Placing Speed to Power on a Firm Foundation

Last week, hundreds of private sector companies and organizations provided input to the Department of Energy in response to its “Speed to Power Initiative” — an exciting program prompted by the Trump Administration to help the nation with “accelerating large-scale grid infrastructure projects to win the AI race.”

The Coalition’s warnings echoed those of the influential and bipartisan National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL), who, over the summer, passed a resolution urging swift action to mitigate the same vulnerability that occurs from both solar weather (known as a geomagnetic disturbance — (GMD) and high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP).

GMDs and HEMP both produce ground-induced currents (GICs) that invade the power grid from the earth through the neutral-to-ground connection of high-voltage transformers. GICs turn these large power transformers across the power grid into “harmonic generators” that destroy components all the way to the load, eventually destroying themselves and taking down the grid.

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