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Sept. 2, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
53:26
Don Brown: Securing the U.S. Power Grid Against Cyber Threats, EMP Risks...
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Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And we all have to ask ourselves a very important question.
What would life be like without electricity?
Well, it would be horrific, actually.
And if you've ever lived through a blackout or rolling blackouts, you know exactly what I mean.
But our power grid in the United States, which is really mostly three different power grids, we'll talk about that, is very vulnerable in many ways.
It's vulnerable against physical attack, you know, sabotage and terrorists.
It's vulnerable to cyber attack.
It's also vulnerable to the high power demands of AI data centers that are going to be using collectively in the future on an annual basis actual terawatt hours of power in the aggregate.
And that's a big deal because the United States of America only generates about 4,400 terawatt hours annually, which is less than half the power generated by China.
So how do we secure our power grid and how do we make it work for us to support our economy?
And also, since I'm in Texas, we're going to be joined here by a special guest in Texas who is an expert on this area.
His name is Don Brown, and he's part of a group called the Secure the Grid Coalition.
The website is securethegrid.com.
And he joins us today to talk about these very important issues.
Welcome, Mr. Brown, to the interview today.
Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you, Mike.
I'm happy to be here.
Well, it's great to have you here.
And the timing is perfect because as I'm in the AI space and we've launched our own free AI engine and we do all kinds of training and everything, we consume a lot of power.
I've been really looking at the power issue and I am very concerned about Texas when Trump announces these massive new investments in AI data centers, which we welcome.
But then the question is, where's that power going to come from?
So with that as the leading intro, where would you like to go with this conversation?
Well, I think we could talk maybe in two or three different places.
The first is probably the base load power.
How do you build a base load power?
And what's going to happen now that renewables are which have been disproportionately advantaged because of all of the green energy dollars, the Green New Deal, all of that that's been going on for a decade or so.
We haven't had any new gas turbine or coal and coal's been shut down.
And so all of that, they're taking away from what's called dispatchable power, the 24-hour available power.
And can I interject here?
I apologize for interrupting you so early, but that policy that you just mentioned of the green subsidies of green power, which is unreliable and difficult to store, that has put the United States behind the race to AI compared to China.
So those policies have crippled our nation.
Yeah.
They have.
And it's not just our nation.
If you actually look at all the developed nations and then all of China's belt and road projects, they've been putting Chinese equipment into all of those too, for solar and wind.
That's right.
So we're talking about 24-7 power.
The data centers need 24-7 power.
The sun doesn't shine 24-7 for some reason.
Yeah.
And wind sometimes picks up.
Usually you're counting on the wind to pick up when the sun goes down.
And then when you can't do that, they're counting on battery storage.
So these different forms of lithium-ion batteries for the utilities are being used as well.
And those alone have their own risks associated with them.
So with all of the renewables has come a great deal of instability into our grid.
Absolutely.
And can I add that I think that a lot of people who have been in charge of influencing the policies on this, I think they're completely irrational.
They're just not thinking about things like the number of cycle charge limits of lithium-ion or the fire hazard associated with them or the cost and the difficulty of mining lithium, et cetera.
It seems like we've been living in a delusional fairy tale where a lot of people, the green energy people, thought we can wave a magic wand and make kilowatt hours magically appear.
Yeah, I think the concept of free energy is what was sold.
Free, renewable, carbon-free energy.
And so that whole fear paradigm around the climate and everything else was used to sell it and to promote it worldwide.
And they've been very successful in doing that.
They have.
I mean, Western Europe is suffering an economic collapse or, well, at least an emergency reduction, you know, a concerning reduction in their economic output and their industrial output because of these policies.
So absolutely.
Particularly Germany.
So, but your group, Secure the Grid Coalition, from the name, I assume your group is focused on having power be reliable and abundant?
Yes, but we're focused more on the threats that come to the grid other than the base power.
So the base power just makes it unreliable.
And moving to the renewables is forcing you to try to find technologies that are really dependent on China.
So when you look at all the solar panels, they're coming from China.
You look at a lot of the inverter-based technologies that are coming in and the batteries and all the BESS's battery energy storage systems.
They're just BESS for short at the utility basis.
