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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

China - U.S. Electric Grid

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Written by Laurence F Sanford, Senior Analyst ASCF

Categories: ASCF News ASCF Articles

Comments: 0

Transformer

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a significant cyber threat to the U.S. electrical grid. Other threats are from Russia, Iran, North Korea, and assorted terrorist groups. All have demonstrated their ability to inflict electric grid harm in countries throughout the world, including the United States.

And, of course, the biggest threat to the American grid is “us.” To quote Pogo from Walt Kelly’s famous 1970 cartoon on humans causing pollution---“we have met the enemy, and he is us.” Our U.S. government's multi-trillion dollar mandated green energy transition is taking away resources necessary to upgrade and secure our existing grid and power sources. The results are fires in Maui and California allegedly caused by downed electric lines.

Without electricity, industry stops, hospitals are hampered (even with emergency backups), and the military is unable to defend the country. Millions would starve. Society would crumble, and chaos would ensue.

In 1977, New York City suffered a blackout due to lightning striking a small substation in upstate New York that fed into the grid. Riots and looting occurred in many poor areas of the city. In 2021 Texas suffered a major power crisis due to winter storms that disabled wind turbines and froze gas lines. Over 200 people died, and economic losses totaled over $250 billion.

Threats to the grid include:
● Cyber hacking
● Chinese-made electrical infrastructure equipment
● Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs)
● Open borders.
● Domestic terrorism
● Natural disasters

Cyber hacking by the CCP is an ongoing component of unrestricted warfare against the United States. Trillions of dollars in military secrets, industrial technology, intellectual property, and personnel information have been stolen from the United States by CCP entities through cyber penetration. Just because no known cyber-attack against the grid has yet occurred doesn’t mean that the CCP doesn’t have the capability. The grid, in many instances, does not have hardened security systems against cyber hacking. Electric vehicle (EV) charging technology can be hacked, affecting the grid.

Power transformers are critical to the transmission of electricity. Installed at a power plant, transformers “step up” the DC (direct current) voltage to efficiently transmit along high-voltage grid power lines. Near the end users, transformers “step down” voltage to 440, 220, or 110 volts to power machines. Inverters convert DC voltage to AC (alternating current) voltage for everyday appliances. The average age of large power transformers in the U.S. is 40 years, twice their planned life span.

In 2019, federal authorities commandeered a 500,000-pound transformer built by Jiangsu Huapeng Transformer Company of China after entering the port of Houston. It was trucked to Sandia Labs in New Mexico for analysis. Reportedly, the transformer had built-in “back-door traps” that would allow an adversary to shut down the transformer remotely and thus shut down the grid. An estimated 400 Chinese transformers are in the U.S. grid due to winning bids with the lowest prices. The United States has imported at least 170 million inverters and 3 million electricity meters from China. It would take only nine substation failures to bring down the entire U.S. grid.

In May 2020, President Trump issued an executive order declaring a national emergency over threats to the U.S. power structure. It banned the use of equipment from a nation that poses a national security threat. President Biden suspended the order on his first day in office.

Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) are a wave of electromagnetic radiation. It is like sunshine or a bright flash but on a different frequency. Electrons from EMPs interact with power lines, metal, and electronic devices. A large EMP from a solar flare or a nuclear device exploding high in the atmosphere over America would fry electronic equipment, computers, and telecommunications and knock out power. The nuclear device could be carried by a missile or a balloon.

Open Borders have allowed millions of undocumented migrants into the U.S.
Known terrorists have been apprehended; who knows how many terrorists have not been captured?

Domestic terrorism on America’s electricity grid infrastructure is of growing concern to security experts. In 2022 over 120 incidents or attacks were reported, an all-time high.
The U.S. power grid spans more than 7,300 power plants, 55,000 transmission substations, and 160,000 miles of high-voltage power lines, making the grid a soft target for terrorists. Thus far, security experts have yet to identify an underlying ideology.

Natural disasters happen. The climate is changing as it has been doing for the past 4 billion years. Weather patterns change, seasons change, and the sun’s flares and emissions change. Volcanoes erupt and spew ash that is carried worldwide by atmospheric winds as the earth’s mantle crust moves. Earthquakes demolish infrastructures. Fires are ignited by lightning.

Summary

The ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu said, “The supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting.” What better way to subdue the enemy than by bringing down the electricity grid in America? And the CCP is and has been waging “unrestricted warfare” against America since seizing power in 1949.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) now characterizes and understands modern warfare as a confrontation between opposing operational systems rather than merely opposing armies. War is won by the systematic destruction of the enemy’s operating system.

The cult of climate change and the search for the holy grail of zero carbon emissions is strengthening China at the expense of weakening America. Instead of spending trillions of dollars on intermittent power sources of wind and solar, electric vehicles, and batteries, the government should invest (without increasing the national debt by trillions) in strengthening the electric grid. Let the market determine what kind of car people can buy and not skewer the people’s right to choose by establishing federal mandates and money bribes ($7,500 tax credits) in favor of EVs for the wealthy.

Peace Through Strength!

Laurence F. Sanford
Senior Analyst
American Security Council Foundation
www.ascf.us

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