Showing posts with label The Grid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Grid. Show all posts
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Tuesday, May 06, 2025
Monday, December 12, 2022
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
How to Live Off Grid Successfully
By Guest Contributor on September 12, 2016@prepperjournal
4.17/5 (92)
Editor’s Note: This post is another entry in the Prepper Writing Contest from John L. If you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and possibly win a $300 Amazon Gift Card to purchase your own prepping supplies, enter today.
If you have been wondering how to live off grid – “is it really possible?” and “Can I do it?” the short answer to all of these questions is, “Yes!”.
Remember: The only sure thing in life is Change itself. There is another important rule of life that is often overlooked:
“Anyone can only teach you what they know.” Learning is a lifelong process. The long answer is still yes, just with a lot more things to take into consideration. Living off grid will take a commitment of time, resources, and determination. You will really need to believe in what you are doing, have a vision for it, and want to make it work despite the obstacles that will plague you.
Living off Grid Takes Practice
Living off grid is not the easiest way to live. Until you do it you don’t even know the things that you are going to have to give up. The big things are easy to figure out: Refrigerators, Heating systems, Television, Kitchen Appliances, and THESE ARE THINGS YOU DO NOT HAVE TO GIVE UP!
There are other things that many people don’t think about until they are actually in the midst of it. Like indebtedness, careers, local churches & schools. Sometimes families and friends.
4.17/5 (92)
Editor’s Note: This post is another entry in the Prepper Writing Contest from John L. If you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and possibly win a $300 Amazon Gift Card to purchase your own prepping supplies, enter today.
If you have been wondering how to live off grid – “is it really possible?” and “Can I do it?” the short answer to all of these questions is, “Yes!”.
Remember: The only sure thing in life is Change itself. There is another important rule of life that is often overlooked:
“Anyone can only teach you what they know.” Learning is a lifelong process. The long answer is still yes, just with a lot more things to take into consideration. Living off grid will take a commitment of time, resources, and determination. You will really need to believe in what you are doing, have a vision for it, and want to make it work despite the obstacles that will plague you.
Living off Grid Takes Practice
Living off grid is not the easiest way to live. Until you do it you don’t even know the things that you are going to have to give up. The big things are easy to figure out: Refrigerators, Heating systems, Television, Kitchen Appliances, and THESE ARE THINGS YOU DO NOT HAVE TO GIVE UP!
There are other things that many people don’t think about until they are actually in the midst of it. Like indebtedness, careers, local churches & schools. Sometimes families and friends.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Prepping for Doomsday: Bunkers, Panic Rooms, and Going Off the Grid
Trends
By
Clare Trapasso
6:00 am ET
May 10, 2016
From left: EdStock/iStock; celafon/iStock; mik38/iStock
ginosphotos/iStock; Maxiphoto/iStock
The apocalypse has become big business. And it’s getting bigger every day.
In the ’50s, homeowners fearing Communist attacks built bunkers in their backyards and basements, hung up a few “God Bless Our Bomb Shelter” signs and called it a Cold War.
But today, Americans en masse are again preparing for the worst—and Communists are just about the only thing not on their list. What is? Terrorist attacks, a total economic collapse, perhaps even zombie invasions. Or maybe just a complete societal breakdown after this November’s scorched-Earth presidential election.
But this is not your Uncle Travis’ guns-and-canned-foods-militia vision of Armageddon preparedness. While the fears of survivalists and so-called preppers are modernizing, so too are their ideas and methods of refuge.
The business of disaster readiness is getting higher tech, higher priced, and way more geographically diverse, with state-of-the-art underground shelters tricked out with greenhouses, gyms, and decontamination units in the boondocks and the latest in plush panic rooms in city penthouses.
Welcome to the brave (and for some, highly profitable) new world of paranoia.
“There’s a lot of uneasiness in society. You see it in politics. You see it in the economy. The world is changing really, really quickly and not always for the better,” says Richard Duarte, author of “Surviving Doomsday: A Guide for Surviving an Urban Disaster.”
Prepping “gives them a certain comfort that at least they’ve got some sort of preparations to … take care of their family if things start falling apart all around them,” he says.
Better be safe with a safe room
If the booming sales of panic rooms are any indication, more and more city dwellers these days are obsessively worrying about everything from home invasions to terror attacks. And they’re backing up those worries with cold, hard cash.
Sales of safe (aka panic) rooms, where families can safely lock themselves away from most threats, are up 30% over the same time last year at Gaffco Ballistics, a Londonderry, VT–based installer which does much of its business in New York City, according to CEO Tom Gaffney. That’s driven in part by the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, CA, and Paris, he says.
Most of his safe rooms are actually fortified master bedrooms, with ballistic fiberglass–reinforced walls, a Kevlar-lined door that is purported to resist both bullets and sledgehammers, and bullet-proof windows—as well as a high-end alarm system that is designed to withstand burglars, rioters, and more.
Panic room controls
Gaffco Ballistics LLC
He also turns home theaters into radiation-proof rooms where residents can watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters while World War III rages on outside.
The rooms range from $250,000 to $1.5 million. (No one said paranoia came cheap.)
People are “just more aware” of potential threats, says Gaffney of his clients, many of whom don’t consider themselves preppers. “It’s a growth market.”
That paranoia has also been fueling business at construction company and safe room installer GoNavco Corp., a Troy, NY–based safe room installer.
Owner Joe Navarra began installing panic rooms several years ago after requests began pouring in. Now this burgeoning portion of his business is up about 50% over the same time last year.
His no-frills chambers start at $20,000, although most are in the $50,000 range. They’re typically installed in the closets or bathrooms of master bedrooms.
Panic rooms aren’t just relegated to the biggest cities and the biggest disasters. Author Duarte has several spaces in his suburban home outside of Miami that could serve as safe rooms with fortified walls and doors.
“You’re never going to stop a determined attacker” with his homemade safe rooms, says Duarte, who says he became a prepper after Hurricane Andrew destroyed his home in 1992. “But you can slow them down to give you enough time to call the police or figure out how to defend yourself.”
Survivalist properties: Living off the land
Of course, for some survivalists, cities will never feel safe. These are the folks who need to go far off the grid. But even this age-old concept is getting a makeover, and a business plan.
