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Feb. 13, 2024 - Epoch Times
53:31
[FREE EPISODE] How Communist China Could Cripple America’s Electrical Grid: Tommy Waller
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If this device that we depend on for the lifeblood of our modern civilization was able to be manipulated, if it was able to be turned off.
The U.S. electrical grid is critically dependent on extra-high-voltage transformers made in China, says Tommy Waller, president of the Center for Security Policy.
He's an expert on the U.S. grid and also stars in the documentary, Grid Down, Power Up.
And that's something that the Communist Chinese, that they understand about our society, our dependence on electricity.
Why is industry allowing these vulnerabilities to exist?
And what happens if the electric grid goes down?
So 1977, there was a 24-hour blackout in New York City.
There were more than 4,500 arrests of people who were looting, more than 550 police officers injured in the line of duty, and over $300 million worth of damage in that city in 24 hours.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Tommy Waller, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
It's an honor to be here.
Thank you.
About three years ago, as we're filming in May of 2020, President Trump basically signed an executive order declaring an emergency around the national grid.
And this happened after a transformer, one of these large high-voltage transformers in the grid of Chinese manufacturer, Tell me what happened and how...
This whole realization that we've had since then has progressed.
Sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
So yeah, it was May 1st, 2020, an executive order that declared, as you said, a grid security emergency.
And it was a recognition that our bulk power system has really now become dependent on certain countries that are adversaries, that really are hostile to the United States, including communist China.
And so in this case, as you mentioned, there's this transformer.
It was seized by the federal government the year before, 2019.
You can read about it in the Wall Street Journal.
And that transformer was brought to Sandia National Laboratory, where it was inspected.
And so the result of it was that here's a recognition that this really critical part of our grid, I mean...
Extra-high-voltage transformers many experts consider to be the backbone of our modern grid, and I can explain why.
But that if this device that we depend on for the lifeblood of our modern civilization was able to be manipulated, if it was able to be turned off, then that could be extremely problematic for us.
And that's something that the Communist Chinese, that they understand about our society, our dependence on electricity.
And so it's a very worrisome vector of attack that the Trump administration recognized, that they tried through executive order to address.
And unfortunately, on the first day of the current Biden administration, that executive order was suspended.
And so our nations imported about another hundred transformers from China in the ensuing period.
We're now somewhere around 400 in the U.S. grid.
And I just want to get you to tell me the scale of these things.
I watched the documentary, Grid Down, Power Up, recently, which you featured as an expert in.
And they talk a little bit about how to actually move these things around and get them installed.
This is a bit of an issue in itself.
And just trying to imagine what that would look like without power.
That's right.
So we talk about the grid.
When we say the grid, we're talking about the whole system that generates electricity.
It transmits it and distributes it.
In order to transmit that electricity, normally it's over long distances.
You think about the power plants that produce our power, they're not right next to the population centers.
These extra high voltage transformers are needed to step up the voltage and then to bring it back down.
It's that high voltage that allows it to travel those long distances.
These assets are absolutely critical.
Think about if that transformer stopped working for any reason.
Then you're not moving that electricity from where it's produced to where it's needed, right?
And so the assets themselves, the large ones, they take years.
I mean, it used to be a lead time of about a year.
Most of these are made overseas, unfortunately.
And now, even the current Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, mentioned that with the war in Ukraine, with the electrification of so many things in the world and in our country, that the lead time for these assets has gone from about a year to more like four years.
To build one if you're going to commission it.
To build and to import it.
And there's only so many rail cars and so many trailers that can transport these things across the country.
When you look at that Wall Street Journal article Rebecca Smith authored about this particular Chinese transformer, you just look at the cover picture in the article and you see the size of the trailer.
I mean, there's only so many of those assets, right?
So we can't afford to lose these for really any reason, whether it's because they were manufactured with malicious intent to manipulate them, or if they're attacked in different forms of attack, which we can talk about.
We can't afford to lose them.
Let's start here.
What does a situation look like where power goes down in a significant portion of the country?
All we have to do is look at history.
Let's take New York City.
In 1977, there was a 24-hour blackout in New York City.
It was a natural form of electromagnetic pulse, EMP. It was a lightning strike.
A lightning strike hit a substation in New Jersey.
It caused a blackout in New York City.
In a 24-hour period, there were more than 4,500 arrests of people who were looting, more than 550 police officers injured in the line of duty, and over $300 million worth of damage in that city in 24 hours.
So you think about society and our dependence on electricity.
I mean, within hours, the water stops flowing.
I mean, in an urban environment, right, it takes electricity to pump that water.
So if you're in an urban environment, You lose water right away.
Over time, you lose the ability to process wastewater.
Refrigeration is so critical to our food system.
There's a very significant nexus between food security and national security.