They're all coming, you know, it's like probably 80% comes from China.
So it's a huge amount that's coming from China.
And China has known back doors into that equipment that have been discovered.
They're in the inverters.
They can be in the battery management systems.
They can be in the, I mean, Sandia has found that Chinese-made transformers, big transformers, these are high-voltage transformers have been found to have back doors into them and they can be turned off.
That's very concerning, but I want to ask you a clarifying question.
I did not realize that transformers were connected to the internet.
I mean, are they run with software that gets updated from the cloud now?
And there's like an Ethernet port plugin.
Yeah, the transformers, they have substation controllers and they control, they monitor things.
So transformers have to have switching capability.
They monitor the temperature to make sure there's not thermal runaway.
There's not a number of different sensors that are inside the transformer.
It's called operational technology, but they're programmable logic devices that monitor the conditions of the transformer.
And these are $5 million to $20 million transformers, and they take about four to six years to replace.
But are they connected to the internet?
Yes.
Through the control systems.
They're called SCADA systems.
Right.
Now, they could broadcast, theoretically, could broadcast like a kill signal.
Yeah, they isolate them.
And if you, you know, there's ways that the cyber criminals can get through and plant, they can change code.
They can get in and change registers.
There's things like that that they can do.
And so there was definite on these transformers when they took them apart in the different national laboratories.
They discovered that they had back doors in them and they can be shut off.
Right.
And then, of course, the U.S. pioneered this kind of Trojan horse with Stuxnet.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's become much, much more of a threat now to all the 16 different critical infrastructures that we have in the U.S. 16.
We use it.
Yeah, we use it to control our water supplies, our wastewater, our communications.
So there's programmable logic in all of that, including oil and gas and everything uses programmable logic to open valves and close valves and monitor temperature and shut off circuits.
And that's all sensor-based stuff.
Well, Don, it occurs to me that even if a nation state like China or Korea wasn't initiating such attacks, that a future AI superintelligence, which may only be a few years away, could defeat these SCADA systems that you're talking about.
Yeah, it's a real concern.
And, you know, and part of the part of the things that we were working on for the last decade and then got passed in this session in Texas was a Senate bill.
It's called Senate Bill 75.
And it is a grid security bill that It looks at cyber and physical security and EMP and solar weather and looks at what the vulnerabilities are.
And then we'll come out with a report.
And if you look at, if you look at the ERCOT grid, which is 90% of Texas populations covered by ERCOT, that has about 1,800 high-voltage transformers and a number of substations.
And those transformers, as I said before, are four to six years to replace.
And then the substations, you know, so you got to protect all of that stuff.
And so this bill puts together a task force that looks at what are the right standards that we will have in Texas for that.
And then how to go about prioritizing which ones you're going to focus on first.
Yeah, and I'd like to know your conclusions to that.
But really quickly, I just want to show the screen.
You mentioned ERCOT.
I want to show ERCHOT right now.
Cranking about looks like 11 gigawatts right now.
And over here, it shows wind and solar, which is a very tiny portion compared to the total.
11 gigawatts is the reserve.
So that's the margin we have.
Oh, that's the margin.
Oh, okay.
But usage looks pretty close to that right now.
Well, that's, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, if you look at that, no, look over there, you can see it's.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, oh, it's only 100.
100K, 100,000 megawatts.
It's, it's.
What?
Yeah, it's 100 gigawatts is what they're going up against there.
So you're saying the reserve is 11 gigawatts?
Yes, it's 10%.
Oh, okay.
So.
Okay, I thought this was real-time usage.
So the real-time usage is actually 100 gigawatts roughly here.
Right.
That's what we're using now.
August is notoriously and September are notorious months for wind.
Sun's going down earlier.
Right.
And sun's coming up later and the wind doesn't always synchronize with it.
So that's when we have the brownouts frequently is, and that's when you need battery storage or you need peaker plants, which are the gas turbines that are coming on.
But okay, so this is saying actually wind and solar are currently accounting for almost 40% of the current load.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
There's times in the day where it does that.
And of course, that's much higher than I had anticipated.
No, it's very big now.
Wind in particular, and now there's many, many projects that are on the books for solar.
Okay.
