Re: clouds at risk
That is indeed the real message. If your lightning protection is in order, you are already protected against the maximum EMP you are likely to be faced with. If the power grid goes down continent-wide, as long as your facility is not on the ground path for the surge (again, it won't be if you are protected against lightning) then you will have exactly the same problem everyone else does: nothing coming out of the socket for some period of time.
One serious concern you can find in the OECD and FERC reports cited here, however, is that the very large transformers power grids rely on are 1) phenomenally expensive, and 2) mostly hand-built, taking months to do it; a new one takes about a year from order to delivery currently, and fewer than 100 per year are built worldwide. They last for decades, so, for example, the US power grid has about 3000 of them. If any really large number of them were destroyed, it could be months, maybe years, before we got the grid back on line. (And you would really want to own stock in a transformer-building company).
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9/15/2014 | 9:04:15 AM