Some real estate companies are seeing big increases by specializing in “survivalist properties”—large parcels of rural land with homes targeted specifically to preppers, with full fortification and self-sustainable food and energy options. After all, why not grow your own tomatoes and kale while you wait out the end of the world as we know it?
For example, sales at American Redoubt Realty, a real estate firm nestled in the heart of prepper country in northern Idaho, are up 50% over the same time last year, says real estate agent Todd Savage, who specializes in such transactions. His clients typically hail from Texas and California.
Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are often considered the epicenter of the modern survivalist property trend. But you can find pockets of it across the country, from North Carolina to Washington state.
“Each election cycle we see a huge uptick in interest and sales,” says Savage, who first noticed the trend in 2012, when Mitt Romney faced off against Barack Obama. “People are tired of both sides.”
His buyers are looking for very specific, “100% self-sustainable,” rural properties, at least 10 acres and up, says Savage. To make it true prepper property, the land must have at least two abundant water sources, like a well and a stream; alternative energy, like solar panels or hydropower; and the ability to grow food.
It must also be easily defendable against a multitude of threats, with either bunkers or safe rooms or simply reinforced doors and windows and a lot of ammunition.
Properties already outfitted with solar panels or hydropower are particularly in demand since they can be expensive to install, he says.
Self-sustaining power sources such as solar are key. AmericanRedoubtRealty.com
Survivalists are also particularly hungry for metal containers they can convert into shelters and bury underground, as well as Quonsets, those steel, half-moon-shaped shelters that can be built into mountainsides, says Jake Crites, a real estate broker at Jake’s Old West Properties in Ashfork, AZ. He’s seen a big uptick over the past two years.
Emergency Quonset
jakesoldwestproperties.com
Better have deep pockets for a bunker
Likewise, sales at bunker builder Rising S Co. have never been better. They shot up 20% to 25% over the past two years for the radiation-resistant shelters, which can be sunk 33 feet underground and tricked out with gyms, greenhouses, and water filtration systems that can even enable dwellers to drink their own urine if need be. Ewww!
“The more politics that are played on TV, the more our sales go up,” says proud prepper Clyde Scott, owner of the Kemp, TX–based company. “People are in fear of our government passing laws to take their guns away and not allowing them to protect themselves,” including against a foreign invasion.
The company sells nearly two dozen, air- and water-tight steel bunkers a year, which can range from $40,000 to $10 million each. They bear little resemblance to the bare-bulb bomb shelters of the ’50s. The bulk of sales are in Texas, but the end-of-the-world-proof shelters are also big in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Florida, Scott says.
Bunkers soon to be under 10 feet of dirt
Most of his clients, from surgeons to billionaires, work in cities and are successful businesspeople with families. The bunkers are typically installed on their “bug out” properties, secondary residences in the country where preppers can go if (or when, depending on whom you talk to) disaster hits.
Business is also good over at Ultimate Bunker, based on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, where sales have nearly tripled each year since the company opened shop four years ago. General contractor Mike Peters got into bunkers (literally, folks!) after watching the TV show “Doomsday Preppers” on the National Geographic Channel. He was convinced he could build them better.
His underground shelters start at $59,000 and go way up from there. His top-of-the-line model has areas for raising rabbits and fish. The majority of his sales are in the $500,000 range.
“Almost everything I do is off-ground and located in the middle of nowhere,” says Peters, who often powers the shelters with solar panels placed on nearby sheds.
Customers “want a bunker right now because they feel the country is doomed after the election,” he says. “It doesn’t matter who wins; we’re in trouble.”
Clare Trapasso is the senior news editor of realtor.com. She previously covered finance for a Financial Times publication and wrote for the New York Daily News. Clare also teaches journalism at a local college, loves food festivals and bike trips, and enjoys playing with her dog.
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
The Frightening Reality About How Easily Hackers Could Shut Down The US
Geoffrey Ingersoll Aug. 6, 2013, 9:22 AM 5,545 14
via NASA
Hacking into and shutting down industrial systems on which the U.S. relies is staggeringly easy, according to recent presentations from the Black Hat hacker conference.
Picture this: A few pump station operators along New York City's water tunnels fire up their computers to check the status of various water pressure readings.
But their networks have been hacked, and the readings they see on their computers are not the real readings. The adjustments they make cause the water pressure to skyrocket, blowing several mains, and cutting water to various part of the city, if not the entire city. Sure these systems have redundancies, but those redundancies are vulnerable too.
Flickr via altemark
Attacks require "significantly fewer resources and skill" than previously thought.
Simultaneously, in other parts of the Northeast U.S., hacked high voltage transformers spin out of control and explode. The blackout could cut as wide as the Tri-State area, and last for months, compounding any attempts to fix the water lines.
No water. No electricity. Pure mayhem.
Tim Simonite of MIT Tech Review recently talked to hackers at Black Hat about a vulnerability in a protocol called “Dbus” which leaves more than 90,000 industrial controls vulnerable.
Another vulnerability, this one in sensors “used to monitor oil, water, nuclear, and natural gas infrastructure” can be hacked into with “a relatively cheap 40-mile-range radio transmitter.” Those sensors could be “spoofed” to show false readings, hackers tell Simonite.
The Obama administration says it takes the threat seriously and has taken several steps — including an executive order — to try and improve network security. As Simonite points out, however, even though the information sharing program alerts companies to vulnerabilities, that doesn't mean the companies follow through with patches.
BlackHat attendees showed proof that the companies weren't doing all they could to protect their customers.
From Tech Review:
All the attacks to be mentioned today require significantly fewer resources and skill than what was required to employ the best-known attack on an industrial system, the U.S.-Israeli-backed Stuxnet operation against the Iranian nuclear program.
Previously, the Defense Science Board released a report that said viruses and exploits with Stuxnet-like results are incredibly complicated and likely require the backing of state-sponsored hacking units to perform. The Black Hat findings paint a completely different picture — it seems the idea of a few people in a basement causing cataclysmic damage is not really that far-fetched.
REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Giant power transformers located seven stories below the main concourse in the power plant of Grand Central Terminal in New York
“We have demonstrated a few scenarios that will cause a catastrophic breakdown — a pipe to burst or tank to overflow — while sending a completely different view to the controller,” Brian Meixell of Texas security company Cimation, told Simonite.
Steve Stone, principle cyber threat intelligence analyst for Mandiant, the company that outed China's hacking unit to The New York Times told Business Insider that every Chinese hack for espionage includes the potential for kinetic actions — that is actual destruction of property.