And food security depends on electricity.
So every single way that you look at it, modern society is not prepared to live without electricity.
And so in short order, you have suffering, and you have chaos, and you have societal collapse when we lose portions of our grid.
And our enemies know that.
So Grid Down Power Up asserts that As few as just nine of these power stations or substations around the entire U.S., if nine were taken down somehow, whatever means, that could actually result in a complete systemic failure of the grid.
When I heard that, I thought, how could that even be possible?
Can you explain this?
Sure, sure.
Yeah, well, the film, so Grid Down, Power Up, the documentary, does cover that.
But it wasn't the documentary that discovered it.
It was actually the federal government, right?
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which oversees our bulk power system.
And this came in the wake of a physical attack, physical sabotage.
Your viewers may remember 2013, that a substation in April, Of that year, a substation right outside of San Jose was attacked by gunmen.
It was a very highly professional attack, covered in the Wall Street Journal.
Rebecca Smith, same reporter, that discussed this sophisticated attack on this substation.
And so FERC did a study, a classified study, in the wake of that.
And what they discovered was if an adversary knew which nine substations to attack, that that could cause cascading failures that could black out the whole country for an extended period of time.
And it's that cascading failure that, I mean, we've experienced this before, August 14, 2003.
Some may remember the great Northeast blackout.
That was a cascading failure from a tree branch in Ohio, a striking transmission line.
A single point of failure caused a cascading blackout that resulted in 55 million customers losing power, some for up to two weeks.
So whether it's Mother Nature or whether it's an adversary, it is a system that can be taken down if it's not properly protected.
It's shocking how quickly and easily society can start breaking down.
We've actually kind of seen that in our society to some extent with, for example, the lack of application of certain laws in certain situations.
You see Portland comes to mind as an example, but this same thing has been replicated in other places.
It doesn't take a lot, it seems, to get I'm resistant to the idea.
Power goes out, suddenly you have a full anarchy going on.
How does that happen?
But actually...
This seems a lot more credible to me today than it did even a few years ago.
For a society to be resilient, it needs to be prepared.
It needs to recognize these threats.
And for it to bounce back, there needs to be virtue.
Think about how so much of our society, even today, lacks virtue, where instead of I should say that in many cases, of course, you see in the wake of hurricanes, whether it's Hurricane Harvey in Texas, the Cajun Navy comes from Louisiana to Texas, you absolutely have circumstances where good-hearted people, whether it's in America or anywhere else in the world, good-hearted people will come to aid others.
But to your point, Over time, our society in America has become far less resilient, far more dependent, and really lacking in virtue and the type of compassion and willingness to help a neighbor.
You know, years ago, those qualities were far more present in society.
Well, and to your point, I'm not going to belabor this, but I do think the COVID-19 pandemic exposed this, the reality that you're just discussing.
Right.
Let's jump into the nuts and bolts of it.
Sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
Multiple, serious, possible points of failure, right?
And some of them natural, and some of them terrorism and state actors and so forth.
So I want to start off with that.
And this obvious example, how is it that we started importing these absolutely critical pieces of infrastructure I'm just imagining here, we imported 100, you're saying.
I don't know if they've all been deployed by now, but just 100.
How many are in the grid already?
And just nine of those, if those could be compromised, potentially, or 20 or 30 or whatever.
Could shut the whole grid down.
That is a wild, wild point of failure, but possible point of failure.
Right.
So how do we get here?
Yeah.
Well, in a lot of similar ways to where we are as a nation and our dependence on China for lots of different things, right?
So we know that the Chinese military has been, not just the military, the CCP, has been executing unrestricted warfare against the rest of the free world, predominantly the United States, right?
And so one method of unrestricted warfare is looking for these critical vulnerabilities of a society and figuring out how to exploit those.
In this case, what the Chinese did, it was genius.
They identified that, for example, these transformers need a certain type of steel to be manufactured, grain-oriented steel.
What did the Chinese do?
They dumped into the market massive amounts of grain-oriented steel And they cornered the market for even the precursors that are needed to create the transformers.
I'm sure you and your viewers are very familiar with the inexpensive aspect of purchasing products from China, which is made possible by terrible labor, in some cases slave labor, if you want to call it that.
And also currency control.
Currency control.
I mean, multiple factors, but yes.
Exactly.
So the CCP has used these different factors to corner the market on an asset that any modern civilization needs to survive.
And so what that led to is a lot of other manufacturers being put out of business, where the utility industry looks and they say, okay, well, I've got to make an investment on a transformer.
What's the prices of these things?
Any investment is going to result in The utilities spending money and the ratepayers, all of us who pay our electricity bills, having to potentially pay more the more they spend.
And so it's understandable for them to look to save money.
And so that's exactly one avenue that the Chinese used in order to get into that market.
