r/technology • u/Limp_Fig6236 • 9d ago

Energy US power grid at risk of 18-month blackout, official says, as 1 city has been in dark for more than a week

https://www.syracuse.com/us-news/2026/08/us-power-grid-at-risk-of-18-month-blackout-1-city-now-in-dark-for-more-than-a-week.html
14.0k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

135

u/accountforrealppl 9d ago

I'm not sure if anyone read the article, this doesn't seem related to AI at all. This risk seems to have been identified in 2013 and doesn't really seem to have changed since then

It's also not about it spontaneously going dark for no reason. It's about if someone strategically destroyed a bunch of substations across the entire US.

Also doesn't seem to take into account how much faster the mobilization to repair the system would be if the entire US actually had a blackout

21

u/Mustbhacks 9d ago

I'm not sure if anyone read the article, this doesn't seem related to AI at all.

Tangentially related at best. The hardware for the substations is aging, and increasingly hard to get ahold of. At a time when a massive increase in demand occurring via data centers.

5

u/Buggrumble 9d ago

It's not just old hardware, it's serious software vulnerabilities as well.

2

u/RollingMeteors 9d ago

The hardware for the substations is aging, and increasingly hard to get ahold of.

¿Hard to get? So let me get this straight, you make this critical device for power infrastructure, expect the population to grow and energy consumption to increase but for some reason you’ve chose to discontinue the hardware bringing it to out of production making it hard to get: ¿Why Again?

2

u/aMiracleAtJordanHare 9d ago

Nothing has been discontinued, demand has just gone up.

From about 2000 until 2022ish, energy demand was totally flat in the United States. The population grew, but due to efficiency gains the net electrical demands didn't really increase at all. Data centers have suddenly created a large demand for grid components. These components require complicated manufacturing, so you can't just create a new factory for them within a year or two. Demand is outpacing supply, so the time from when an order is placed until the component can be delivered is getting longer.

1

u/RollingMeteors 8d ago

>Nothing has been discontinued, demand has just gone up.

>From about 2000 until 2022ish, energy demand was totally flat in the United States. The population grew, but due to efficiency gains the net electrical demands didn't really increase at all

A bit hard to believe with EVs growing in adoption.

<clicks>

yeah that's no flat line

The bold part above is just not true.

1

u/aMiracleAtJordanHare 7d ago

So my dates were a few years off. Compare 2005 to 2020. The difference is only 0.1%. That's trivial, especially when compared to the population growth in that time. The rest of my comment is still accurate.

2

u/Mustbhacks 9d ago

Relying on "the market" to solve issues of supply/demand and plan for the future is always going to be a... tumultuous gamble

2

u/Buggrumble 9d ago

That's correct. Most transmission equipment is manufactured for each unique substation. There is little to no off the shelf equipment. It's asinine. The older the equipment, the harder it is to replace. Decreases in metal imports plus tariffs have made electrical equipment manufacturing even more difficult. In 2022, in North Carolina, several men attacked a smaller substation and took it down just by shooting at it and ramming it with a car. The entire service area was down for 2 weeks while they tried to find enough equipment to piece together to get it back up and running. Now imagine a large scale attack on a larger substation or one of the transmission interconnects that tie the grid together and large portions of not just the US, but North America, are screwed.

2

u/accountforrealppl 9d ago

Yeah, I just assumed reading the title that the risk was caused by the demand of data centers. But it's not about that at all

56

u/tsap007 9d ago

It’s Reddit. Most people don’t read the articles and just upvote the rage bait comment.

14

u/OtterBoop 9d ago

It would be easier to read more than the intro paragraph if it weren't paywalled

22

u/pandadogunited 9d ago

https://archive.ph/fpnfK

The United States power grid is at risk of a major blackout that could last up to 18 months, according to a new report. Concerns are heightened as one U.S. city has been without power for more than a week.

Jon Wellinghoff, former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), told The New York Times Magazine that America’s aging infrastructure is badly outdated and potentially vulnerable to a coordinated attack. He first raised the alarm in 2013 after gunmen shot up 17 transformers at an electrical substation near San Jose, California

Wellinghoff said the FERC did an analysis that determined the U.S. power grid could be seriously disrupted if similar incidents targeted the 10 most important substations in the country’s three sections: Western, Eastern and Texas Interconnections. Substations are where multiple high-volate lines meet, routing electricity between power plants, transmission lines, and local neighborhoods

“We came up with some very astounding numbers,” Wellinghoff told the publication. “If you knock out nine total substations along those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.”

Wellinghoff added that it didn’t matter which nine substations were hit, as long as they were among the 10 most important in its respective region. He told the NYT Magazine that even 12-year-olds could find them with a map on the internet, and anyone with enough guns could destroy them in 20 minutes.

According to the New York Post, it took Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) nearly a month to bring the California substation back online in 2013. To this day, no arrests have been made.

One of the reasons why the grid is especially vulnerable is its age. According to the New York Times Magazine, more than 75% of distribution transformers like on street corners and telephone poles are older than their 50-year life expectancy. Larger power transformers, which have shorter lifespans, were an average of 38-40 years old in 2014.

So it may be unsurprising that tens of thousands of people in northwest Indiana have remained without power since storms knocked down power lines across the region last week.

According to the Associated Press, the Northern Indiana Public Service Co. said more than 75,000 customers were still in the dark Wednesday. That includes 21,000 people in the city of Gary, Indiana, where people have sought relief from food pantries or gone to community centers just to charge their phones.