“Typically we're talking about external attacks. An entity or individual from the outside uses a custom piece of code to break into cyber security systems,” explained Stone. “Once you’re a valid user, you're gaining all the capabilities a valid user can do.”
Right now, China's hackers are only intent on stealing information, Stone explained. They burrow into a network, increase their permissions, become a “valid user,” and then steal trade secrets.
YouTube/NTDTV
A Chinese hacking unit was exposed by Mandiant just this year.
That “valid user” can also increase or decrease water pressure, or make it look like water pressure has decreased, prompting an operator to try and increase it.
Mandiant's opinion, though, is that it's only nation states looking to do this sort of penetration, like Iran's recent spate of bank attacks — likely prompted by President Barack Obama's admission that Stuxnet was of American origin.
“I don't know exactly why the Obama admin started blabbing about that,” said Professor Peter Ludlow, an Internet culture expert and professor of philosophy at Northwestern.
Ludlow said the administration's big mistake was not making sure the defense was bolstered before first releasing a virus like Stuxnet, and then second going ahead and admitting to kinetic cyber operations.
“I think that this has actually been happening for quite some time now,” said Ludlow. “And basically if you start weaponizing the Internet, even kinetically, it's not just going to be for people like nation states.”
Ludlow watched the beginning of kinetic cyber operations, long before the U.S. Military was even aware of the possibility, in a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game called 2nd Life.
According to Ludlow, gamers developed code that first altered the game itself, but then eventually would hack into users' computers. Then kinetic operations came up.
“There was speculation even back then, could you come up with a [software] device that could fry your adversary's computer,” said Ludlow.
AP
NYC power outage following Hurricane Sandy.
Ludlow says the fault for potential exploits like the industrial systems hack falls on the shoulders of government and private agencies who are pressuring the community to find the exploits.
“Right now you have state actors in a bidding war for zero day exploits. Used to be that security people would get zero day exploits for a Tshirt or something, now it's a half mil, million dollars for zero days,” said Ludlow.
A zero-day is a software or network hack that the public is not yet aware of. So when a hacker finds one, it's incredibly lucrative. A state actor or even a private company could use one to conduct espionage, or worse yet, real damage.
The way Ludlow looks at it, the more government takes interest in hacker conventions like Black Hat, the more capable individuals are going to be at leveling potentially destructive cyber weapons.
The previous assertion of the Defense Science Board was that only state-sponsored hackers are capable of shutting down an electrical grid. In response, the Board's recommendation was to protect the nukes, both from network hacks and as a potential response to hacks that would disable the U.S. grid or water system — like a sort of nuclear deterrent akin to the mutually assured destruction of the Cold War.
Stone is skeptical of this approach.
“Equating it to an atomic bomb and mutually assured destruction doesn’t match what we see. It’s already happened,” said Stone.
He's talking about attacks like the one in Korea, which was timed to destroy massive amounts of data, or like Stuxnet, which destroyed pieces of Iran's nuclear facilities.
Ludlow seems to think there's no end to the rabbit hole, that the exploits will continue to get easier to execute and more destructive as time goes on, turning the Internet into a “Afghanistan-like war zone,” he said.
Worse yet, as these exploits evolve, the need for state-sponsorship to launch attacks dwindles because the technology ceases to be something that requires money and resources.
Experts tell Business Insider that China and Russia are capable of these attacks but choose not to execute them because the globe's superpowers depend on each other. If the U.S. economy tanks because of a catastrophic attack on New York City, then Russia and China both suffer.
On the other hand, the world is full of ideological psychos. From lone wolves to terrorist organizations — the ability to exact a catastrophic attack is becoming more and more accessible.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/hackers-could-shut-down-the-us-2013-8#ixzz2bFn891AA
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Thursday, August 09, 2012
California braces for power-grid test amid heat wave
By Rory Carroll | Reuters – 7 hours ago
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California's electricity grid operator issued a rare statewide alert on Thursday warning residents to curb power usage in coming days as a heat wave threatens to strain its already taxed network.
The California Independent System Operation, or CAISO, a not-for-profit corporation charged with operating the majority of the state's high-voltage grid, issued a "flex" alert urging consumers to reduce power usage especially in the afternoon, when air-conditioning dramatically ramps up demand.
A ridge of high pressure, which brought above-normal heat to the Midwest earlier this summer, is now sitting over the Four Corners region, pushing high temperatures into the upper 80s and low 90s Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) across much of California, about 5 to 10 degrees above normal, according to AccuWeather.com.
CAISO is bracing for the heat wave and struggling to compensate for the loss of the 2,150-megawatt (MW) San Onofre nuclear power plant. That plant will be offline at least through the end of the summer, following a small radiation leak.
The CAISO warned earlier that San Onofre's prolonged outage increased the possibility of rolling blackouts in Southern California, particularly in the event of extreme weather or additional generation problems.
The electric alert may serve as a reality check for state leaders and grid officials who are struggling to deal with increasing demands for more carbon-free electricity over the next few years.
California's plan to dramatically increase reliance on renewable power sources, such as solar and wind, while shutting a number of ocean-side plants that supply power around the clock will challenge power grid operators to keep the lights on.
The grid operator said Thursday's situation was exacerbated when a large power plant went offline unexpectedly.
Businesses and homes were urged to curb use during the peak consumption hours of 11:00 a.m. to 6 p.m., through Sunday.
California's two major utility companies, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE), asked industrial customers to limit consumption during the hot spell, officials from both firms said.
"We are having above-normal temperatures, especially on the coast," Steven Greenlee, a CAISO spokesman, told Reuters. "We've got higher demand because of the temperatures and, as we had anticipated when San Onofre went offline, supplies are getting tighter."
EMERGENCY
The current heat wave will be the biggest test of the power grid since 2007, when a "stage 1" emergency was declared after operating electricity reserves fell between 7 and 6 percent.
CAISO has also ordered power-plant owners and transmission operators across the state to limit maintenance activities that might jeopardize equipment availability due to the high electric demands.
Despite the consumption alert, Greenlee said the state is not in danger of blackouts at this point.
"We would take other steps and release another warning before that would take place," he said.
Peak electricity demand ranges from nearly 47,000 MW Thursday, then trending downward to 43,000 MW by Monday as the above-normal temperatures abate. The state is capable of producing up to 58,600 MW, according to CAISO.