So as you can see here, this is going to show the screen at nighttime, obviously the solar goes completely flat.
And then this is all wind at night.
Yes.
That's when you're counting on the wind to pick up.
And fortunately, that's when HVAC usage is much lower in the summer peak months.
Yes, after eight.
After eight.
So those hours between five and eight must be brutal for the they are.
That is the critical time.
And that's usually when you get your alerts from your utility.
You know, cut back on this.
Okay.
All right, great.
So thanks for walking us through this.
I wanted to explain all that to show people what's happening.
So all of this is very vulnerable is one of the is your core message and we need to shore it up.
So what based on the research that you're talking about, what would be the top priorities to secure the power grid?
Well, there's things that are natural and things that are man-made and are man-caused.
And the natural ones, for example, solar flares cause ground currents that can destroy those transformers.
So I think highest priority and probably easiest to fix is to go protect us against solar weather.
So a storm, there's a famous, there's a number of famous storms that have caused events back in the 1850s.
So this is like a 200-year storm.
There was a Carrington level event.
It's called Carrington.
You can look it up with spelled with a C. Yes.
And that event melted the telegraph lines and caused fires in the telegraph offices.
And what happens is there's the ejections from the sun hit our ionosphere and they start, you know, you see the Aurora Borealis.
It can reach all the way down, as it did last May, to the, not this May, but the May prior, where you can see the northern lights in Texas.
And sometimes those create currents that are in the crust of the Earth, and those currents and voltage discrepancies will try to go up through the high voltage lines, and it'll create a DC current and oscillation in those lines.
And that's what causes damage to the transformers.
So there are simple capacitor block, blocking technologies that are out there.
They're proven, and they can be put in strategic places to stop those currents from flowing.
And they, you know, as soon as you start getting a sensing a current flowing through there, you can shut it off.
The cost to do all of the Texas ERCOT grid for that is under a billion dollars.
So it's very doable to protect the whole grid.
And then going forward, you can just think of that as kind of an insurance policy, where you're protecting millions and millions of dollars worth of equipment and very long lead times to replace.
And so I would say that's the number one, not even man-made thing, but a natural-caused event that comes, we have solar flares that happen, and we're going to, without a doubt, it's with all certainty, there's going to be one that will knock out those transformers.
So take care of that now.
It's not a huge amount of money.
Does the wandering magnetic pole and the weakening of the magnetosphere, does that make solar flares more powerful in terms of induction of voltage?
Yeah, the stronger the magnetic field makes a stronger ground current.
So you get those strong ground currents up in the northern territories.
But you can also have that same ground current occur from a high-level nuclear EMP explosion that drives a bunch of ions into the atmosphere, and those are actually worse at the equator.
So when you put in this ground-level protection, and this is called the E3 pulse, it protects against both nuclear explosion and solar weather.
And in Texas, that protection really, the southernmost part of Texas, that protection needs to be 85 volts per kilometer.
So if you think of a transmission line that is 100 kilometers long, you've got 8,000 volts going into that transformer that is DC current, so you can see how that could cause overheating and burnout of the transformer.
And, of course, several nations have the technology to engage in high-altitude detonations of nuclear weapons with an EMP effect.
I mean, it's a natural effect of the detonation.
Yes.
It's been known for a long time.
And there's, I mean, the original numbers that came from this were derived by the explosions that were done back in the 60s.
And there's a famous one that was done over Kazakhstan by the Soviets, and they came up with what that ground current effect was based on the geomagnetic latitude.
Okay.
There's latitude, and then there's geomagnetic latitude.
They're different.
They're depending on the poles.
Which keep moving.
Which keep moving.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
Right.
And the conductivity of the terrain.
So in some terrain, it's rock, it's granite, it's not very conductive, you know, and some areas you're near the coast, and it's more conductive.
Right.
And it seems like an enemy of the United States, and I forgot the name of the report, but there was an EMP report a few years ago that predicted a very high percentage of a die-off within, I don't know, 18 months or so, following an EMP attack over the Continental.