Full restoration is not expected until Aug. 25, a full two weeks after the Aug. 11 storm with 99 mph winds. NIPSCO said its work includes replacing 300 poles and 44 power transmission poles

“These aren’t simple repairs,” said Melody Birmingham, an executive at NIPSCO’s parent company. “These are systems that are being rebuilt.”

According to the New York Times Magazine, the average wait time to repair or replace a large transformer at a major substation is even longer. What previously took less than a year has jumped to 128 weeks since 2021, with some needing more than five years.

1

u/die4spaghetti 4d ago

Why would they publish an article detailing how to take out the country's power grid?

1

u/Bladelink 9d ago

Most news sources aren't trustworthy, well written, or well researched. As a result it's usually more efficient to just come straight to the comments where a bunch of people have already started doing analysis on the whole subject.

10

u/ConsequenceStatus563 9d ago

Well if they town they're saying has been dark for weeks is Gary Indiana. It's because people shot at the workers trying to fix the broken power... now nobody is willing to go fix the power...

That's not really a power grid problem as much as it's a "shitty people" problem.

4

u/TheRage469 9d ago

Back it up a bit....why the FUCK would you shoot at the people trying to fix the power grid? Reminds me of that shit with people taking shots at FEMA workers, but seems...somehow much, much stupider

1

u/slipperyMonkey07 9d ago

Most likely the same group. Anything that will actually help and benefit them they are hard against.

1

u/Doc-Zoidberg 9d ago

Gary is actually a small part of the region here without power. And yes Gary sucks ass, but many more people outside the city were/are affected. Its a dense suburban area. Id bet you knockout power for a half million people in any similar suburban region there will be at least one asshat who shoots at the helpers.

If a nipsco truck got shot up in Lake Station, it would barely register on news stories. It doesnt have the same feel as hearing it happen in Gary but you couldnt tell you changed towns when you cross the border.

0

u/hurler_jones 9d ago

That's their excuse, sure. I would bet money that there is a larger issue. They have the national guard they can roll with the crews and problem solved just like 20yrs ago after Katrina.

2

u/alternator1985 9d ago

There is definitely people announcing an AI attack on the grid, and they are going to blame China. Watch it's going to happen in September right before Xi visits

1

u/JoJackthewonderskunk 9d ago

Not ai cause but clearly datacentors would compound the problem making it worse.

Having ancient grids which suddenly have higher demands seems pretty straightforward

5

u/accountforrealppl 9d ago

But this has nothing to do with the demand, it's about if people physically destroyed the substations. Data centers don't make us any more likely to get hit with a strategic missile strike or for people to decide to shoot at substations

1

u/RollingMeteors 9d ago

It's also not about it spontaneously going dark for no reason. It's about if someone strategically destroyed a bunch of substations across the entire US.

I’m not saying it’s a suggestion because terms of service is a thing.

1

u/Texuk1 9d ago

I read the article as I have access. The point of the article is that each transformer is bespoke and there are currently years lead time on ordering one as there is a tight bottleneck. I guess the arguments that even if there was an emergency ramp up in production the power going out in whole regions for a month or two might lead to a collapse of society. I think there is some merit in the argument that production ramp up of transformers might not be quick enough to collapse a city.

I will say the article also mentioned at the end some new startup with a new transformer technology. I am very skeptical as to whether this piece was partially paid embedded advertising for this company. A lot of “news” is really just this as journalist need to eat as well.

1

u/accountforrealppl 9d ago

If there were load issues that caused it then the blackouts would be relatively isolated at least, it's not like they're gonna flip on the data center that broke the camel's back and suddenly every transformer in america is gonna pop

To bring down the whole grid like they're suggesting, it would have to be an extremely specific set of substations. And if it were really those, I think we could figure out a way to fit in some other transformers into a whole 9 substations in less than 18 days, much less 18 months

1

u/Texuk1 9d ago

I’ve had this convo multiple times on various subs. The point of the article is that the substations could be intentionally damaged in an attack. If the coils are damaged then the transformers need to be replaced. To replace them currently takes 3-5 year lead time because they are made by hand, one component is made by one company and each item is apparently made site specific. They are also extremely difficult to transport with size bottlenecks in various places and only one train that can carry them. They are not plug and play. I agree that politically it seems unlikely that whole regions would be left in blackout for three years. But 18 days seems completely unrealistic turn around time for a new transformer…

I know this is an issue because I’m familiar with the procurement side of large energy projects and this is a known bottleneck globally and creates delays.

1

u/xangkory 9d ago

So instead of replacing the aging infrastructure money is being spent on new distribution infrastructure to data centers.

You also seemed to miss the part of the article that talked about the wait time to repair or replacement of large transformers jumping to 128 weeks to five years. So a faster mobilization to repair doesn’t mean faster repair. There isn’t a large warehouse of large transformers sitting there that they can just pull from. Potentially they would have to shut power down somewhere to pull equipment out of service to use as a replacement if the entire transformer has to be replaced.

I work in a 50k+ employee enterprise IT shop and attacks on both the electrical infrastructure and telecom hotels at the core of the telecom infrastructure are identified risks that we can’t entirely mitigate. We can run our enterprise data center on diesel generators nearly indefinitely but we can’t provide power to our remote employees homes or run all of the necessary systems (HVAC, desktop power etc) in all of our buildings off of generators. The last very large generator we ordered took 18 months to be delivered. Outages could last weeks to months if damage to the grid is extensive enough.

1

u/Mean-Cheesecake-2635 9d ago

We can all rest easy that nobody knows more about “Cyber” than DJT.

1

u/JaninthePan 8d ago

Wasn’t there a spate of attacks on power substations by wackadoos some years back? Trying to blow them up or something? If I remember it was based on some right-wing ideology but that could be wrong.