California is no stranger to blackouts, having experienced costly power outages in 2000 and 2001. It was later revealed that those blackouts were the result of power market manipulation, not supply-demand fundamentals.
The most recent major outage occurred in September of last year, when "human error" left nearly 5 million people across parts of California, Arizona and Mexico without power.
CAISO said Thursday's peak demand could reach 47,125 MW, which would surpass last summer's peak demand of 45,545 MW, set in early September. It would also exceed CAISO's forecast for peak power use this summer of 46,342 MW, under normal weather conditions.
California's all-time peak demand hit 50,270 MW on July 24, 2006 amid a heat wave. Since then, the economic recession and moderate weather have cut the state's electric needs.
Wholesale electric prices for Friday delivery in Southern California slipped to the mid-$50s per megawatt-hour, down $7 from an 18-month high set Wednesday.
Next-day power prices at the Palo Verde hub and the Mid-Columbia hub in Pacific Northwest also eased from Wednesday.
(Additional reporting by Eileen O'Grady in Houston; Editing by Dan Grebler and David Gregorio)
Source
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California's electricity grid operator issued a rare statewide alert on Thursday warning residents to curb power usage in coming days as a heat wave threatens to strain its already taxed network.
The California Independent System Operation, or CAISO, a not-for-profit corporation charged with operating the majority of the state's high-voltage grid, issued a "flex" alert urging consumers to reduce power usage especially in the afternoon, when air-conditioning dramatically ramps up demand.
A ridge of high pressure, which brought above-normal heat to the Midwest earlier this summer, is now sitting over the Four Corners region, pushing high temperatures into the upper 80s and low 90s Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) across much of California, about 5 to 10 degrees above normal, according to AccuWeather.com.
CAISO is bracing for the heat wave and struggling to compensate for the loss of the 2,150-megawatt (MW) San Onofre nuclear power plant. That plant will be offline at least through the end of the summer, following a small radiation leak.
The CAISO warned earlier that San Onofre's prolonged outage increased the possibility of rolling blackouts in Southern California, particularly in the event of extreme weather or additional generation problems.
The electric alert may serve as a reality check for state leaders and grid officials who are struggling to deal with increasing demands for more carbon-free electricity over the next few years.
California's plan to dramatically increase reliance on renewable power sources, such as solar and wind, while shutting a number of ocean-side plants that supply power around the clock will challenge power grid operators to keep the lights on.
The grid operator said Thursday's situation was exacerbated when a large power plant went offline unexpectedly.
Businesses and homes were urged to curb use during the peak consumption hours of 11:00 a.m. to 6 p.m., through Sunday.
California's two major utility companies, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE), asked industrial customers to limit consumption during the hot spell, officials from both firms said.
"We are having above-normal temperatures, especially on the coast," Steven Greenlee, a CAISO spokesman, told Reuters. "We've got higher demand because of the temperatures and, as we had anticipated when San Onofre went offline, supplies are getting tighter."
EMERGENCY
The current heat wave will be the biggest test of the power grid since 2007, when a "stage 1" emergency was declared after operating electricity reserves fell between 7 and 6 percent.
CAISO has also ordered power-plant owners and transmission operators across the state to limit maintenance activities that might jeopardize equipment availability due to the high electric demands.
Despite the consumption alert, Greenlee said the state is not in danger of blackouts at this point.
"We would take other steps and release another warning before that would take place," he said.
Peak electricity demand ranges from nearly 47,000 MW Thursday, then trending downward to 43,000 MW by Monday as the above-normal temperatures abate. The state is capable of producing up to 58,600 MW, according to CAISO.
California is no stranger to blackouts, having experienced costly power outages in 2000 and 2001. It was later revealed that those blackouts were the result of power market manipulation, not supply-demand fundamentals.
The most recent major outage occurred in September of last year, when "human error" left nearly 5 million people across parts of California, Arizona and Mexico without power.
CAISO said Thursday's peak demand could reach 47,125 MW, which would surpass last summer's peak demand of 45,545 MW, set in early September. It would also exceed CAISO's forecast for peak power use this summer of 46,342 MW, under normal weather conditions.
California's all-time peak demand hit 50,270 MW on July 24, 2006 amid a heat wave. Since then, the economic recession and moderate weather have cut the state's electric needs.
Wholesale electric prices for Friday delivery in Southern California slipped to the mid-$50s per megawatt-hour, down $7 from an 18-month high set Wednesday.
Next-day power prices at the Palo Verde hub and the Mid-Columbia hub in Pacific Northwest also eased from Wednesday.
(Additional reporting by Eileen O'Grady in Houston; Editing by Dan Grebler and David Gregorio)
Source
.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
This Week's Solar Flare Illuminates the Grid's Vulnerability
By PETER BEHR of ClimateWire
Published: June 9, 2011
A massive burst of solar wind that erupted from the sun Tuesday is expected to deliver only a "glancing blow" to the Earth's vulnerable magnetic field, NASA officials said yesterday. But it will preview what some experts call a potentially existential threat to the power grids of the United States and other nations, and the populations that depend on them.
Antti Pulkkinen, who leads NASA's "Solar Shield" satellite-based detection system at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said the cloud of ionized particles from Tuesday's violent "coronal mass ejection" will largely miss Earth, giving some North American residents a glimpse of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, this weekend. "It will not be a major event [for] the power grid," he said.
However, NASA spacecraft detected a much larger eruption last weekend on the backside of the sun headed away from Earth, generating a much faster-moving cloud.
"If this event was on a collision course with the U.S., we would have had a major space weather event," Pulkkinen said. "In this regard, we got lucky."
The next peak cycle of sunspot activity is predicted for 2012-2014, bringing with it a greater risk of large geomagnetic storms that can generate powerful rogue currents in transmission lines, potentially damaging or destroying the large transformers that manage power flow over high-voltage networks.
"Geomagnetically-induced currents on system infrastructure have the potential to result in widespread tripping of key transmission lines and irreversible physical damage to large transformers," a 2009 report (pdf) by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) and the Energy Department says.
Agreement on the seriousness of the threat, but not the solution
In the worst-case scenario, the stockpile of spare transformers would fall far short of replacement needs. Urban centers across the continent would be without power for many months or even years, until new transformers could be manufactured and delivered from Asia. The transformers are not made in the United States.
