All Episodes
Previous Next
March 21, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
11:53
Ted Koppel’s “Lights Out” - a book review
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So one of the things that's really fascinating about Ted Koppel's new book called Lights Out, which is a little bit about the cyber warfare threat of the grid, the power grid being destroyed in America, and also a little bit about preparedness.
He really goes into Mormon culture, for example, which is quite fascinating because Mormons are really the best prepared people on the planet.
But at least one of the things that I found most fascinating about the investigation that Ted Koppel did is looking into the fact that there are no power companies investing in defenses against cyber attacks that could take over and cause grid failure.
And when I say no, that's qualified.
Actually, in his book, Ted Koppel says that the larger companies, the big ones, are doing some things for cyber defense, but everybody else isn't because it's not profitable to do so.
It's too expensive to invest in retrofitting existing systems, for example.
It's too expensive and there's no immediate payoff.
Look at the economics of this and you'll understand why America's power grid is so vulnerable to cyber attacks from China or Russia or North Korea or even, let's say, a group of hackers that wants to bring the grid down.
You know, they call it a fire sale.
Everything goes.
The economics tell the truth.
The economics are that the industry of generating and delivering electricity is largely a private industry in the United States.
These are private companies that are delivering electricity for profit.
And therefore, it is a competitive marketplace.
So electricity costs per kilowatt hour are competitive.
And if a company cannot deliver those kilowatt hours economically enough or affordably enough, then they are going to lose their business and be out of business.
So there's a lot of price pressure.
Well, how do you keep price low enough To compete in the industry.
The answer is you don't expend money on things that don't have an immediate return on investment.
And retrofitting your systems to protect against cyber attacks has no immediate return on investment.
So defending your company, if you own an electric company, defending your company against China is not something that earns you more money next quarter or even next year.
It might prevent your company from being hacked in five or ten years, but there's no profit in it.
And you multiply this thought process, this rational decision, if you will, short-term decision, but still rational in terms of profitability, you multiply this across the industry, and you get an industry that is delivering affordable electricity to consumers, but is wildly vulnerable to cyber attacks and hack attacks, and thus vulnerable to being taken down.
Grid down scenario.
Courtesy of China, China's cyber warfare division.
So all of a sudden your computers...
I was speaking a little Mandarin there for you.
Evil China Mandarin voice there.
So your computers don't work anymore.
And then, well, what happens?
The grid goes down, and the problem is that the grid, once it goes down to a sufficient level, it's very, very difficult to get back up, to get back online.
The way the power grid is structured, it is a network of different power producing nodes and power distribution nodes, if you will.
And the system is obviously highly redundant right now when it's up and operating.
And if one power plant goes down, they can bring another plant online or they can import effectively electricity from somewhere else.
They can pay a higher rate temporarily to get it from a more expensive production center or source, and they can balance the load so that you get the right voltage at your house, and the number of kilowatt hours being pulled out of the system by consumers and commercial users is also being put back into the system through real-time power generation.
You've got to remember, electricity is generated, distributed, And consumed all in a fraction of a second, right?
It moves at essentially the speed of light.
So there's not much storing of electricity that goes on.
There are some large batteries in substations and small power generation centers, but that's really minimal.
Most of the power that's consumed is generated now and consumed now.
So, if you take down a large enough sector of the power grid, it's very, very difficult to get it back online.
And as Ted Koppel documents in his book, if you damage some of the key components, such as what he calls the LPTs, the Large Power Transformers, Damaging these components will require literally years to replace them.
These LPTs, and this is fascinating.
I didn't even know this myself, and I've studied this topic, but LPTs are very, very large.
They weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds.
They can't even be transported on normal railway cars.
They have to be loaded onto special cars, special railroad cars that are ruggedized, heavy-duty railroad cars to be able to carry the enormous weight of these things.
And by the way, they take about a year to manufacture.
Just to get one of them takes about a year, and they come from overseas.
Imagine that.
So...
Here's the shocking thing.
