Well yes. This is not a one size fits all solution. There are obvious levels of criticality. Scale and depth of any damage also has consequences. Sure there is backup power in some cases, but only the highest levels generally have them. Each user would supposedly have considered their specific case and provided backup power according to the reliability of their specific supply, their mission criticality and their company economic limitations. Not every 747 carries the A-F1 kit. When I evaluate alternative power requirements, I use historic records of local power reliability. Its usually up there at 0.998 = 17.5h down per year. That does not consider intentional power outages. That does not consider any implications of a widespread outage. That does not consider implications of extremely long lead times that others may need to restore services. It's thought that there are still residual effects of the hackers shutdown of Colonial Pipeline working its way through the diesel supply of the NE and that attack didn't even cut one wire, or damage any capital equipment.
The problem is there is none, or very few, have any actual blanket requirement. Most were probably determined by project management's budget, or as an afterthought of their first blackout. Those hardened sites continued to function in Tenerife. No airplanes crashed on landing and the rest of the flights were cancelled or diverted. Aircraft handling worked, but still the airport failed. No comms. Ticketing and reservations failed. Airlines, Customs and immigration could not communicate with Madrid. Parking gates did not open. Traffic jams outside. No trains. Credit systems went down. Restaurants and shops closed services. Some water tanks emptied. Surface traffic control to/from the airport failed. Same happened at the cruise ship and ferry docks. One component failed resulting in chaos for the entire island. Commerce of 1 million residents and sometimes up to another 500,000 tourists was shut down entirely for a day. What's that cost? 100-200M immediately and maybe another 5x that in recirculating effects afterwards. Fortunately it only lasted 12h. If it lasted for longer time, we would start running out of fuel, food within a week. It takes 2.5 days to get from the mainland by ship. If there is nothing within 1000 miles in any direction, that was a widespread outage. But even if that system servives, it still does no good, if the distribution system crashed. That outage was not intentional. All the traditionally "critical services" were matained, but still chaos resulted. That means we missed protecting something critical. Something that ties everything together. I think that proves electricity is an extremely critical service.
Considering true total cost, the choice is protection or providing redundancy, including lead time of supply chain logistics. The economics will never give you the answer in a complex system where our limited modeling techniques have to deal with multiple black swan events. It's going to take a wholeistic approach. What exists now is an unreliable hodgepoge of connections to potential chaos ready to be exploited by whatever bad actor that cares to. Im not saying everything has to be built like Fort Know, but the game play rules today has upped the stakes. Plenty of money has been spent on security for black swan events, especially since 9/11, a lot of it where it never was needed. Its easier to break into the Capital Building in midday with gov in session than my local atm machine. I have to insert my card before the door opens. That's certainly a cheap solution for a transformer building, but they don't even have that. A lock, often on just a chain link fence gate that anybody can get past with only determination, is all you usually see.
Pipelines in insecure regions of the world have parallel patrol roads run daily, some with fibre optical footfall sensors, security cameras at all entries, armed guards, sometimes even a special layer of military security inside company security perimeters. Its not unknown to build a special military base adjacent to oil fields and export terminals. US Coast Guard now is monitoring LNG terminals. Sure costs go up, but the alternatives are not pretty either. Perhaps we have simply taken our peaceful society norms too much for granted in the past and its beginning to clash with all the "freedoms" that people think they can exploit in any manner they choose today. Read one story about some guy jamming security cameras around his delivery truck with a small transmitter he bought on Amazon for $20, complaining the FCC fined him $32,000 when he made some delivery to a work zone at an airport and jammed all their secirity cameras. Fortunately it's usually not terrorists, just freedom from surveillance cucoos messing up stuff, but maybe that modus operandi is changing now.
Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."
I don't particularly like the idea of crossing my fingers and leaving it up to the collective, with nobody actually running the show. We have to be able to function better than a big ant nest hoping that the worker ant aphid division found enough aphids to stroke today.![[pipe]](/data/assets/smilies/pipe.gif "[pipe] [pipe]")
