Preventing a catastrophic prolonged blackout?

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A Catastrophic Blackout is Coming - Here’s How We Can Stop It - TEDx talk by Samuel Feinburg, TEDxBaylorSchool, September 2017, posted on YouTube Apr 10, 2020:



I'll keep an eye out for updates on this problem and any progress toward solutions. I would appreciate it very much if others could do likewise.

Note: Please limit this thread to the problem itself and the question of what governments and electric utilities can do, and are or are not doing, to prevent or mitigate a massive prolonged blackout, and efforts to get governments to take this problem seriously. If you wish to discuss specific ways that individuals and families might try to mitigate the problem for themselves, e.g. backup generators for homes, please do so in the separate thread Individual mitigation of prolonged blackout disaster.

Hopefully no one here thinks the societal dimensions of this problem can or should be ignored. Probably also, most of us here are not homeowners and thus not in a position to do much if any individual mitigation anyway.

Therefore, IMO, we should all educate ourselves and our families, friends, and online acquaintances about this problem, and then (for those of us who live in representative democracies/republics) write to our elected representatives about the problem and its solutions.

If the Carrington Event happened today, we would be f****d.

Our blackout happened last year because Abbott thought dick pics were a far serious problem than hypothermia.

It would be more reasonable to lay a foundation that can still allow for survival and health without the requirement for constant electricity.. And that is definitely possible through local watershed management for watershed integrity, stormwater retention earthworks to keep aquifers charged and encourage springflow and elevate groundwater tables, local food systems integrated with ecological succession, and primary reliance on lifestyle technologies (shelter, food prep and storage, hygiene, medicine, entertainment, etc.) that are based on local resources rather than resources that must be brought in from somewhere else. Too often people will think of things like this and immediately say "I don't want to live in a cave and be a savage" or something like this.. but, for one thing, local ecological technologies do not need to be primitive nor do they need to exclude comfort. for another thing, having a foundation of this sort is not at all incompatible with utilizing nonlocal resources and trade for extra activity.. imagine what electronics would be like if people were creating them collaboratively because they wanted to, not because they were hired to overengineer some planned-obsolescence piece of crap in order to trade their time and energy for central bank coupons to buy access to things they rely on for survival and health that come from another part of the world...

in the case of a major geomagnetic storm, even beyond the level of the carrington event (which is also not a trivial likelihood, especially now as the magnetosphere is weakening, as it has been increasingly since around the time of the carrington event), there isn't a whole lot that we could do to protect the electrical grid. this type of event would go far beyond a simple blackout, we're talking like.. melting copper pipes and burning down homes with wiring in them, frying the circuitry in cars and cell phones, etc. in addition to just losing power..

if we were to take precautions to reduce reliance on electricity (not stop using it altogether), it would be helpful in the case of a less extreme simple blackout situation, and in the case of a large scale planetary geomagnetic storm and flooding of charged particles and cosmic rays..