Of being able to provide these transformers.
And so we're in a spot now where our country, we need to, number one, we need to identify where these transformers are and get them inspected.
And then we need to be able to produce these domestically.
You know, ideally on-shoring production, and if not friend-shoring, you know, having allies produce them, and ensuring that those allies are not using components that come from Communist China.
How many more of these have been inspected to date?
So we know that one has been inspected at Sandia National Laboratory.
That's all we know.
And we know that a president of the United States declared an emergency on May 1st of 2020 after that, right?
And so we know this is a big deal, right?
The good thing is that there are people, even if the federal government isn't moving as fast as they should on this, which they need to move much faster, right?
States are waking up, right?
So you look at Texas, for example.
Texas has its own grid.
The last legislative session, they passed the Lone Star Protection Act, or Infrastructure Protection Act is what it was called.
And it was designed to be able to, at least moving forward, In a state like Texas to identify whether critical infrastructure components were going to be coming from adversaries to make sure problems like this don't happen in that state.
So this is something that, if the federal government is dragging its feet, that can be taken on at the state and local level.
Because at the federal government level, really, there's regulatory capture.
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It's so important to think about how to address this, and I actually want to cover that extensively in the interview.
Before we go there, I want to highlight to our viewers this idea that the Chinese regime has civil-military fusion as one of its top seven national priorities.
So the cornering of the market for these high-voltage transformers is as much a military We imported massive, I think it's like a 500,000 pound electric transformer from China.
They decided to send it to one of our national labs, we did, when it came in, as a country.
And they found hardware that was put into that that had the ability for somebody in China to switch it off.
It's possible these things are in the system.
The thing that scares the crap out of me is that this is just actually one way, shocking way, right, that the system can be compromised.
But we actually have, like, I think we discussed, I think, six Yeah, well just to reinforce your point about the civil-military fusion, right?
So we know the Chinese have executed unrestricted warfare, which includes economic warfare.
But let's back up even further.
Let's go a couple thousand years back to Sun Tzu, right?
Who wrote The Art of War.
He said, the supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting.
This is the way they do it, right?
And so to answer the question about the different vectors, and I think we should go to Mother Nature after, but let's just talk for a second about it.
Human-induced threats to the grid, right?
So we talked already a little bit about physical sabotage, like what happened in California.
We just saw this in North Carolina just at the end of last year.
You know, rifle fire.
There's lots of different ways that you can harm the grid physically.
Cyber attack, right?
Electromagnetic attack, which could be either localized, a directed energy weapon, or nuclear electromagnetic pulse.
And then the one we just talked about with respect to this grid security emergency declared by President Trump and then suspended by President Biden was supply chain.
And then finally, you look at just policies.
There will be blackouts if we continue some of the policies that our government has applied upon the nation just due to physics.
I mean, you can't shut down large baseload power generators like nuclear, coal, fossil fuel plants and replace it with renewables where the sun only shines and the wind only blows intermittently.
And also, at the same time, electrify everything, right?
So you think about the draw, the demand that electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging stations have on the grid.
That's going to require a lot more electricity.
Yet, because of lots of different government policies, we're shutting down the largest producers of electricity.
Physics will not allow us to continue to have the lights on.
The path that we're heading.
So it's policies that are human-induced and then actually, you know, malicious action by humans that can take the grid down.
And the reality is that right now the grid is so vulnerable to some forms of threat from Mother Nature that even if we deterred all of our human adversaries from taking it down, it's 100% certain at some point the grid will go down because of solar weather.
And that's a warning that I've issued at least twice personally to the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm.
And so far it doesn't look like we're doing nearly what we need to do about it, even though it's a completely fixable problem.
So the system is vulnerable to these basically electromagnetic pulses, whether from a solar flare or from an EMP or a nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude or, God forbid, closer than that.
Yes, that's right.
I mean, if we spend a minute or two to talk about the EMP phenomenon, right?
Because some viewers might think, well, you know, that sounds like science fiction, right?
In fact, unfortunately, you know, in the past, there was some ridicule.
You know, you're worried about EMP. Like, where's your tinfoil hat, right?
This is a real threat.
Our military hypothesized that there would be an effect when they detonated a nuclear weapon in the exo-atmosphere because they discovered in our ground tests, our ground bursts, that any conductor that was in the source region of a nuclear detonation, so say a Decades ago, when they did these ground-burst nuclear tests, they would build mock towns and mock cities around it.
They would conduct a nuclear test, and what they discovered was that the electric grid wires that were in that vicinity of the blast would be highly charged with a current, and it would travel down those wires and catastrophically ruin assets that were hundreds of miles away.
Source region, electromagnetic pulse is what they called it.
