How to prevent the inevitable collapse of the US power grid

To secure the US power grid, FERC must provide strong financial incentives to accelerate deployment of proven protection technologies.

The Center for Security Policy and the Secure the Grid Coalition filed a formal Complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), docketed as EL26-49-000, this month. This is not another bureaucratic footnote. It is a direct challenge to the electric utility industry’s dangerous complacency—and a lifeline for the continuity of American society itself.

The complaint asks FERC to do one simple, urgent thing: order the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to assess and protect America’s bulk power system against ground-induced currents (GICs) to the international scientific standard of 85 volts per kilometer (V/km). And crucially, it requests that FERC authorize full cost recovery through utility rate structures so that utilities—and therefore NERC—have every financial incentive to act instead of fighting to preserve the unprotected status quo.

Why now? Because the threats are real, imminent, and already costing us billions, while the industry’s self-written “protection” standard is pitifully inadequate, unscientific, and exists solely because NERC’s utility-company members voted to avoid the small added costs of protection. [Learn more by viewing the Secure the Grid Coalition’s video explainer.]

The Threat: Invisible Currents That Can Black Out the US

Solar activity generates geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs) that induce low-frequency, quasi-DC currents in the Earth’s crust called ground-induced currents (GICs). These GICs enter the power grid through transformer neutral-to-ground connection, the path of least resistance, and flow across thousands of miles of high-voltage lines. The result? Half-cycle saturation of massive power transformers, creating massive harmonic distortion, reactive power consumption spikes, hot-spot heating, and eventually, continental-scale catastrophic failure.

The E3 component of a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) from a nuclear detonation in the exo-atmosphere does exactly the same thing—without a surface-leveling nuclear-sized blast or thermal impact reaching the ground. One weapon, detonated high enough, can bathe the continental United States in GICs powerful enough to destroy the grid in minutes.

We already see the damage in unexceptional, routine solar weather. Credible studies peg the annual economic toll from GIC-induced harmonics and equipment stress at approximately $10 billion a year. That is not theory; it is money leaving Americans’ pockets right now.

Worse, the damage is cumulative. Transformers do not always fail immediately. The 1989 Hydro-Quebec storm caused a blackout in Canada and, within 25 months, permanent failures in transformers at 12 US nuclear power stations. A 2003 solar event one-fiftieth the size of the 1921 “Railroad Storm” still destroyed 12 transformers in South Africa over months. Imagine that on a nationwide scale, from a 1-in-100-year storm like the 1859 “Carrington Event.”

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