Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Bill Walton show. Featuring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, artists and thinkers.
Fresh perspectives on money, culture, politics and human flourishing.
Interesting people, interesting things.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Everything we count on.
Food, water, money, medicine. The phones in our pocket run on a machine most Americans have never thought about much. The electrical grid.
That machine has no warehouse worth the name. Every watt you use is made the instant you use it and reaches you at nearly the speed of light.
Yeah, we have batteries, but every battery in America, fully charged, could run the country for about an hour.
And the whole thing hangs rough on roughly 6,000 transformers, each one the size of a house, some a lot larger than that.
They're wound by hand, they're built overseas, and if we lose them, take years to replace.
The United States Senate report recently concluded that a blackout lasting one year would kill nine out of 10Americans. Not injure, not inconvenience, kill.
My guests today have spent their careers staring at that number. And they've come to tell us two things.
How close we are and how we can step back from that edge. We do have lines of action.
And so joining me is Tommy Waller, President and CEO of the center for Security Policy in Washington.
Before that, he spent a career in the Marine Corps Reconnaissance and Special operations commanding the 3rd Force Reconnaissance Company and later serving in the Air Force's Electromagnetic Defense Task Force.
He leads the Secure the Grid coalition.
And this February, he did something Washington noticed. He filed a formal complaint that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission arguing that the standard protecting America's grid was written by the industry for the industry and doesn't protect it at all.
31 organizations stood with them and only one objected regulator.
Jonathan. Jonathan Hollerman comes at this from the other end. Not the machines, but the people.
He's a former Air Force seer instructor. That's survival, evasion, resistance and escape.
He now serves as Deputy director of the task force and national and homeland security.
When the Air Force needed to understand what a long term blackout would actually do to Americans, to family, to soldiers, to the rule of law, they came to him. In his report.
Grid Down, Death of a Nation is the document that made the casualty estimates real.
For the past decade, he's designed off grid EMP hardened retreats for more than 500 clients, including some of the wealthiest families in America. He knows what the smart money is preparing for.
Well, guys, Tommy, Jonathan, great to have you on and I'm very interested in this issue. I did a show six years ago with Peter Pry, who was sort of the pioneer in this area, and I'm really happy to have you back on to follow up. But before we dive into this, the grid is something I've, I've tossed around that term a lot. And then I realized when we're preparing for this, I don't know exactly how to describe it. I mean, what is it? How does it work? What are the elements and, and, and bring. Bring us down to Earth for the people that may not have, like me, that have. Might not have thought much about it or don't have a technical background?
[00:04:10] Speaker C: Sure. Well, Bill, that, that actually has happened to me quite a bit as I came to work on this particular topic. So, as you mentioned before, I work for the center for Security Policy. You know, our mission is that we provide uncompromised analysis on what threatens our Republic and then unconventional solutions to help keep Americans safer. And so, yeah, we've been deeply analyzing threats to our nation's grid for a long time. And in fact, sometimes when people would ask me about my job and I would tell them that I might start to get into the conversation about threats, and they do exactly what you just did. Wait, wait, back up.
What's the grid? Right, and so, yeah, when we say grid, what we're talking about is the machine that generates electricity, transmits it, and then distributes it for use. Right. So generation that can be anything from nuclear power plants to coal power generation facilities, fossil fuel, natural gas, wind and solar. In the more recent years, those are all forms of generators.
A lot of times those generators are not right next to the civilian population that needs to use it. And so what happens is you've got to make that electricity move over long, long distances to get to where it's going to be used. And that's our transmission infrastructure. So when people drive down the road and they see massive transmission lines and these big, huge substations with big, huge transformers, what's happening is that electricity, after it's generated is the voltage is being stepped up to extra high voltage so that it has high voltage, low resistance, it can move long distances. And then the last part of the grid is known as the distribution grid. That's all the small pieces of the grid. If you look out, you know, you're out of your window at the transformer on the pole that's part of the distribution grid. About 90% of all of our infrastructure is in the distribution grid. And that's what steps those voltages back down and then makes it available for use. So when we say grid, we're talking about all of that infrastructure. And as you mentioned in your opening, it's the most amazing machine that mankind has ever developed and it puts us on life support.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Ultimately it's a technology though that's almost a half a century or a century old. I mean we figured this out in the 20s and 30s when electricity started being a major factor in the country. Is that so we have we had any innovations or has it been pretty much the same?