And so they thought, well, This may actually also happen if we detonate a nuclear weapon in space, in the exo-atmosphere, right?
So 30 kilometers or higher up into space.
That's exactly what we did.
The United States and the Russians, the Soviets, detonated nuclear weapons.
They're called high-altitude nuclear bursts, right?
Atmospheric nuclear tests.
And the results were a pulse, an electromagnetic pulse that was far worse than they ever expected.
A lot of the test equipment was actually ruined, right?
So our test took place about 900 miles from Hawaii.
It turned lights off in Hawaii, right?
And so both sides, the Soviets and the Americans, discovered they had this incredible, really super weapon.
And so they signed an atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty, stopped testing these in the atmosphere, and it became a highly classified knowledge that this was a method of attack.
Our country then spent billions of dollars hardening our nuclear weapons systems, our command and control systems against this.
So when people ridicule and say, you know, where's your tinfoil hat?
You're worried about EMP? No.
The U.S. Defense Department has been worried about EMP for a long time.
The problem is that we didn't protect the life-sustaining infrastructures, like the electric grid, against this really catastrophic threat.
Well, and you don't need a nuclear weapon either.
That's right.
There are these EMP devices, as I understand it, again, from the film, that there's even suitcase-sized ones that have a kind of more localized effect, but there's larger ones.
So none of this is actually theoretical.
Not at all.
No, a directed energy weapon.
I mean, our own military, there are systems that our military has where, you know, They can use a directed energy weapon to shut down electric infrastructure.
I mean, we have the CHAMP, you know, cruise missile system, can produce localized EMP effects.
It can pick out a building, among other buildings, and put a directed energy pulse into that building, right?
And so this technology does exist.
And so whether it's, of course, a high altitude nuclear EMP would be devastating because of the impact it would have, the widespread impact it would have.
But regardless, even if it were a localized effect, if someone found out which of those nine substations to attack with a radiofrequency weapon, and they didn't, and those substations were unprotected, it results in the same kind of blackout.
And you're also saying that the solar flare can actually have that exact same effect?
That's why you're saying it's a 100% chance that if the system is not hardened, it's going to go down at some point because there's a 100% chance almost that one of these flares will happen.
Solar weather, it's a natural form of EMP. I'll just briefly explain.
When we talk about nuclear EMP, there are three types of pulse.
I won't go into the details.
Your viewers can read all about this.
The E1 and E2 are the fast pulse.
The E3 component of a nuclear weapon is very similar to what happens when the sun produces a coronal mass ejection, these highly charged particles that leave the sun and travel into space.
It happens all the time.
In fact, just last month, in March, there was a massive solar storm.
It just happened to be the opposite side of the sun.
Had it traveled towards Earth, we might not be having this interview right now.
And the reason is, these highly charged particles, they react with the Earth's magnetosphere.
In fact, in the northern latitudes, people can see aurora borealis, the northern lights.
That's the visual depiction of the electromagnetic energy generated when these particles slam into our magnetosphere.
So you think about, just for the sake of viewers, an explanation.
If we were to start an engine, like our lawnmower, for example, There's a magnetosphere there.
There's copper wire and a magnet.
When you pull, the movement between the copper wire and the magnet creates electromagnetic energy that travels down to your spark plug and starts that engine.
The Earth, that magnetosphere, when it moves and it heaves and it wobbles, either due to a nuclear blast or highly charged particles from the sun, a coronal mass ejection, that movement induces current into the Earth's crust.
And what do we know about electricity?
It takes the path of least resistance.
So as the Earth's crust has these currents induced and it sees a transmission line, for example, if the conductivity of that transmission line is less than the Earth, It moves up through the grid, right?
Which of course it will be, because that's what its purpose is.
In many areas, in many areas.
And it depends.
And one of the good things is we have scientists, USGS Geomagnetism Program, that are literally surveying the conductivity of North America, of the crust of the Earth, to figure out in different areas how conductive it is.
But what we know...
Is that in the past, that conductivity has resulted in electric infrastructure being ruined.
And so 1921, we're here in Washington, D.C. right now, right?
In 1921, there was a solar storm.
They call it the railroad storm.
Why?
Because there were railroad stations in Connecticut and along the Northeast that caught fire and burned to the ground.
Why did they catch fire?
Because the telegraph operators That had telegraph lines that were, you know, 100 or plus kilometers long, had these ground-induced currents from a solar storm, right, that caused sparks and fires.
And so we know right now, and this is something, Jan, again, twice I've briefed the Secretary of Energy, and I showed her, and I could show you the tables that demonstrate.
That the industry-led and government-approved standards to protect our infrastructure against these harmful ground-induced currents, right?
Those currents go into our transformers.
The transformers, we said, are nearly irreplaceable.
