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Remember those old stock broker commercials “When E.F. Hutton Speaks?” The TV commercials showed everyone craning their necks as they tried to listen in on conversations from E.F Hutton Brokers. When Terry Boston was CEO of PJM, he would invite me up to track PJM’s leading-edge initiatives, and they were always worth listening to. Terry recently sent me a link to a report on surviving a catastrophic power outage released in December 2018. He serves on the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), which was asked to examine the nation’s ability to respond to and recover from a catastrophic power outage of a magnitude beyond modern experience. The event could potentially be an act of war that would require a military response. It could be a sophisticated cyber-physical attack timed with a major natural disaster. Or possibly repeated events in a short period of time with significant physical damage.
Regardless of the cause, it would exhaust or exceed mutual aid capabilities. There would be little or no notice. The event would last several weeks to months due to physical infrastructure damage and it would affect a broad geographic area, covering multiple states or regions and affecting tens...