Texas’ electrical grid is vulnerable to attack. It can be protected, but public servants haven’t done so yet.
This investigative series has been viewed from the lens of Miriah Sachs and her family of four’s plight during the February 2021 blackout. Five days without electricity during freezing temperatures led to nine weeks of water damage in their kitchen caused by the winter freeze and the blackout.
The role of unreliable energy generation in this debacle was explored in part one of this series. Connecting to the national grid was exposed as a not-trustworthy solution in part two, while the problem of rising electricity costs created by unreliable energy was explored in part three.
But there is another threat to Texas’ sovereign energy grid. This is the one that threatens to bring Texas back to the 1800s and would strand the Sachs with more than five days of no power.
This is something that has worried Sachs. “I also worry about other things like attacks on the grid,” she said.
EMP Attack
State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) has been warning citizens and lawmakers about the state’s electrical grid since he was first elected in 2014.
What does he say the threat is? An attack from an electromagnetic pulse—or EMP. He said this happens when a small nuclear weapon is detonated roughly 200 to 250 nautical miles above the Earth’s surface. “If you were to detonate one nuclear weapon in that location above roughly Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, somewhere Central Florida, the gamma rays from the detonated weapon would impact the atmosphere, knocking electrons loose that would interact with the Earth’s magnetic field, creating huge, several 1000 volts of electricity,” Hall explained. “That would affect anything electrical or electronic, overload it, and burn it up. Very few things would survive, including large transformers and all the way down to small devices like telephones. It would be devastating … We would be thrust back into roughly the 1800s when there was no electricity.”
He said this threat has been known since the 1960s during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both powers at the time did high-altitude nuclear testing. Both found that such testing created an EMP, which took out the power in the surrounding areas. Both superpowers signed a treaty to end such testing.
But the threat remains. “Other countries acquired the capability due to the help from the Russians and theft by the Chinese, and then they pass it on to others like North Korea and Iran,” Hall said. “It is well known [that] all those countries have warned us or threatened us with an EMP attack.” North Korea, for example, has positioned itself as a threat. Hall said they own three satellites that are in a south polar orbit. They circle the U.S. multiple times a day. “Three of them have never sent back a signal that we’ve monitored. That means that either they were complete duds, or they contained a nuclear weapon just waiting for a signal to be dropped,” Hall said. “We don’t know the answer to that.”
But an EMP threat isn’t limited to satellites in the stars. It can come far closer to home. “In 2013, we intercepted a cargo ship going through the Panama Canal that had two SA-2 missiles on it, buried under about 10,000 tons of sugar and all launch control equipment,” Hall said. “One of the most popular theories of how an attack can be made easily is to use a medium-range missile, like a SA-2, to launch a nuclear weapon off the back of that ship sitting off the coast of Galveston, or San Diego, or Charleston, South Carolina, or all three. One missile, one small weapon gets to 200-250 nautical miles above [the] Kansas area in general, set off, and you have an EMP attack.” He added that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of Russian nuclear missiles were lost and remain unaccounted for.
The end result is not only a threat to livelihoods but also lives. Hall said a study by the White House Commission on EMPs concluded that 11 months after an EMP attack on America, 90 percent of the American population would be dead. We’d have lost our electronic components and have no way to repair anything. “People have come to realize that electricity is the second most important thing to sustaining life. The only thing more important than electricity in today’s world, in America, is air,” Hall said. “You’ll live longer without food and water than you will without electricity. Because you won’t get food, you won’t get water. As a matter of fact, you won’t even be able to tell time unless you happen to have an old wind-up clock that you kept, which your grandmother had.”
Solutions Unimplemented
The threat exists. It is known. Also known as the solution: hardening the state’s power grid.
What is hardening? It means making improvements to our electric grid to ensure it can withstand and recover from physical and cyber threats. Hardening can be as simple as keeping powerlines clear of debris, swapping out parts, or installing code that takes systems offline before an attack so they can be rebooted afterward.
This can be done, but it hasn’t been. Hall says it won’t be done unless state lawmakers act. “The power companies are not going to do it on their own,” he said. Hall has repeatedly filed proposed measures that would have required power companies in Texas to start the hardening process. He added that the power companies want the state government to pay for it if they mandate it. “I am adamantly opposed to [the] government paying for it because [the] government doesn’t have any money. It takes the money from the citizens and then uses it,” Hall said. “If the government is in charge of it, it’s gonna cost us five times as much to do it as if the power companies did it.” Furthermore, state law already allows the power companies to recoup the investment to harden the grid. “They can apply for a rate change to accommodate for the improvements. In that rate change, they can even make a profit,” Hall said. “It’s not like anybody’s gonna hurt the power companies with this. It’s just [that] they have leadership that is unwilling to be leaders.”
It wouldn’t even be that costly, according to Dr. Peter Vincent Pry. He is the Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, is a specialist in EMP warfare, and was a member of the EMP Commission. “It’s not as difficult or as expensive to harden against an EMP attack as a lot of people imagine,” he said.
If that’s all there is to it, then what is the hold-up? Hall said that since his election in 2012, the Texas Senate has passed proposed legislation about this issue. “It dies in the House, and it gets no support from the governor’s office.”
That brings us back to Miriah Sachs and her family in Cypress. They went through five days of frozen hell during the February 2021 blackout. She’s worried about an attack on our power grid. She wants something done to protect her and her family. “If we’re not taking any steps to prevent that, or any steps to secure or strengthen the grid, while we don’t have the issues pressing on top of us, I think that’s a real substantial failure,” she said.
Part five of this series focuses specifically on Communist China’s threat to Texas energy.