That the level of protection we have from the current standards are so low That the grid will go down if we have a significant storm like the 1921 storm, like the 1859 Carrington solar storm that some of your viewers may have heard about.
So when I say that it's 100% certain, all I'm saying is the level of protection we have now and the standards that have been set by the industry and approved by the government guarantee that the grid goes down.
If we suffer a solar storm of a significant magnitude.
Never mind these other routes, right?
We haven't even discussed cyber attacks yet.
I can't help but think of solar winds, since we're talking about solar.
That's right.
And look, the same regulatory capture That resulted in a completely dangerously erroneous solar storm standard.
That same regulatory capture between the industry and the federal government has resulted in cyber security standards that we believe are not nearly what they should be.
Right now, there is no standard approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, that would require the detection Mitigation or removal of malware in the grid.
Yet we know that the Russians used what they call black energy malware to take down the Ukrainian grid.
And we know that some of that malware is in our own grid.
Yet there's no standard that requires the industry to find it, mitigate it, and remove it.
Despite the fact that our coalition has, on multiple occasions, petitioned the federal government to create such standards.
You would think they would care about this.
Some do.
Look, and let me just say, and I probably should have said this a lot earlier in the interview, that when people find out that I served in the Marines, hey, thank you for your service, which I appreciate.
The reality is there was nothing that I ever did in uniform or ever would do that actually would impact the day-to-day survival of the American people.
That's the truth.
And the people who keep the lights on in this country, They do.
They do provide for our survival every day.
So the first thing I should mention is to just thank those that work in the electric power industry.
They're actually trying to keep the lights on.
Engineers that are out there, there's some phenomenal people working really hard every single day.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the regulatory environment, when it comes to the rules that govern Well, there's a lot of people who have been obstructing and lobbying against really reasonable, prudent, and affordable methods to protect this infrastructure.
Before we start talking about those, tell me about yourself.
Yes, you've served in the Marines, you're in the Reserves later, and you've been briefing The Secretary of Energy on some of these vulnerabilities.
So where did you come from?
Sure, right.
Yeah, well, look, I felt a calling to serve in uniform really since I can remember him.
I think, to me, it goes all the way back to being about four years old and Christmas time at my grandparents getting G.I. Joe pajamas for Christmas, right?
That wasn't pajamas, it was a uniform, right?
And so I had this calling to serve and identify the Marines as the branch that I wanted to serve in, and I swore into the Marine Corps on my 18th birthday.
And I kind of told myself, you know, I'd stay in until they kicked me out.
And we reached that point.
I took a stand on the COVID vaccine mandate, and unfortunately, you know, mine and many others, our religious accommodations were denied.
I waited a year, I appealed everything I could, and was not allowed to continue serving.
And so that service ended.
But I was very blessed that the last half of my career in the reserves that I had this civilian job, the civilian job with the Center for Security Policy, right?
A non-profit founded by Frank Gaffney who worked for President Reagan.
Frank knew all about nuclear EMP years before it was ever declassified, right?
He's been worried about the grid for decades.
And so when I got this job, which is more than a job, it's a calling, right?
A calling in life.
He sat me down and he taught me about electromagnetic pulse and he taught me about these threats.
And then, you know, he assigned me the duty of managing this nationwide secure the grid coalition.
You know, I'm not a physicist.
I'm not an engineer.
I'm an infantry guy, right?
But I was so blessed.
To be the apprentice to some of the world's foremost experts in all of these different threats to this most critical infrastructure.
And to be able to translate from them to the American people and to our policy makers the reality of those threats, what needs to be done to defend against them.
And yet, our current Secretary of Energy includes President Trump before he was president.
The first time he was briefed on Electromagnetic Pulse, our organization made that possible.
Not just him, but many.
Anybody who will listen, regardless of political party, anybody who will listen to learn about this incredible vulnerability that we need to remedy.
It struck me that you were a forced reconnaissance Marine.
Tell me briefly what that means, or for the benefit of the audience, because it strikes me it sort of fits well with your current role, actually.
Well, you know, so the reconnaissance community in the Marines, it's supposed to be the eyes and ears for the commander, right?
We're supposed to identify our adversaries and what they're doing on the battlefield to be able to report back to our higher headquarters.
It's been a blessing and a privilege to be part of that community.
The Marines I served with are among the best in the nation.
And in fact, you know, 17 years ago, last night, you know, we lost just incredible patriots to combat operations in Iraq.
And these were recon Marines who gave it their all, right?
But the eyes and ears for the battlefield commanders is essentially what I've been focused on in the military.
As a reconnaissance officer.
But yes, it blended very well with my civilian job to be the eyes and ears for our policy makers when it came to profound threats to our security.
And so I was blessed that that civilian job actually made it possible for a short period of time, for a couple years, for me to work on this in uniform.
