More than 300 million Americans rely on electricity every day for work, entertainment and life-giving treatments. Yet, the nation's power grid remains virtually undefended from attack, be it solar flares or bad actors.
Tommy Waller and Kyle Shideler with the Center for Security Policy recently joined "1819 News: The Podcast" for round two to explain how the federal government refuses to protect critical infrastructure.
"If we lose electricity, then the rest of our critical infrastructures also fail to operate," Waller said. "… It gets really bad, really fast without power, is the reality… When we look at critical infrastructures, that one has been at the top consistently for the last decade-plus in terms of our policy focus is don't lose power."
He said the government continues to turn a blind eye to the fact that too much of the power grid nationwide is vulnerable to attack, sabotage or natural disasters.
"[T]he federal government has been made well aware of these threats, and so has the electric power industry. And they have willfully refused to fix them," Waller said.
While human attacks are possible, Waller said a solar weather event capable of knocking out the grid is "100% going to happen" in the future and that now is the time to prepare.
"I'm going to continue to brief the Secretary of Energy and all the people in the government about how these are real threats, and the standards are not there to protect us," he said. "We are completely vulnerable to that threat in the United States of America. There is absolutely no protection of the grid except for three locations for that particular threat of solar weather, OK?"
"It is a 100% fixable problem," he continued. "The cost nationwide to fix it is just over $4 billion, with a B, OK? Which, as I briefed the Secretary of Energy three times, is one-third of 1% of the Biden infrastructure bill.
"You've got 100% willful refusal to fix it. So you got a major problem with a 100% certainty at some point over the course of time it's going to happen. You have real-world evidence of catastrophic damage to grid infrastructure, and you have real tested solutions, solutions tested by the U.S. Department of Energy, and a willful refusal from the federal government to fix it.
"[T]hey see the problem, they know how to fix the problem, but they are intentionally not solving the problem, as though they almost want something bad to happen here."
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