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What isn’t surprising is that America hammered home a ground stake yesterday at the G8 Summit with the declaration that they will commit to an 80% reduction in GHG emissions, achieved by 2050. The idea that the Obama administration would take such a direction crystallised on the evening of October 2nd, 2008 in St. Louis Illinois.

On that evening the then Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin and the current Vice President Joe Biden primped, positioned and even occasionally answered a question during the Vice Presidential (nominee) televised debate. Biden, in response to a question regarding the causes of climate change responded; “It’s man made, it’s clearly man-made. That’s why the polar ice caps are melting”.

For those paying attention, this was a watershed moment – remembering that every answer given in that debate must have been subject to intense preparatory deliberation by an expert team of policy setters and massagers of messaging. Biden’s answer unequivocally nailed a sign on the wall pointing to the direction the administration would take. Here we are, some nine months later, and the bright spark Biden gave voice to that night has gestated in the G8 announcement.

And yet, like a newborn child, there is both an infinity of possibility and the great potential for tragedy all wrapped up in the same bundle. The G8 announcement, designed to spur developing countries like China and India into making similarly far reaching commitments, is problematic in that it fails to set aggressive commitments for interim emissions targets. Climate scientists would like to see developed nations achieve 50% emissions cuts by 2020, on the way to the overall 80% cuts three decades later. The announcement also courted controversy for the failure to concretely specify the baseline year against which relative targets are calculated – “OK…I’ll cut 80%. 80% of what though?” So…dramatic progress, but the devil remains in the details.

If the announcement isn’t a complete surprise then, is there anything that is? There’s certainly no surprise in the fact that 99% of the western world will get up today and do exactly the same things that they did yesterday, even if they read the newspaper headlines regarding the announcement as they crunch through their morning bowl of cereal. They’ll eat the same food, use the same transport method to get to work or drop little Mary-Jane and Muhammad at the local school, and book the same holiday destination regardless. An infinitesimal number of people will internalise the news and begin to think how their lives might be different if conducted such that they generate only 20% (or less, depending on the baseline year) of emissions than they do today.

Similarly, business leaders will generally have the same meetings they otherwise would have had. Focussing not on the method by which they may achieve profitable operations with 80% less emissions, but instead on this quarter and this year. Product Managers, Vice Presidents of Futurology and other foretellers of the future will spend the day dreaming up two-dot-oh this and three-dot-oh that, mashed up, twittered and iPhone ready for all. Ministers of Education, School Principals and Teachers will pull out the same textbooks and all give no thought as to how to enable the room full of fresh-faced 9 year olds with an education suitable to successfully progress and contribute to an economic model that is undergoing a fundamental shift throughout the duration of their future working lives. The 9 year olds of today are the 50 year olds of 2050. They are generation of Emissions Transitioners – the Digital Immigrants of the carbon-down age. Their lives will be defined not by the rhetoric of the 2009 G8 Summit, but by the continued action of many throughout the coming forty years.

Perhaps the surprise then, if there is any, is simply the degree to which the minutia of planning necessary to actually enact structural change has thus far failed to materialise. To have the head and the mouthpiece of the dog bark is one thing, but to have the body react requires specific directions to be sent to the nerves and muscles that initiate and coordinate action. It is high time that detailed consideration is given to how change will be achieved and successfully guided and governed along the way.

Clearly the necessary structures to accommodate and encourage change remain illusive – preceding the G8 announcement by just a few days was the news that an ambitious plan to generate 4,000 megawatts of wind farm electricity in the USA was being mothballed. The project was cancelled, according to the chairman of BP Capital Management due to fact that “transmission issues and the problem with the capital markets make (the scheme) unfeasible at this point”. The country that does achieve such a plan for renewable energy generation and distribution will be the first to lay claim to the pole position in the rankings of countries decoupled from the pollution, profit, violence and warfare associated with oil production in many parts of the world.

A high game of brinkmanship therefore continues to be played amongst the world’s leaders. At stake is nothing less than the shape of the geopolitical stage and the economic ordering of the winners and losers in the “green economy”. Mixed in amongst that is the question of what sort of everyday opportunities and decisions will be available to everyone alive today who is 45 years of age or less – for we are the generations of transitional action. L’Aquila may rumble with the aftershocks of tectonic discontent, but it is the aftershocks from the 80% announcement that will rumble far longer and with far more potential reach.