I mean, I was recruited by the U.S. Air Force's Electromagnetic Defense Task Force, EDTF, to be a staff member of that organization and to help them Form a task force to address electromagnetic spectrum threats to produce two reports on this issue that lay out the challenges.
And so it's been a privilege to serve in that capacity both in the reconnaissance community and when asked in the Air Force's EDTF. So maybe briefly, give me kind of the overview of the specific grid-related threats that are coming from China.
And, you know, I know you see that as kind of the biggest threat among the many you've just described.
Sure, sure.
You know, when it comes to China and their ability to affect our grid, we talked a little bit about policy, right?
So if we adopt policies here that rely on China to produce, whether it's transformers, Or the inverters, all the thousands, tens of thousands of inverters that we need for our renewables, right, for wind and solar.
The wind and solar technology itself, the markets are cornered by China in many of those areas, if not all.
So there's the policy aspect, right, where we embrace policies that create and enhance a dependency on China while at the same time creating vulnerabilities because we are not producing enough electricity.
That's one.
The second one, you mentioned before, cyber, right?
So we know that China has a significant cyber capability.
And that can range from cyber espionage, where they're stealing secrets in our own power production, whether it's nuclear power or otherwise.
Cyber attack, right?
Planting malware and different forms of malicious cyber intrusions into our infrastructure.
Supply chain, we mentioned already, producing those different things with, say, for example, a hardware backdoor that would allow them to remotely control or turn off or turn on certain things.
Electromagnetic attack, right?
So we know that the Chinese are obviously nuclear capable.
It's part of their war fighting doctrine to focus on both cyber.
And part of their cyber doctrine is the use of electromagnetic pulse, right?
That's both for the Russians and the Chinese.
Nuclear EMP is in the cards if they wanted to.
We just watched a balloon transit the entire continental United States.
That balloon could be a platform for an EMP attack.
It doesn't take a nuclear missile.
It doesn't take an intercontinental ballistic missile.
It can be one of their proxies.
North Korea had a vessel called the Chongchong Gang.
That went to Cuba, picked up two SA-2 missiles, surface-to-air missiles, on their launchers.
Now, they weren't nuclear-tipped at the time, but it turned off its transponder and transited the entire Gulf of Mexico and turned it back on right outside the Panama Canal.
So U.S. intelligence said, we need to look at this.
What did they find?
They trapped it in the Panama Canal.
They found these two missiles buried underneath tons of sugar.
But that could have been a trial run by a proxy of communist China, right?
And so a surface-to-air missile is another method.
And then just physical sabotage.
I mean, you look at our open borders.
You look at just our immigration policy with respect to the People's Republic of China.
They put the right people here with the right know-how.
They can conduct physical attacks on this grid as well.
Well, you know, just to your point, I'm getting lots of reports of actually very significant numbers of military-aged Chinese nationals coming through the southern border, through the Darien Gap and so forth.
Absolutely.
Michael Yan is down there.
Basically, tracking some of this is kind of shocking because you don't think of that.
You think of it as generally people from the region, economic migrants and so forth, but it's actually quite a number of people from all over the place, including Communist China.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And the reality is, as we said before, China has identified this vector of attack as one that could be effective in doing exactly what Sun Tzu said, right?
Subduing an enemy without fighting.
And so we have to recognize that they have identified that as a vector of attack, and we need to defend it with as much intensity as they are attacking it, right?
And that's what we've failed to do so far.
So tell me about the Secure the Grid coalition.
This is something that can get American citizens involved in the process of trying to help people become aware this is important.
I'm very convinced, even from our relatively short conversation on this, that this is an incredibly important issue.
And a completely bipartisan one, I might add, as well, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, so the good thing is that there's hope, right?
And look, as we talk about this, and if we get into the issues of regulatory capture, and your viewers are sitting here thinking, like, Why?
They probably are getting a little bit angry, and they should, right?
And so, you know, I go back to a quote from St.
Augustine who said, Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage.
Anger at the way things are, courage to make sure they don't remain that way.
And our Secure the Grid Coalition is a venue for people who get righteously angry about this inaction and who have the courage to work on it to do so, right, to collaborate.
It's co-chaired.
It's a bipartisan group.
It's co-chaired by Ambassador Woolsey, who was President Clinton's Director of Central Intelligence, and Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House.
And we've got hundreds of members around the country who volunteer.
We're talking about a volunteer effort in their states and at the federal level to continue trying to shape policies to protect this most critical infrastructure.
And I have to say that probably the single most valuable product of that effort just lately has been the film you mentioned earlier.
One of the members of that Secure the Grid Coalition, David Tice, sank an immense amount of money, time, and effort.
He was able to talk to Dennis Quaid, who's the narrator, and now you've got, I mean, just...
