The Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5) is hosting the 2018 Power Grid Defense Conference August 9-12 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Huntsville, Alabama. Greg Allison, Founder of the HAL5 Chapter and a former Executive Vice President of NSS, is also Chairman of the Alabama Power Grid Defense Committee and has this to say about how the subjects are related:
Why Space Advocates Should Support Power Grid Defense
By Greg Allison
Our dreams for people living in space will take decades to reach levels of sustainability, even with vehicles evolved from those being planned by Musk and Bezos today. The fragility of our power grid may be a huge roadblock to our dreams. There are numerous root causes that could bring down our power grid to an extent that our nation and world would not be likely to recover from in our lifetimes – even denying us the dream of space settlement for generations. The likelihood of this occurring is actually quite high within the next couple of decades. The good news is that if we act now we can take steps to ensure our grid is hardened to the point that a grid down would be far less extensive and more recoverable.
Our electric power grid could be brought down by geomagnetic super-storms, coronal mass ejections (CME) from the sun, cyber-attacks, sabotage, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon. The first two events in space are just a matter of time. It was only 62 years between the 1859 Carrington Event and the Railroad Event CME of 1921. It has been 95 years since then. The probability for a Carrington Event CME has been determined by NASA to be 12% per decade. We had a near miss from a CME in the summer before last when a CME barely missed the Earth in its orbit. Several nation states and organizations have both the means and the motives to bring down our power grid through cyber, physical attack, and EMP.
What needs to be done to secure our future is actually not such a great leap. We just need to make sure our electrical grid is protected, and quickly. We space advocates have technical and political savvy which is unique to pushing this world-saving agenda forward. I ask you to please join with us, Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5), in our quest to keep our dreams possible and secure a safe world for ourselves and our children. Please attend, participate, or donate to our 2018 Power Grid Defense Conference to be held on August 9 -12, 2018 at the Embassy Suites Hotel Huntsville Alabama. To register and/or find out more about the event and power grid defense please visit our website at www.PowerGridDefense.org or email: [email protected].