A recent tweet by Monkchips caught my eye; “good question from @tomraftery. regarding smartgrid resilience how will we defend against electro magnetic pulses?”.
Having recently written about smart grids the question of potential security risks is a good one in my view. I got to thinking that the question of whether the vendor spokespeople had anything scripted to say was interesting, and perhaps indicative in a small sample way of the lack of strategic risk analysis in the vendor community. But the really interesting question is the other one; are smart grids inherently more at risk from an EMP incident?

“Compared to what?” is the first response. Compared to the status quo of national and international grids powered by baseload and demand plants fueled mostly by fossil fuels? Compared to individual off-the-grid power generation by the likes of smal PV and wind based renewables? Smart grids and the status quo approaches rely on networked generation, so they both carry the added risk of a cascaded failure, where a failure in one part of the grid unbalances neighbouring zones. Individual power generation failures cannot cascade; all failures are local failures.

Meanwhile smart grids share the same generation methods and technologies that are used in individual off-the-grid generation. A mix of renewable generation techniques including PV, wind, wave, water, thermal tower and the like would be used, as suited to the local environmental conditions. Is such equipment especially vulnerable to EMP? If the vendors Monkchips spoke with are indicative it might be safe to say that EMP shielding is unlikely to be a current design feature on standard, commercially available installations. There is inherently more electronics distributed throughout a smart grid than in the status quo grid, therefore it is fair to say that on a component basis the equipment used in smart grids is damaged more easily by EMP.

In a smart grid, some of those electronic components will be involved in managing the flow of electricity across the grid; controlling and measuring consumption and contribution whilst maintaining a baseload current. So a failure due to EMP would not only knock out local generation in the affected area, it would also knockout the controlling grid management nodes. There is in this case the potential for cascade failure flowing out from the area directly affected by the pulse.

In reality however, the status quo grid is today national and international structure of both radial and interconnected design. Switches between network branches control the flow of electricity, dictated by spot market price fluctuations and efforts to balance the grid to baseload demands. Switch changes are made both manually and automatically. The existing danger of cascade failure was famously demonstrated in the 2003 failure of the grid in the North East of the USA. This article (http://www.newsmax.com/weyrich/emp_radiation/2008/06/25/107194.html) holds the view that the existing grid is already gravely at risk from cascade failure.

Arguably, smart grids might actually be more resilient than the existing switch grid networks in two important ways. Firstly, the modern equipment may detect an up or downstream fault faster, make a decision faster, then enact a switch change faster than current systems. The difference may only be milliseconds, however that may be the difference between cascade or otherwise. Secondly, smart grids are intended to have a more granular switching capability, though they will likely share the same suburban and rural trunk and backbone transmission as is already used today. “Lower” down the food chain from the suburb level subgrid might be street level controlling nodes and so on. The greater granularity of such control nodes may also isolate a cascade faikure within a smaller zone.

So far its a fairly even match. The generation nodes in smart grids and local off-the-grid designs is likely to be less EMP resilient than a coal fired power station. On the other hand both the smart grid and the status quo share a risk of cascade failure. The smart grid design may even be a little more resilient to cascade failure.

But there’s one more thing worth considering; that is the question of whether there is a material risk of an EMP incident anyway. An EMP incident isn’t something that is likely to occur everyday; the detonation of a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere would do it. There are a few other ways, but all require nothing less than considerable money, skills, madness, and balls. A hostile EMP incident will either be an active of war launched by a nation state, or one of terrorism by an unallied group. There is also the possibility of friendly fire by way of an industrial accident, or the failure of one or another item of ill maintained national critical infrastructure (whether privately or publically managed).

If the EMP incident was as a result of friendly fire then it is highly unlikely that an atmospheric nuclear detonation would occur. If the attack was an act of terrorism then it is on the balance more likely that an EMP pulse could be generated locally to a generation plant or other critical element, and less likely that a nuclear bomb could be procured and exploded in an aeroplane or launched in a rocket to explode over the target company. Again, the affect would therefore be localised and unlikely to result in catastrophic cascade failure throughout the grid.

In the event that a nationwide EMP incident did occur, the country is probably at war. At that point all this discussion is perhaps interesting, but whether we have a smart grid or the status quo grid probably isn’t our biggest problem. Other than the fact of course that it is arguable that there will be more international conflict ahead of us if we continue the status quo approach, fuelled by resource shortages and social disruption resulting from the effects of climate change.