Many of these LPTs, Large Power Transformers, they can be blown out by an EMP weapon or EMP attack, and they can be critically damaged to the point where they're not usable anymore and they have to be replaced.
Well, many of them were installed when railroad tracks used to go to those power plants, but those tracks no longer exist.
You got that?
So maybe this LPT was installed in, let's say, Seattle, Washington in 1982, and there was a railway going to the building where they pulled that sucker in there and they installed it with big, heavy cranes, right?
Because it weighs hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Well, since then, that railway has been ripped up and replaced with, let's say, suburban housing, right?
So now the only way to replace the LPT is to basically tear down a bunch of houses to get to it.
Now that's just an example.
I'm not saying that Seattle has that situation.
I don't know.
But Ted Koppel stated in his book, Lights Out, that there are LPTs somewhere around America.
He didn't say exactly where.
But somewhere around America that cannot be replaced anymore because the railroad tracks no longer exist to deliver those components.
But even if you could deliver them, how would you get them in the first place?
Let's say there's a grid down scenario, lights out, EMP attack, the entire national power grid goes down.
You'd have to replace hundreds of these LPTs, and the wait time right now is about a year to get one.
Now, maybe if they increase capacity, they could produce one every three months, let's say.
Let's say they could do four a year.
Well, that means it's going to take a few decades, right, to get all these replaced all across America.
Well, what do you do in the meantime?
Ride a power-generating bicycle?
Keep pedaling, Bobby.
I want to watch Oprah.
You got to ride your bike to generate electricity?
How do you run the hospitals?
How do you deliver medicine to the pharmacies?
How do you run the banks?
How do you run the ATMs?
How do you run the food stamp system, upon which almost 50 million Americans depend to feed themselves the Doritos and Oreos that they think are food?
How do you do that?
Well, the answer is you don't.
I mean, what do you do, camp out for a decade, wait for the LPTs to be delivered from the Netherlands or wherever, Germany, wherever they're made?
Really?
You know, the funny thing is, if you really look at the system and you read this book, Lights Out, you find that there is no contingency plan.
There is no backup plan.
There is no real redundancy plan.
It's all just whatever...
If it goes down, we'll deal with it, man!
You know, the closest thing that we have to redundancy is nuclear power generators on Navy warships, which can dock off of cities like Miami and they could maybe power a few buildings or maybe a few blocks of buildings.
You can't power the whole freaking city with the nuclear power from a submarine.
No, it doesn't work that way.
It's not big enough, not by a long shot.
So most of America is screwed in this scenario and there really is no contingency plan at all.
And on top of that, really most of America is discouraged from prepping.
Preparedness and survival has been mocked, made fun of.
People have been called kooks for storing food.
And so there has been this assault on private citizens storing food at the same time that the federal government is stockpiling like an asteroid is coming or something, or aliens are only 18 months out.
You know, we're going to have to live in caves for a decade.
I mean, that's the way the federal government is acting.
Like, squirreling away every last scrap of food they can find and billions of rounds of ammunition, you know.
And meanwhile, they're telling the public, oh, you don't need to prepare.
No.
Three days is all you need.
You know, go to ready.gov.
Three days.
All you need is three days.
You're going to be good.
Another power back on in three days.
72 hours.
That's all you need.
That's what we're all being told.
So it comes down to the fact that there are some communities where people tend to be preppers.
And Ted Koppel interviews a bunch of people in Cody, Wyoming, by the way, which is a great town.
They have a great museum.
And Cody, Wyoming is east of Yellowstone National Park.
And in Cody, Wyoming, most people are, well, I don't know about most, but a lot of people are preppers.
Lots of people.
You go down South Fork Road there, you're going to get into some real hardcore preppers.
I know, because I know some of these people.
And they can survive no matter what.
Some of them hardly realize that there is electricity.
It's like, what?
What electricity?
I've been living off the grid forever down here.
But the truth is, there are people who will survive, and then there are the great masses of the uninformed city dwellers who will not.
▲
Export Selection