David Tice and Dennis Quaid going all around the country because they care about this, but the film they produce, Grid Down, Power Up, is the culmination of nearly a decade of interviews of the experts in our coalition in a film that can teach Americans everything I've been trying to brief policymakers for nine years.
It can teach them in less than an hour.
And the neat thing is that the producer on his website, griddownpowerup.com, Made a tab on that site, participate.
You click on that tab and all the policy recommendations that we've been promoting for years You click on that and you can actually get involved.
So we have now a platform where the efforts of our coalition can be massively expanded.
And people who watch this, who are concerned about it, can actually get involved by viewing the film, sharing the film, and then clicking on that participate tab, which will give them the ability to send messages to the people who could actually fix this problem.
Because again, like I said, it is a fixable problem.
Well, and so how?
Apparently, there's relatively easy ways to harden some of this infrastructure that aren't that expensive.
It's not a complete replacement of these transformers, for example, which of course is very difficult.
Yeah, so we'll take one example.
We'll take the example for the threat that we can't deter, the sun, right?
When we look at the sun, we know it makes those harmful ground-induced currents that can travel into those transformers.
Well, there's technologies out there—neutral ground blocker, for example— that if they applied those to the transformers that are vulnerable— not every transformer is vulnerable to solar weather.
It depends on the length of the lines.
It depends on a lot of factors.
But the analysis that's been done so far, the transformers that are vulnerable to that threat Were they to install these neutral ground blockers on the transformers themselves, that they could solve that problem for the entire United States for just over $4 billion.
And here again, this is what I explained to the Secretary of Energy after she made comments about both the infrastructure bill, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, $1.2 trillion, and she talked about the Inflation Reduction Act.
I only used the infrastructure bill.
Theoretically, it should be about Infrastructure, right?
One-third of one percent of that infrastructure bill could solve the problem of solar weather completely, right?
Four billion is one-third of one percent of 1.2 trillion.
Yet there's no indication, despite multiple, multiple attempts to get them to spend that money on that infrastructure.
Money that our elected officials have already set aside.
Thus far, there's not any indication they're spending it on that, which means if we don't protect those transformers, they go down at some point in the future.
And so that's just one example.
I mean, your viewers can just drive down the road.
They can drive down the highway, right, and see walls erected to protect neighborhoods from the sound generated on that street.
And keep driving and look at the substation that provides the lifeblood to that neighborhood with, you know, maybe a chain link fence and a padlock.
So, you know, where it should be protected, ballistic protection to make sure the transformers can't be shot up, they can't be viewed.
So, it's a fixable problem.
You would think that the industry would be very interested in maintaining the integrity of these directors, right?
Because their business depends on it.
A lot of people might find it confusing why they're not more interested.
Yeah.
And again, there are some in the industry that are.
There are some companies that are absolutely doing the right thing.
They just are doing it quietly and they're not stepping out and boldly talking about it.
But writ large, the industry as a whole, there is what we call regulatory capture, right?
And it is a little bit difficult to understand because you would think for business continuity's sake, right?
A lot of it has to do with just, you know, profit, quarterly, you know, your quarterly profit reports and really, you know, a love of money over doing the right thing.
And so, you know, we see this where As an example, Jan, the industry, the entire industry on an annual basis spends about $145 to $150 million in political influence and lobbying at just the federal level, right?
So in this city and in the offices where our U.S. elected officials serve, about $145 to $150 million a year.
That does not count the state and local level and all of the political influence and lobbying there.
That entire industry It pays about $4 million a year, the entire industry, in fines.
When you look at the last 10 years of the fines that they've paid for violating the rules that they created, right?
The industry creates the rules.
The federal government has to approve them.
When they violate their own rules, the federal fines are only about 4 million years.
So when you look at, you know, the balance of where they put their money and effort, it goes into maintaining control.
Right?
As opposed to actually protecting the infrastructure.
And that process is designed by the industry to be that way.
I mean, Jan, we talked about the 2003 blackout.
I think we should take a minute to look at two factors.
The result of that 2003 blackout in August, the Great Northeast Blackout, was that you had the creation of NERC, the North American Electric Liability Corporation, which is the industry nonprofit that makes the rules.
And FERC, the Federal Energy Relatory Commission, either approves or disapproves.
Well, that process after the tree branch in Ohio created a blackout That cost 55 million customers their electricity.
You know how long it took for them to create a standard for vegetation management?
Vegetation management means cutting trees, right?
Nine and a half years.
Nine and a half years to create a tree cutting standard, right?
And then when you look at the solar standard that I just mentioned, and what I showed the Secretary of Energy, and I can show your viewers, that process was similar in the sense that the industry controlled that process and used junk science, is what we call it.
