to do. We know how to do it. We know that it's not very

expensive, and we know it can be done in phases depending on what level of

protection we want. What we need to do is start with those things that are

hardest to replace, our large transformers. We start by protecting

them, protecting substations, protecting the transmission, the generation, the

fuel supply.

Microgrids enable us to get away from some of the real vulnerabilities like

huge high voltage transformers and these big power lines. We could evolve away

from the big grid. Every city could have its own independent power source. It

would also change the politics of electric energy in a way more responsive

to the people.

Frustrated by the obstruction and persistent delays, concerned citizens

from all walks of life have banded together in places like Rock Hill, South

Carolina and San Antonio, Texas.

The people of San Antonio are really the ones that own their own grid. This is a

municipally owned electric utility, Joint Base San Antonio, through the

leadership of Lieutenant General Stephen Quast and the Electromagnetic Defense

Task Force.

established a pilot project in San Antonio.

And right now, there are courageous military officers in San Antonio working

with engineers at CPS Energy to protect that grid against all hazards. It's the

first of its kind in its country.

Essentially, you do not have to be vulnerable to the fact that you use

electricity. San Antonio can say, hey, businesses around the world, come to San

Antonio and we will give you clean power and we will give you resilient power.

where nobody can take it away.

Another leading example is in Rock Hill in York County, South Carolina, where

local residents came together to take action.

They call it the Lake Wiley Project, and its purpose is to assure a viable local

grid during and after any kind of major outage that impacts the nation's

electrical power.

In searching for a place, York County was an obvious place to come.

So I went to the electrical engineering department at Clemson University, my

alma mater, and asked for the names of graduates at Duke Energy.

They provide electricity to all of York County.

Together, we agreed on working the problem from the bottom up.

The good news about this project and about studying EMTs is that it is

fixable. The preliminary studies that we've done show for about $100 per

citizen that you could easily take care of these type situations.

So as we look forward into how to make those investments, I think that's

something that's probably well deserving of people's attention and the funding

towards that. We know what needs to be done.

It's just a matter of a will to do it.

And the question about what's it going to cost, what is the price?

of the loss of life as we know it today what price tag do you put on that and

compare it to the few dollars it would be spent the people have to contact

their elected officials from the local level to the state level to the national

level we cannot afford not to do it because look at the damage and look at

what's going to happen if we don't so get educated get a call to action

I want to start taking action as quickly as possible. We have for far too long

talked about developing a strategy to develop a plan and start doing something

concrete to start mitigating what could be a horrific catastrophe.

I never want to be sitting here in the dark saying I told you so. People need

to stand up and encourage their representatives to demand that we lock

up our critical infrastructure.

This is a fixable problem, and it's completely bipartisan.

But we need to come together around solutions that will work, legislation to

provide structure and regulatory discipline, and then people on the

ground to get it done.

The highly credentialed EMP Commission has provided detailed recommendations in

their early reports to Congress.

On our website, we've outlined a few of the highest priority action steps to

protect our civilian infrastructure.

and we will ensure we will follow through.

How we respond to the looming threat facing our grid will ultimately be

judged by history.

Visit our website at griddownpowerup.com and send emails to your legislators,

utility companies, and regulators and urge them to take action now to protect

America's future.

We know that In most civic causes, execution tends to fail because there's

no follow-through.

To overcome this issue, we are supporting and sharing proceeds with

501c3 organizations with a history of fighting for grid protection.

We also urge you to contact your local government officials to demand that this

Achilles' heel in America's defense is addressed now.

Most elected officials do what their constituents want them to do. And so if

you are concerned about our electrical power system surviving, you need to let

your legislator know how you feel.

And if enough people make enough noise, we can get this through. I know we can

get this done.

There have been times in our nation's history when the American people have

stepped up.

and critical changes were made for the common good, which saved our country in

dark times.

The nation rallied during World War II, and private industry turned factories

into an incredible arsenal of democracy that defeated the evils of Adolf Hitler

and his Nazi regime.

Under President Eisenhower, The national system of interstate highways changed

the way our country conducts business.

And the civil rights movement demonstrated our nation's ability to

rise up against institutional racial segregation.

Now, Martin Luther King couldn't do it alone.

But a march in Selma, Alabama created a movement that inspired a million-man

march. which galvanized tens of millions of Americans to stand up and demand an

end to racial injustice.

Taking action against seemingly insurmountable odds is part of our DNA.

We, the people of the United States of America, the greatest country on earth,

must demand that we have a reliable and defensible power grid so that our

families can continue to thrive.

We need America's citizens to spread the word, act,

to make this happen.

In our country, failure has never been an option.

We got this, America.

Choose power up, not grid down.