But there's no need to be that nature.
united states do you recall that report yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's the that's the 2017 report um and that you could get a very good the easy way for for our your viewers to watch that is just to go to griddownpowerup.com and that does an excellent job of explaining these different threats and why we're addressing them there's a big focus on it in fact uh in trump's
first administration he had a focus he had an executive order 13 680 oh 865, 13865, that really assigned all the different departments, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, you know, actions to go address these threats.
Right.
And that, then, and that, that executive order is still active, but it never really got acted on in the Biden administration.
So I think that report I brought it up is called the Commission, or it's from the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from electromagnetic pulse attack.
So I'm showing it here.
And I don't recall the exact percentage, but clearly.
It's 90%.
It's 90%.
It's a 90% kill rate, unfortunately, within.
And it's, you know, back then they were saying it's going to be a year or more to recover.
Yeah.
But the transformers, because power is growing, demand is growing so rapidly all across the world, not just the U.S., all these transformers are in very high demand.
And so the lead time on any of this equipment is very long.
Even so, it's not just transformers, but even gas turbines, the lead time is pushing up three, four years.
Absolutely.
No, I've seen that myself because we're building new buildings.
And, you know, Schneider Electric and other providers will tell you, yeah, you got to wait till like, you know, 2029 or whatever.
Right, right.
You're like, what?
Talk about Trump's tariffs also, because, you know, Trump has unleashed a 50% tariff against India, which is a nation that manufactures an enormous quantity of transformers, and also tariffs against China and threats, even larger threats of tariffs against China.
And China, I think, is the other of the top two transformer manufacturers.
So doesn't that just kind of worsen the transformer supply chain for us?
Well, I think it does.
But I think that the incentive to build our own utilities, bring them here and build those transformers here.
We don't, you know, I think there's only one steel company in the U.S. now that still makes transformer grade magnetic steel.
So you want the, I'll go to the material science piece, but you want grain-oriented steel for transformers.
You want elongated grains so you get better magnetism and more efficiency.
So you'll gain a couple of percent in efficiency in a transformer by using this grain-oriented steel.
And that's important.
So China has that.
And we have only, I think, one manufacturer that is doing that right now in the East Coast.
Right.
And so I'm sure that manufacturer can't keep up with demand at all.
But if Trump is trying to create an incentive for other U.S. manufacturers to come online, because I think the transformer manufacturing business is a very long-term business, maybe a 10, 20-year payoff, a business investor or owner would have to have some assurance that these tariffs would stay in place for that extended period of time.
And yet Trump tends to throw out a tariff number today and then two weeks later, ah, I'm lowering it to 10%.
You know what I mean?
There's no predictability or permanence from a business investment environment to invest in manufacturing transformers.
Does that make sense?
It does.
I think the steel part is important.
And he definitely has a long-term plan for steel and the car manufacturers and military, they need steel.
So bringing steel back, that's a fundamental thing.
The actual winding of the transformers and the copper that's needed and all the materials and all that can be, I think, protected.
It's pretty obvious what the Chinese have been doing all along for the last 20 years.
They have been securing all of the rare earth minerals and putting in place really strategic economic blocks to us coming back.
So there's real, I think the tariffs are one tool.
So this is just personal belief.
I think the tariffs are one powerful tool to flip that around.
Now, with India, I think that's a specific thing.
I don't know that the Indian, I don't know the situation on India other than he was very displeased with some of the political stuff that was coming out of India.
You know more about that than I would.
Well, yeah, what's interesting about that is that also involves energy.
And it was India's purchases of Russian energy that motivated Trump to put the secondary tariffs, which India did not really respond to in any significant way.
They didn't say we're going to stop buying Russian oil.
So it's India needs affordable energy, as does Western Europe.
I mean, everybody.
And so, you know, Trump putting these tariffs on India to punish India for buying energy from Russia is causing America to be unable to build out more affordable energy infrastructure because it relies on Indian parts.
That's my point.
But I think that there was, isn't there the rationale is that he's trying to put pressure on Russia to not have the funds to economically continue with the war, prosecuting the war.
Yeah, that's definitely his motivation.
But the idea of secondary tariffs obviously expands that to India and China, which then affects our supply chains for our grid.
Yeah.
Well, I can tell you, China, completely different story.
China is, you know, they announced back in the 90s, late 90s, their unrestricted warfare, and they're prosecuting that.