They used bad data in to produce bad data out that would require them not to have to take action.
And probably one of the most egregious things, and we discovered this with the Air Force Electromagnetic Defense Task Force, When it comes to the threat of nuclear electromagnetic pulse, it just so happened, I think by divine providence, that The day that the industry and the government released their study on nuclear EMP,
the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded research organization, worked with the U.S. government on a three-year study on the effects of nuclear EMP on the bulk power system.
And the day that they produced and published that report, it's about that thick, happened to be the second summit of the U.S. Air Force Electromagnetic Defense Task Force.
And so I took the world's foremost experts and put them all in a room and handed them copies of that report.
And they started to go through it.
And the report that they produced, which is, I mean, your viewers can find it online at Over the Horizons magazine, an Air Force publication, pointed out Just how dangerously erroneous this study was.
And I'll give you one data point, because we just talked about the 2003 blackout, right?
That 2003 blackout caused by a single point of failure, a tree branch in Ohio.
When you look at the industry-funded, government-approved study by the Electric Power Research Institute on the effects of high-altitude EMP on the bulk power system, the table that they showed, the projections of the amount of electricity that we would lose in this eastern interconnection,
the eastern grid where we are here in Washington, D.C., They projected we would lose only about 40% of the electrical load that we lost in August 2003 with the Great Northeast Blackout caused by a single tree branch, one single point of failure, where a high-altitude nuclear blast would create thousands of simultaneous points of failure.
That one data point will give you an idea of of the industry funded studies that inform the government approved regulations that are supposed to protect our grid.
Well, I'm glad we're talking about this because the viewers of this program are no strangers to the concept of regulatory capture and this type of reporting that you're just describing.
So they might think to themselves, well, so where is the hope?
How can we change these large bodies that are determined to be doing things in this highly problematic way?
Right.
Well, the hope really comes from the bottom up, honestly.
I mean, we've seen, again, in Texas where some steps have been taken.
Right now, there's actually legislation in Texas authored by a state senator, Bob Hall, that would create a commission at the state level that would analyze all these threats and decide for the state How it would address those threats as opposed to just depending on the federal government.
There's no reason why states can't do that around the country.
Obviously there's an interconnected nature, right?
But it doesn't prohibit them from doing it bottom up.
We see pilot projects.
San Antonio, Texas.
One of the most valuable things that came out of that Air Force Electromagnetic Defense Task Force It was a pilot project in San Antonio, and I was so grateful for the opportunity.
In fact, the first summit, it was a classified briefing at the time.
All the results have now been unclassified, but they had to have one briefer cover the final briefing of all these generals and admirals and the former CIA director, and they said, well, we think it should be the Marine, right?
I was the only Marine there.
And it just so happened from this civilian job that I have that I had an expertise in this area.
And I knew for years that all the experts said, well, if we could just get one pilot project started somewhere in the country that can write the playbook for this and inspire the action, right, that's what we need to do.
And I put that in the briefing.
And all these people shook their head and said, yes, we need to do that.
And so right now in the town of San Antonio, You have Joint Base San Antonio and you have the surrounding civilian community who are actually working together to apply the know-how to protect against electromagnetic spectrum threats like EMP. Not just the infrastructure for the base, but the surrounding critical infrastructure.
That is a hopeful story that needs to be translated to the rest of the country.
And it can be, if we have enough people who get behind this.
Any final thoughts as we finish?
No, just that, you know, we're running out of time.
You know, Dr.
Peter Vincent Prye was the Chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission and he passed away late last year.
And that's what he says, you know, we know how to fix this.
He was worried about whether we had enough time.
And one of the things that he shared with me, I just would share with your audience, you know, We ought to be, once we grasp the gravity of this vulnerability, we need to, number one, we need to be better prepared.
You think about the citizens of Moore County, North Carolina.
That was a no-notice outage.
That physical attack, the rifle fire on those substations turned the lights off immediately.
There was no weather report saying a hurricane was coming.
We need to be better prepared to be able to live without electricity for as long as we can.
And, of course, as you learn about this, it makes you think differently about how to be prepared.
And so some, you know, think, oh my gosh, you know, Dr.
Price said it makes you want to run to the frontier, right, so to speak.
And what Peter Price said was that we need to follow the example of our founders, the founders of this country.
They had an infinite frontier to run to.
And instead, they turned and they fought tyranny, right?
And they won.
And so, yes, we should be prepared.
But we need to fight the tyranny of inaction by getting involved.
It's the same way that our founders fought the tyranny of their day.
And that's what's such a blessing now about having a film, Grid Down Power Up, and a website, griddownpowerup.com, and the Participate tab, that gives every American the opportunity to do just that.
Well, Tommy Waller, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
It's been an honor.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you all for joining Tommy Waller and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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