US in danger of nation-wide electricity black out

One U.S. city has been in the dark for a week as the entire U.S. power grid is at risk of black out that could last 18 months.

The information comes from former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Jon Wellinghoff, who told the New York Times that the U.S.’s aging infrastructure is putting it at a severe risk of a nation-wide black out.

The issue was first raised by Wellinghoff in 2013 after armed assailants shot 17 transformers at an electrical substation near San Jose, California; it took Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) nearly a month to bring the California substation back online in 2013, and no arrests have been made.

After analyzing the incident, he discovered how easily the badly outdated U.S. power grid could be compromised if a coordinated attack hit the 10 most important substations in the country’s three sections: Western, Eastern and Texas Interconnections.

“We came up with some very astounding numbers,” Wellinghoff told the publication. “If you knock out nine total substations along those three grids, you can black out the entire United States,” he said.

Raising the alarms, he said mere 12-year-olds could easily find the substations through the internet, and anyone with enough guns could destroy them in 20 minutes. That’s all it takes to take out the entire U.S. power grid, he says.

He said that more than 75% of distribution transformers in the U.S. are older than their 50-year life expectancy, while larger power transformers which have shorter lifespans were an average of 38-40 years old in 2014.

All this while 75,000 people including 21,000 people in the city of Gary, Indiana, were still in the dark in northwest Indiana as storms knocked down power lines across the region.