They're moving forward with that.
And it's very clear in the way that they're putting all the back doors into the Chinese-made equipment.
I don't think there's a windmill or a solar farm that can't be turned off or set up that can't be turned off by China.
Well, that's incredibly concerning.
Yeah.
Because then theoretically, China wouldn't need an EMP weapon.
They could just turn everything off.
And we already know the kill rate would be 90% in these affected areas.
Well, I mean, that wouldn't take down, you'd have to shed a lot of load, but I mean, we still have a significant amount of base power.
It's just they have to build it back up.
So that's the reason for gas and nuclear small new.
Well, let's go back to the SMDs, you know, to accelerate that whole program of small modular reactors.
Yes.
That's very exciting.
Well, I'm a big advocate of the small modular reactors, actually.
And there are several companies in the United States that manufacture those, quite a few, and around the world, a large number of projects.
Based on your research, when do you think the small modular reactors, which I think are between 20 kilowatts and 300 kilowatts typical output, right?
Well, the demonstration ones are down to down to one and a half kilowatts, some of them.
The bigger ones, the bigger players have up to 80 megawatts up there.
Yeah, megawatts.
So I was thinking way too small.
These, it seems like these don't need the same duration of permitting as a typical fission nuclear power plant like an AP1000 from Westinghouse.
So the permitting is faster.
They're carbon neutral in essence.
So the anti-carbon people don't throw a fit over that, right?
Yeah, and even more exciting, I think, are some of the fast breeder neutron breeder reactors that can use spent nuclear fuel.
And we have probably 200 years worth of energy in those that spent nuclear fuel.
And then out of that, there's a secondary process.
You can create a reactor that creates all these radioisotopes that are used in medicines.
So for medical treatments.
So there's ways to take that.
Recent learning for me was that out of that fuel, they've only used 95, or they've only used 5% of the energy.
So there's 95 remaining sitting there being stored that you can use for fuel.
You don't need the uranium anymore.
Right.
And I notice we're not talking, neither one of us are talking about hot fusion because it seems so impossible and so far in the future.
We need to focus on things that can be done now.
Correct.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
What about gas?
Well, you mean gas turbine?
No, I mean, yeah, natural gas has an energy source for the gas turbine.
That's our short-term fast to market, but they need the turbines there to do that.
Have you looked at one of these gas turbines?
They're basically jet engines.
You're right.
In reverse.
Yeah, kind of engineering.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And so you need a bunch of jet engines made that you and to get those turned out fast.
That's the critical, ramping up that infrastructure.
Yeah.
And once again, you know, somebody that America is financially punishing is the world leader in turbine design.
That would be Russia, right?
So are they the leader in turbine?
I believe so.
I mean, we could look it up.
I'll look it up.
But they have incredible expertise in that area because think about their own companies like Gazprom.
They built those turbines themselves.
And those are massive.
And they're experts in that.
And that's a big export industry for Russia.
So I just want to point out, the United States unfortunately gave away too much of its manufacturing base over the past few decades under a lot of policies.
And then we arrive at this point where we need to make stuff to have a power grid.
And we need the power grid to have abundance, et cetera.
And yet, we're not good at making stuff anymore like we used to be in the 70s and 80s.
And then we have to depend on all these other countries.
But then we're in the middle of these kinetic wars and geopolitical wars and economic wars that basically screw up our supply chains for all these things that we need.
And U.S. domestic production of these is years out or decades out in some cases.
Like, how long does it take to master the production of gas turbines?
That's a multi-decade project, you know?
Well, I mean, GE makes gas turbines.
Yeah.
They make them for all that.
And, you know, Rolls-Royce does it.
And there's a number of manufacturers that have made gas turbines and therefore are, you know, put them on the Boeing engines, put them on Airbus.
So that manufacturing capability, and you can't argue that there's not a lot of capacity as far as airplanes go.
You know, there's quite a few, and those get remanufactured all the time.
Absolutely.
And you're correct.
I want to correct.
Germany is the largest exporter in the world of gas turbines.
Okay.
So it's not Russia.
Russia's on the list, but Germany, Italy, Japan, and China are also at the top of that list.