"If the solar storm of 1921, which has been termed a one-in-100-year event, were to occur today, well over 300 extra-high-voltage transformers could be damaged or destroyed, thereby interrupting power to 130 million people for a period of years," Joseph McClelland, director of the Office of Electric Reliability at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at a May 31 House Energy subcommittee hearing on the issue.
"The U.S. society and economy are so critically dependent upon the availability of electricity that a significant collapse of the grid precipitated by a major natural or man-made EMP [electro-magnetic pulse] event could result in catastrophic civilian casualties," Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) said at the same hearing.
The U.S. grid currently relies for its defense on warnings from NASA that would alert U.S. utilities to take actions to protect their systems. Tuesday's storm did not require a response, NERC said.
But the alerts have the effect of advice and there are no mandatory, enforceable procedures or emergency actions, NERC officials say. No comprehensive plan exists to retrofit the transmission grid with protective devices, although the Electric Power Research Institute, the industry's primary research and development organization, is developing a range of technical responses.
The threat is a top priority for FERC and NERC, their officials say, but the two organizations have sparred over the reach of new federal authority that could be created to upgrade the grid's protective equipment and defensive plans.
While the House last year passed the "GRID Act," addressing vulnerabilities of the bulk power sector to natural threats and cyber attacks, action in the Senate is tied up by conflicting bids for jurisdiction by five different committees.
Learning from a 1989 solar storm
Pulkkinen said that NASA's satellite and computer systems provide a vital early warning capability. The solar eruptions can be detected several days before the space weather strikes the Earth, and more detailed threat analysis can be generated 24 hours before an event begins, he said.
The warnings weren't available during the last major solar storm that began on March 13, 1989.
That massive impulse blacked out the entire power grid in Quebec in 92 seconds, giving operators "no time to even assess what was happening to the power system, let alone provide any meaningful human intervention," said John Kappenman, author of a January 2010 report (pdf) by Metatech Corp. prepared for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
More than 80 percent of Quebec's system was back up within 11 hours, Kappenman said. But he and other experts say the challenge to the U.S. grid is more serious for several reasons.
The Hydro-Québec power system draws almost entirely on hydroelectric generation, which permits a relatively simple and rapid restoration, he said. In contrast, the U.S. grid relies predominantly on steam electric generation, making restoration much more difficult, and a recovery as fast as Quebec's "is highly unlikely."
High-voltage lines act as antennae, attracting geomagnetic disturbances from the sun, and the larger and longer the lines, the greater the effect. The total length of U.S. high-voltage lines has increased nearly tenfold since the 1960s, Kappenman reported. The average length of the highest-capacity U.S. lines currently is four times greater than the smaller lines used more than a generation ago.
"Today's sprawling high-voltage power grids are more susceptible to space weather impacts than ever before," Kappenman said.
Designing defenses against space weather
Utilities have spent several billion dollars installing equipment to protect their transmission networks from lightning strikes, Kappenman added, but installations to defend against space weather are lagging. In part, that's because the research on the threat and the best countermeasures has not been completed. The transmission networks are so interconnected and interdependent that one company's investment in protective equipment could be nullified if a neighboring utility did nothing.
But some available defenses are also not being used, Kappenman said. He cited devices called "series capacitors" that can block the flow of geomagnetic currents on transmission lines. In the western section of the U.S. grid, many are in place. In the entire eastern grid, however, only two lines have this protection.
In the Quebec event, grid devices called compensators that were essential to counteract the rogue currents' effects tripped off to protect themselves. That "pulled the legs out" from under the province's grid, precipitating a rapid collapse of voltage, Kappenman said. This illustrates the need for complex modeling of the grid's vulnerabilities, he added.
The 1989 disturbance, which was felt by power systems deep into the United States and damaged a transformer at a nuclear plant, is far from the maximum. A report in the spring issue of the EPRI Journal notes that the 1921 storm was 10 times stronger (but it hit a far less developed and exposed grid network). The strongest solar storm on record hit in 1859, battering the U.S. telegraph system in places, EPRI said. That event may have been 50 percent more powerful than the 1921 storm, it reported.
Recent storms "do not represent the most severe storm events that are plausible," Kappenman said.
Richard Lordan, a senior technical executive at EPRI's Palo Alto, Calif., office, said his organization is researching a range of defensive strategies. The amount of long-distance power transfers can be reduced as much as possible, and generators close to population centers can be brought online.
"As a final resort, you can consider removing transformers from service," he said -- deliberately blacking out parts of the grid. EPRI has developed sensors that could detect high geomagnetic currents in transformers that would alert operators that the equipment had to be taken offline.
"If the storm is severe enough, operators have ways of islanding the system," he added, just as rolling blackouts have been used in extreme power emergencies like the Texas winter storm during this year's Super Bowl week. "It's preferable to take the system out and protect the equipment. It's a last-resort step.
"There are other [protective] devices under development," he said. "But the industry wants to be sure these devices don't impact the reliability of the system."
Critics call security process 'too slow'
The Department of Homeland Security has funded EPRI's design of a modular replacement transformer that is now being tested. It can be adapted to the range of substation configurations around the grid, and shipped in three pieces by truck to wherever it was needed. It will be installed for field testing in 2012.
But there are a host of unanswered policy questions before the replacement transformers could provide effective backup, he said, beginning with how they would be paid for.
"What would be the appropriate deployment strategy? How many are needed? Who owns them? Who maintains them? And who determines when an event is severe enough to warrant deployment?" he said. "These conversations are going on."
FERC and NERC agree that mandatory authority is needed to deal with solar weather emergencies that are days or hours away. NERC President Gerald Cauley says his organization "should be given authority under FERC oversight to address grid security vulnerabilities by enforceable means other than standards."
But they aren't in accord over whether the federal government can step in and direct a transformer replacement program. Cauley told the House hearing last month that NERC's current "bottoms-up" process for developing grid security standards that begins with its power company stakeholders is the right approach in this case.
The provisions in the House-passed GRID Act spelling out FERC's authority to order a transformer replacement program are not needed, Cauley said. "FERC already has the authority to order us to address these topics today," he said.
McClelland responded, "the commission has said on numerous occasions that when it comes to national security, the process -- the standards development process is too slow. It's too open, and it's too unpredictable."