So that's good that it's a little more diverse.
We can get it from allies like Germany, as long as they don't realize what we did to Nordstream.
But they're playing along with that for now, so that's okay.
Italy, I think we have a 30% tariff on Italy at the moment, or the EU.
So turbines from Italy would be expensive.
Japan, oh, dang it, we've tariffed Japan too.
So anyway, I'm not going to dwell on this issue, but it's just seems like we could use a better hand getting the parts we need.
Yeah, there's opportunities to do specific things.
I mean, when you put in a tariff, it doesn't have to be blanket across all items.
That's right.
That's right.
It can be very strategically designed so that it advantages manufacturing here and what we need to bring back in for our strategic supply chains.
Yes.
Or I'm sure you would agree that the best policy for America would have been 20 years ago to have protectionist policies for our domestic transformers and gas turbine industries.
Absolutely.
You know, the people in charge were thinking of their own pocketbooks, it seems, and advancing that and maybe some ideological bents in that whole thing.
Absolutely.
Or the idea that we were just going to be able to always get everything we need from somewhere else because we print the currency and the whole world wants dollars.
Well, it's not going to be that way forever.
Okay.
So let's talk about sabotage and domestic terrorism now.
Yes.
With all the coming across the border, I think that has really heightened the urgency on taking action now.
So out of this bill in Texas, I could talk about Texas.
One of the things they've done is they're looking at centers for cybersecurity and really focused on how to address that in a rapid fashion.
So that is getting attention.
And, you know, Mike, I think if you, at least my thinking on this is if the U.S. economy went down completely, 90%, all of that, they would have an equally bad problem everywhere else in the world, in a sense, because their whole economy, China is not a consumer-based economy.
It's a supplier-based economy.
And you would have all these job losses.
So I don't think China benefits greatly by knocking out the U.S. economy.
I think that's a bad play for them.
Now, a terrorist, that's a different story.
Someone from Iran, that's completely different.
But China, I think, can put pain on nation states and has ways to do that and can certainly put pain on nations that are supplying things to China.
They can put pressure on them in a lot of different ways that way.
And they certainly have a very large army of cyber people.
So that's true.
Now, the people coming across the border, did you want to address the physical side?
I do.
I do.
Actually, that's exactly where I was going because we've seen rising domestic tensions.
We've seen some interactions between, let's say, illegals in blue cities versus ICE agents, right?
Some, you know, some fights, maybe some gunfire breaking out here and there.
It seems like the temperatures are rising domestically.
And some of these radicalized terrorists might want to think that they could hurt, maybe they could hurt Trump's America by taking out power grid substations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's, I mean, again, if going back to Grid Down Power Up, that movie, they talk about the Metcalf attack that was in California.
And that was an orchestrated, very well-planned hit job with, I guess, AR-15s or AK-47s.
They were high-powered rifles that were shooting at the Transformers, and they took out the Metcalf, the Transformer, large transformer in Metcalf, California.
What concerns?
They were in and out.
They were in and out like a military operation.
Were they ever even caught?
I don't recall them being caught.
Never caught.
Okay.
Then there was a similar one at Duke.
I haven't heard it was quite as military operation, but it was in North Carolina, Duke Power, and that happened in 2023, December of 2023.
So several concerns then I have, and thank you for bringing that up.
I'm a long-range rifle shooter myself.
Yeah.
And so to hit a transformer, that's a big target.
You know, it's pretty easy to put around on that at 1,000 yards if you don't have crazy wind.
So the thing is that people can sit back a thousand yards and take out these power grid substations if they have a decent caliber rifle, if they know what they're doing.
If you've got line of sight and a view on it.
Right.
That's right.
So you can block that.
You can block that view fairly easily and cost effectively with just, you know, I don't recommend chain link walls, but you could, yeah, you can put it doesn't have to be heavy-duty walls to do it.
You can just put visual blocks in there.
So then all parts of the, all parts of the transformer aren't vulnerable.
There are certain parts that are vulnerable and that you have to know what you're doing, actually.
Right, right.
And we won't even go there.
I wouldn't want to give anybody any crazy ideas.
But I'm just saying that, you know, high-powered rifles are fairly widespread in terms of their ownership.