Published: June 9, 2011
A massive burst of solar wind that erupted from the sun Tuesday is expected to deliver only a "glancing blow" to the Earth's vulnerable magnetic field, NASA officials said yesterday. But it will preview what some experts call a potentially existential threat to the power grids of the United States and other nations, and the populations that depend on them.
Antti Pulkkinen, who leads NASA's "Solar Shield" satellite-based detection system at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said the cloud of ionized particles from Tuesday's violent "coronal mass ejection" will largely miss Earth, giving some North American residents a glimpse of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, this weekend. "It will not be a major event [for] the power grid," he said.
However, NASA spacecraft detected a much larger eruption last weekend on the backside of the sun headed away from Earth, generating a much faster-moving cloud.
"If this event was on a collision course with the U.S., we would have had a major space weather event," Pulkkinen said. "In this regard, we got lucky."
The next peak cycle of sunspot activity is predicted for 2012-2014, bringing with it a greater risk of large geomagnetic storms that can generate powerful rogue currents in transmission lines, potentially damaging or destroying the large transformers that manage power flow over high-voltage networks.
"Geomagnetically-induced currents on system infrastructure have the potential to result in widespread tripping of key transmission lines and irreversible physical damage to large transformers," a 2009 report (pdf) by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) and the Energy Department says.
Agreement on the seriousness of the threat, but not the solution
In the worst-case scenario, the stockpile of spare transformers would fall far short of replacement needs. Urban centers across the continent would be without power for many months or even years, until new transformers could be manufactured and delivered from Asia. The transformers are not made in the United States.
"If the solar storm of 1921, which has been termed a one-in-100-year event, were to occur today, well over 300 extra-high-voltage transformers could be damaged or destroyed, thereby interrupting power to 130 million people for a period of years," Joseph McClelland, director of the Office of Electric Reliability at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at a May 31 House Energy subcommittee hearing on the issue.
"The U.S. society and economy are so critically dependent upon the availability of electricity that a significant collapse of the grid precipitated by a major natural or man-made EMP [electro-magnetic pulse] event could result in catastrophic civilian casualties," Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) said at the same hearing.
The U.S. grid currently relies for its defense on warnings from NASA that would alert U.S. utilities to take actions to protect their systems. Tuesday's storm did not require a response, NERC said.
But the alerts have the effect of advice and there are no mandatory, enforceable procedures or emergency actions, NERC officials say. No comprehensive plan exists to retrofit the transmission grid with protective devices, although the Electric Power Research Institute, the industry's primary research and development organization, is developing a range of technical responses.
The threat is a top priority for FERC and NERC, their officials say, but the two organizations have sparred over the reach of new federal authority that could be created to upgrade the grid's protective equipment and defensive plans.
While the House last year passed the "GRID Act," addressing vulnerabilities of the bulk power sector to natural threats and cyber attacks, action in the Senate is tied up by conflicting bids for jurisdiction by five different committees.
Learning from a 1989 solar storm
Pulkkinen said that NASA's satellite and computer systems provide a vital early warning capability. The solar eruptions can be detected several days before the space weather strikes the Earth, and more detailed threat analysis can be generated 24 hours before an event begins, he said.
The warnings weren't available during the last major solar storm that began on March 13, 1989.
That massive impulse blacked out the entire power grid in Quebec in 92 seconds, giving operators "no time to even assess what was happening to the power system, let alone provide any meaningful human intervention," said John Kappenman, author of a January 2010 report (pdf) by Metatech Corp. prepared for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
More than 80 percent of Quebec's system was back up within 11 hours, Kappenman said. But he and other experts say the challenge to the U.S. grid is more serious for several reasons.
The Hydro-Québec power system draws almost entirely on hydroelectric generation, which permits a relatively simple and rapid restoration, he said. In contrast, the U.S. grid relies predominantly on steam electric generation, making restoration much more difficult, and a recovery as fast as Quebec's "is highly unlikely."
High-voltage lines act as antennae, attracting geomagnetic disturbances from the sun, and the larger and longer the lines, the greater the effect. The total length of U.S. high-voltage lines has increased nearly tenfold since the 1960s, Kappenman reported. The average length of the highest-capacity U.S. lines currently is four times greater than the smaller lines used more than a generation ago.
"Today's sprawling high-voltage power grids are more susceptible to space weather impacts than ever before," Kappenman said.
Designing defenses against space weather
Utilities have spent several billion dollars installing equipment to protect their transmission networks from lightning strikes, Kappenman added, but installations to defend against space weather are lagging. In part, that's because the research on the threat and the best countermeasures has not been completed. The transmission networks are so interconnected and interdependent that one company's investment in protective equipment could be nullified if a neighboring utility did nothing.
But some available defenses are also not being used, Kappenman said. He cited devices called "series capacitors" that can block the flow of geomagnetic currents on transmission lines. In the western section of the U.S. grid, many are in place. In the entire eastern grid, however, only two lines have this protection.
In the Quebec event, grid devices called compensators that were essential to counteract the rogue currents' effects tripped off to protect themselves. That "pulled the legs out" from under the province's grid, precipitating a rapid collapse of voltage, Kappenman said. This illustrates the need for complex modeling of the grid's vulnerabilities, he added.
The 1989 disturbance, which was felt by power systems deep into the United States and damaged a transformer at a nuclear plant, is far from the maximum. A report in the spring issue of the EPRI Journal notes that the 1921 storm was 10 times stronger (but it hit a far less developed and exposed grid network). The strongest solar storm on record hit in 1859, battering the U.S. telegraph system in places, EPRI said. That event may have been 50 percent more powerful than the 1921 storm, it reported.
Recent storms "do not represent the most severe storm events that are plausible," Kappenman said.
Richard Lordan, a senior technical executive at EPRI's Palo Alto, Calif., office, said his organization is researching a range of defensive strategies. The amount of long-distance power transfers can be reduced as much as possible, and generators close to population centers can be brought online.
"As a final resort, you can consider removing transformers from service," he said -- deliberately blacking out parts of the grid. EPRI has developed sensors that could detect high geomagnetic currents in transformers that would alert operators that the equipment had to be taken offline.
"If the storm is severe enough, operators have ways of islanding the system," he added, just as rolling blackouts have been used in extreme power emergencies like the Texas winter storm during this year's Super Bowl week. "It's preferable to take the system out and protect the equipment. It's a last-resort step.
"There are other [protective] devices under development," he said. "But the industry wants to be sure these devices don't impact the reliability of the system."
Critics call security process 'too slow'
The Department of Homeland Security has funded EPRI's design of a modular replacement transformer that is now being tested. It can be adapted to the range of substation configurations around the grid, and shipped in three pieces by truck to wherever it was needed. It will be installed for field testing in 2012.
But there are a host of unanswered policy questions before the replacement transformers could provide effective backup, he said, beginning with how they would be paid for.
"What would be the appropriate deployment strategy? How many are needed? Who owns them? Who maintains them? And who determines when an event is severe enough to warrant deployment?" he said. "These conversations are going on."
FERC and NERC agree that mandatory authority is needed to deal with solar weather emergencies that are days or hours away. NERC President Gerald Cauley says his organization "should be given authority under FERC oversight to address grid security vulnerabilities by enforceable means other than standards."
But they aren't in accord over whether the federal government can step in and direct a transformer replacement program. Cauley told the House hearing last month that NERC's current "bottoms-up" process for developing grid security standards that begins with its power company stakeholders is the right approach in this case.
The provisions in the House-passed GRID Act spelling out FERC's authority to order a transformer replacement program are not needed, Cauley said. "FERC already has the authority to order us to address these topics today," he said.
McClelland responded, "the commission has said on numerous occasions that when it comes to national security, the process -- the standards development process is too slow. It's too open, and it's too unpredictable."
.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Living off the grid – how to escape the spies all around us
February 9, 2008
Living off the grid – how to escape the spies all around us
At the wheel, at the till and at the computer keyboard we are all being watched. Here's a few ways to keep your life private
Nick Rosen
Britain is the undisputed leader in the free world at snooping on its citizens. We are watched everywhere we go: driving to work, walking the dog, shopping, taking the train.
We are constantly under surveillance, by camera, by the chips in our debit, credit or store cards. When we telephone or e-mail our friends, numerous agencies and private companies instantaneously know what we are doing and where we are doing it from. We can barely turn on a light or the oven without someone, somewhere, tracking our every move.
We believe that we cannot escape this casual surveillance of our lives so we casually accept it. But thousands of people are finding ways to avoid the day-to-day tracking by stepping wholly or partly outside the system and its control.
I spent a year travelling around Britain meeting people who live “off-grid” and learning how to avoid the invasive sweep of corporate data-hounds and sidestep the intrusive gaze of closed-circuit television cameras.
Related Links
Analysis: bugging as easy as a walk in the park
Brown clears use of bugging tapes in court
Lawyer asks: was MP recorded for the FBI?
Four years ago there were an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras – the exact figure is unknown as there is no central registration system – but there are probably nearer 6 million cameras now.
There are up to ten on every bus and dozens at every station, so avoid London Transport if you want to evade the cameras. Most CCTV runs from speed cameras, which are less prevalent in the countryside. Maps of them are available on car websites.
Tinted car windows keep your face off camera but your numberplate will still give you away. Numberplate recognition computers are a classic example of “function creep”: cameras and computers installed for one purpose – congestion charging – are now used for another.
At night, use an infra-red light bulb to illuminate your numberplate. CCTV, like all video cameras, operates in that part of the spectrum near infra-red, so such a bulb above the number will flood the camera and is legal at the time of writing.
There is no legally enforceable code of practice on how these cameras should be used nor any widely accepted recording standards. Only one law governs CCTV cameras: for health and safety reasons they must be above head height – at least 2.5m (8ft) from the ground.
Since we are literally watched from above, covering the head provides a level of anonymity and privacy, as everyone who wears a hoody knows.
Just as intrusive as surveillance cameras is the use and misuse of personal data. Sometimes the two forces, government and private, come together, as in that delightful question on the electoral registration form that asks you to tick here if you do not want your data sold for marketing purposes.
From NHS records to store cards, utility company records to social networking websites, our data is being sliced, diced and resold. So how can we take back control?
For a start, you can swap your store loyalty card with a friend’s (once you have spent all the points) so that you will get credits for your purchases but the retailer will not know whose data is being collected. You can do the same with Oyster or other travel cards – the transport authorities will still have the aggregate data they need for management but they cannot track your individual movements.
You can switch from plastic to cash and barter and give or get free goods via Freecycle (www.freecycle.com). There may be tax issues here – it depends which accountant you ask.
Utility companies are huge holders of personal data but tens of thousands of people escape their clutches by living without mains services – water, power, phone line or sewerage. By paying council tax they remain eligible to use the NHS and schools.
For town residents with an existing electricity supply, it does not yet make economic sense to cut off power. In the city the most common kinds of off-grid dwellings are boats, vans and tents in parents’ gardens. The last need planning permission but normally nobody bothers to seek it. Finding acceptable spots in cities to live full-time in a camper van is possible but not easy.
Thousands of people live on urban canals and rivers, paying the minimum £75 a year to British Waterways for a “continuous cruiser” licence. They use no mains power nor need to pay council tax, and so evade the growing army of planning officers checking on the size of your patio extension.
Back on dry land, it is possible to dispense with your water supplier by having a borehole drilled in your garden, however small. You do not need a permit if it is not for industrial use. It will cost a few thousand pounds but for a large family on a water meter it makes economic sense, as well as limiting the amount of data accessible by the water company.
There are ways to ensure virtual invisibility online. The off-grid community uses encryption to ensure that its e-mails are not spied upon by governments or criminals. Hushmail (www. hushmail.com), based in Canada, offers a free service that allows users to conceal the source of their e-mails and encrypts them.
These codes automatically bring users to the attention of electronic eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency of the United States, which assumes they have something to hide (which usually they do not) but it does protect them from casual surveillance.
You can browse the web in relative anonymity by using Xerobank (www. xerobank.com), which passes your clicks through an anonymous “data cloud”, hiding the data normally revealed as you use a computer.
Facebook, which is owned by Microsoft, was recently criticised for teaming up with retailers to discover what its members were buying and then sending e-mails to those shoppers’ online “friends”, advising them of the purchases. This was done without the permission of the individuals involved and often without their knowledge.
There are ways of setting your privacy options within Facebook so that you would not be spied on and “outed” in this way but the settings are hard to find. The simplest way of dealing with the threat from social networking sites is to use an assumed identity when you join. It may be against their rules but the chances of being discovered are low and the worst that can happen is that your identity is closed down and you have to rejoin.