The good news is, I think most of the people that own rifles are responsible owners, and they wouldn't even dream of this.
I've also seen crazy purple-nosed, purple-haired leftists at an AR-15 training range, and they couldn't hit paper at 25 yards.
So that's good.
That's good news.
But I think the fast answer on that is, I mean, even when you drive through Austin, Texas, you can see there's transformer.
So blocking those visually is important.
You can do something that's fairly inexpensive that just starts take your sheriffs in every county know where these things are.
They can be patrolled.
They can block them off.
The utility company, local, in Texas, we have many local community and private utilities.
And the distribution transformers should be protected.
They need to be protected.
That makes perfect sense.
Okay.
And then there's the drone threat.
Now, once you build the walls to block it off, it seems like you could pretty easily put like an anti-drone cage on top, like the Russian tanks do.
They drive around with these drone cages.
But wouldn't drones then be the next obvious threat?
Yes.
Yeah, and there's, I'm sure you know there's jamming technology and things like that, but now you're starting to get into some expensive stuff.
And then when you're dealing with high voltages, what you put around something has to actually take into consideration you're dealing with very high voltages.
You don't want to electrocute people around you.
That's right.
Yeah, that's true.
Okay.
So how seriously are state regulators taking these warnings right now?
I think they're taking it quite seriously.
And that's why when this bill went through Texas, Senate Bill 75, it was 100% voted in by both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and in the House.
I see.
Wow.
Very, I mean, that's very unusual.
Yeah.
I guess everybody loves electricity working.
Not surprising.
Okay.
So if you were to rank then the biggest threats include natural and unnatural.
What are the top three then in your view?
Well, it's certainly cyber.
We're constantly being attacked on cyber.
You don't read about it, but if you follow, there's a, you know, the government organization, CISA, CISA.gov, has, you know, daily reports on all the attacks that go on on infrastructure and other things.
So you can see that cyber is very real active, and anybody that's in that field knows they're constantly under attack.
It's a big industry.
Right.
And so I would say of all of the threats, just ransomware, nation state, anything, all of those are very easy to do, easy to hide who did it, you know, and kind of get away with it.
Now, if you were to rank to go up the next level, EMP and solar, solar's, EMP is, if we were just looking at the man-made events, EMP is going to is possible.
In fact, you can get a, you can do a pickup truck kind of EMP weapon that's used.
So there's actual equipment that they create to test different equipment to see if it's EMP protected.
Oh.
So they're pulse generators and they can be aimed and they can be shot at equipment.
So being able to protect from EMP is very important.
So I didn't really go into detail on that, but there's basically two things with EMP that you have to protect.
This ground current that I talked about first, which is also a natural solar weather problem, that's a very slow pulse.
That could be anywhere from a couple of seconds to 20, 30 seconds long.
That pulse is called E3.
E2 is lightning, and that we're protected against already.
They have arresters and filters that block that.
But then there's E1, and E1, everybody's familiar with, you know, your 5G networks and stuff like that.
Well, if you look at the frequency of the rise on those curves, those are sub-nanosecond.
But an E1 pulse from a nuclear weapon or something like that is in the range of two to five nanoseconds that it goes from zero to peak.
Wow.
So those pulses rise very fast.
And with just a one meter long, a little more than a yard, those pulses can generate up to 50,000 volts coming into your computer or your electronics devices.
So you have to protect that E1 pulse, which is a rapid, short pulse, like a lightning strike.
It goes up fast and comes back down.
And that's, if you've ever worked on computers, you got to be careful not to blow out the memory cards or touch things.
You know, you have to be grounded, all of that.
Or when we talk about shielding things.
So there's equipment today.
The technology has moved in the last decades.
There's cost-effective equipment that can shield against that.
Siemens is one of the providers that does that.
And they have a refrigerator-sized box that you can put your whole entire substation electronics in, run fiber optics in it, and have that sealed and raised up to not get into floods and to not protect it.
And you can have spares of those.
And so that's very doable, especially build out on new baseload.
So when you look at Permian Basin, for example, the Permian Basin project, just the transmission part of that project and then putting in the generation.
So that's going to, that's a, that's for Texas for ERCOT, that Permian Basin project to electrify and put AI and data centers out there in the Permian Basin.
That's a $33 billion project.
And I did the cost estimate on that.
And to protect it from E1 and E3 for that whole project is $40 million.
So you're looking at a $33 billion project and it's only 40.
I mean, it's a little more than one thousandth of a percent.
Yeah, it would be insane not to add that protection to it.
Right.
Yeah, clearly.
Okay.
Well, we're almost out of time here, Don.
I want to give out your website again or the group site.
Securethegrid.com is the site, and the organization is Secure the Grid Coalition.
And Don, is there anything else you'd like to add today before we wrap this up?
Well, I think that there are things.
One of the things I always say is there are issues that are important to independent of politics, and grid security is one of those.
So you can always cross the barriers that have been created in society today with conversations around protecting yourself with the grid.
So my recommendation is to go to your website in general.
You've got a very good preparedness website.
I've been through it before and I've used it personally.
Oh, that's great.
And go to your website.
So plug that and look at the different kinds of things.
Get yourself a generator and become self-sufficient.
Have water.
Have a water supply.
Have a filtering system.
Know where the swimming pools are in your area or where the water supply is in your area and be sure that you're thinking about you will lose, you know, when you lose electricity, you lose water.
And you should have some basic necessities for the size of your family that you're considered about.
And then just like you would with wildfire, you know, you want them, you want your neighbors to be protecting their houses and doing the right things in their neighborhood too.
So don't be afraid of being, you know, being called a survivalist.
Go do some intelligent things that says, you know, I keep my car with some gas in it, you know, and I'm not always on empty.
Yeah.
Right.
And the power grid is something that we often take for granted.
Because when it's there, you don't notice it.
When it's not there, then everything sucks.
So everything's bad very fast.
Yeah.
Actually, I think the 2021 near blackout situation in Texas was a really important reminder.
Yes.
I mean, and thank God it didn't get any worse.
But I heat with wood, but I use a wood boiler that circulates hot water.
But of course, I need power to circulate the water, right?
Yeah.
So I can burn wood, but without electricity, but I mean, I save a lot by not using electricity to heat.
Yeah.
Obviously.
But I still need it to circulate.
You can still get battery storage systems and some.
And you can buy the home battery storage systems and solar panels and keep those in a chemical situation.
You could charge those up.
I've deeply researched that.
I'm waiting for the sodium ion chemistry to go mainstream.
I just, I don't like the lithium chemistry.
Sodium ions coming online.
There's even a North American manufacturer.
I've looked at flow batteries at scale and lots of things.
Every technology has horrible failures currently for grid shifts.
The lithium iron, lithium, lithium iron phosphate is probably the safest, and that's what's been used in the utilities.
But it's heavy, you know, it's not for treatment.
Absolutely.
And it doesn't cycle the way I need it to cycle.
And it doesn't work at all the temperature variations very well that everybody expects beyond text.
It's better than the consumer-based.
That's true.
But Canada's got questions is all I'm saying.
Yo, yeah.
All right.
All right.
Well, thank you so much, Don.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you today.
I appreciate your time and your expertise.
And thanks for joining me.
It's been great.
Absolutely.
All right.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
All right.
It's Don Brown, everybody.
The website is securethegrid.com.
And get informed because AI and data centers is bringing on record demand for electricity.
It's going to outpace all human consumption or residential consumption in a very short period of time.
They're not building offices anymore in America.
They're building AI data centers.
And they're building them for the machines that use a tremendous amount of electricity.
At some point, the competition between you and the robots or the AI is going to become a very fierce debate.
Just saying that's coming.
Not hard to see that.
Thanks for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams here at Brighteon.com and get your backup generators.
Solar generators are offered by one of our sponsors, the satellite phone store, sat123.com.
And they also offer satellite phones and satellite bandwidth and also EMP protection bags, very large bags.
They're called dark bags.
And you can even buy one big enough to protect your entire generator with the solar panels inside this bag.
So again, that's sat123.com or you can just go to beready123.com, either way, and you'll find all kinds of solutions there that can help you stay prepared.
Thanks for watching today.
I'm MikeAdams of Brighteon.com.
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