It is more of an effort to live off-grid, requiring a time-consuming vigilance as you monitor your communications and shopping habits to ensure that you are not giving away too much information. But I would rather spend my energy in positive action than in merely worrying, which is what most civil libertarians seem to do.
Nick Rosen is the author of How to Live Off-Grid.
Find out more about off-grid living at http://www.off-grid.net/
.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3338076.ece
.
Living off the grid – how to escape the spies all around us
At the wheel, at the till and at the computer keyboard we are all being watched. Here's a few ways to keep your life private
Nick Rosen
Britain is the undisputed leader in the free world at snooping on its citizens. We are watched everywhere we go: driving to work, walking the dog, shopping, taking the train.
We are constantly under surveillance, by camera, by the chips in our debit, credit or store cards. When we telephone or e-mail our friends, numerous agencies and private companies instantaneously know what we are doing and where we are doing it from. We can barely turn on a light or the oven without someone, somewhere, tracking our every move.
We believe that we cannot escape this casual surveillance of our lives so we casually accept it. But thousands of people are finding ways to avoid the day-to-day tracking by stepping wholly or partly outside the system and its control.
I spent a year travelling around Britain meeting people who live “off-grid” and learning how to avoid the invasive sweep of corporate data-hounds and sidestep the intrusive gaze of closed-circuit television cameras.
Related Links
Analysis: bugging as easy as a walk in the park
Brown clears use of bugging tapes in court
Lawyer asks: was MP recorded for the FBI?
Four years ago there were an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras – the exact figure is unknown as there is no central registration system – but there are probably nearer 6 million cameras now.
There are up to ten on every bus and dozens at every station, so avoid London Transport if you want to evade the cameras. Most CCTV runs from speed cameras, which are less prevalent in the countryside. Maps of them are available on car websites.
Tinted car windows keep your face off camera but your numberplate will still give you away. Numberplate recognition computers are a classic example of “function creep”: cameras and computers installed for one purpose – congestion charging – are now used for another.
At night, use an infra-red light bulb to illuminate your numberplate. CCTV, like all video cameras, operates in that part of the spectrum near infra-red, so such a bulb above the number will flood the camera and is legal at the time of writing.
There is no legally enforceable code of practice on how these cameras should be used nor any widely accepted recording standards. Only one law governs CCTV cameras: for health and safety reasons they must be above head height – at least 2.5m (8ft) from the ground.
Since we are literally watched from above, covering the head provides a level of anonymity and privacy, as everyone who wears a hoody knows.
Just as intrusive as surveillance cameras is the use and misuse of personal data. Sometimes the two forces, government and private, come together, as in that delightful question on the electoral registration form that asks you to tick here if you do not want your data sold for marketing purposes.
From NHS records to store cards, utility company records to social networking websites, our data is being sliced, diced and resold. So how can we take back control?
For a start, you can swap your store loyalty card with a friend’s (once you have spent all the points) so that you will get credits for your purchases but the retailer will not know whose data is being collected. You can do the same with Oyster or other travel cards – the transport authorities will still have the aggregate data they need for management but they cannot track your individual movements.
You can switch from plastic to cash and barter and give or get free goods via Freecycle (www.freecycle.com). There may be tax issues here – it depends which accountant you ask.
Utility companies are huge holders of personal data but tens of thousands of people escape their clutches by living without mains services – water, power, phone line or sewerage. By paying council tax they remain eligible to use the NHS and schools.
For town residents with an existing electricity supply, it does not yet make economic sense to cut off power. In the city the most common kinds of off-grid dwellings are boats, vans and tents in parents’ gardens. The last need planning permission but normally nobody bothers to seek it. Finding acceptable spots in cities to live full-time in a camper van is possible but not easy.
Thousands of people live on urban canals and rivers, paying the minimum £75 a year to British Waterways for a “continuous cruiser” licence. They use no mains power nor need to pay council tax, and so evade the growing army of planning officers checking on the size of your patio extension.
Back on dry land, it is possible to dispense with your water supplier by having a borehole drilled in your garden, however small. You do not need a permit if it is not for industrial use. It will cost a few thousand pounds but for a large family on a water meter it makes economic sense, as well as limiting the amount of data accessible by the water company.
There are ways to ensure virtual invisibility online. The off-grid community uses encryption to ensure that its e-mails are not spied upon by governments or criminals. Hushmail (www. hushmail.com), based in Canada, offers a free service that allows users to conceal the source of their e-mails and encrypts them.
These codes automatically bring users to the attention of electronic eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency of the United States, which assumes they have something to hide (which usually they do not) but it does protect them from casual surveillance.
You can browse the web in relative anonymity by using Xerobank (www. xerobank.com), which passes your clicks through an anonymous “data cloud”, hiding the data normally revealed as you use a computer.
Facebook, which is owned by Microsoft, was recently criticised for teaming up with retailers to discover what its members were buying and then sending e-mails to those shoppers’ online “friends”, advising them of the purchases. This was done without the permission of the individuals involved and often without their knowledge.
There are ways of setting your privacy options within Facebook so that you would not be spied on and “outed” in this way but the settings are hard to find. The simplest way of dealing with the threat from social networking sites is to use an assumed identity when you join. It may be against their rules but the chances of being discovered are low and the worst that can happen is that your identity is closed down and you have to rejoin.
It is more of an effort to live off-grid, requiring a time-consuming vigilance as you monitor your communications and shopping habits to ensure that you are not giving away too much information. But I would rather spend my energy in positive action than in merely worrying, which is what most civil libertarians seem to do.
Nick Rosen is the author of How to Live Off-Grid.
Find out more about off-grid living at http://www.off-grid.net/
.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3338076.ece
.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett On Grid Security
Your Host Ira Flatow (2-4PM ET)
[On National Public Radio]
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett On Grid Security (broadcast Friday, August 14th, 2009)
Our grid is vulnerable to attack from electromagnetic weaponry, and building a smart grid might make it worse, says Representative Roscoe Bartlett (R, Maryland). Bartlett, a former research scientist and engineer, offers his solution for securing our electronics from attack.
Teachers, find more information about using Science Friday as a classroom resource in the Kids' Connection.
Guests
Roscoe Bartlett Congressman
Roscoe Bartlett Congressman
Republican,
6th District, Maryland
Frederick, Maryland
Related Links
Segment produced by:Annette Heist
Segment produced by:Annette Heist
.
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