[00:06:39] Speaker C: So in terms of innovation, there's been a lot of innovation, but there's still a lot of, a lot of infrastructure that's extremely old, it's aged and the older the infrastructure in general, the more vulnerable it's going to be. Unfortunately Bill, and I'm sure we'll get into the discussion on this. Some of the innovation while, while it may have been well meaning from an, a quote, environmental perspective, those that believe that we can save our environment just by using things like wind and solar.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: There we go.
[00:07:11] Speaker C: Some of that innovation's made it actually more vulnerable.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: So, but we have, I understand that we have two major grids, three major grids in the country and one of them is Texas and the rest, one is the sort of west coast and the other one's east coast. Is that, is that correct?
[00:07:29] Speaker C: Yes, sir. So three main interconnections, the Eastern interconnection, the Western interconnection and then ERCOT or the Texas interconnection. One of the things to know though, Bill, is that electrons, even though they may be separated into three different grids for the whole, you know, continental United States, electrons don't care about state boundaries. In fact, they don't care about political parties either. And so you have what are known as RTOs and ISOs, regional transmission operators and independent system operators that, that actually they sort of act as like an air traffic controller for the electrons themselves, moving the electricity back and forth based on where the demand is and where the supply is. And so it's a complicated machine. Absolutely.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Who owns the grid?
[00:08:11] Speaker C: About 3,000 plus different companies all across
[00:08:15] Speaker B: the U.S. okay, so these are all the local electric companies that own their piece of it.
[00:08:20] Speaker C: It's a whole swath of different types of organizations, Bill, whether it's investor owned, utilities, some are government owned. When you look at say for examp, TVA in Tennessee and wapa, the Western Area Power Administration, some are government owned, some are privately owned, some are investor owned and some are co ops that are owned by the people.
And so there's no one person, there's no one authority that's in charge of all of it.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Can you reinforce this fact that I didn't realize that basically all of our electricity is delivered instantly from the source because it's moving at almost the speed of light and that there's no meaningful storage. And I mentioned the battery number. I think I've learned that even though we have some batteries and some reserve, if, if we used it all at the same time, it would last about 60 minutes.
[00:09:10] Speaker C: Right? So, Bill, the way it works is, you know, you have to have what's called load, right? You have to have. For the grid to work, someone needs to use the electricity that's being produced at the same rate as it's being produced. And this is one of the things, Bill, you asked earlier about the technological innov innovations. Some of those innovations have made it more difficult to run the grid. So you think about, well, let's put
[00:09:33] Speaker B: a name on it. We're talking about wind and solar. And if the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, those don't work very well.
[00:09:41] Speaker C: That's right. That's one component. It's an intermittent source of power. The other is that it produces what's known as direct current DC power. Our grid is run on what's known as alternating current. So you have these large rotating generators, big turbines that are spinning, that spinning. Generation has to happen at a certain cycle. Wind and solar are pumping in direct current, which requires what's known as inverters to take that, that electricity, convert it from DC to ac. And unfortunately, Bill, both the components that, that generate wind and solar, 85 plus percent of that manufactured in China. And the majority of the inverters that are used are manufactured in China as well, which has introduced significant security issues in our grid as well.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Now US is on AC and Europe's
[00:10:29] Speaker C: on dc no sir, both really. All modern grids in the world operate off of alternating current ac. Now, the frequencies are slightly different in the US versus Europe, but the application of DC electricity, wind and solar, has increased. So as an example, Bill, the Iberian Peninsula blackout. The week before all of Spain and Portugal went blackout, they had cheered the headlines, said that they had gone fully 100% renewable, right?
And then what happens? A week later, the entire grid crashes. We can talk about how and why that happened, but I guess the point is that it's not always the case where when you add new, quote, innovative technology, that the grid becomes more resilient. In this specific case, and to be clear, I'm not anti wind and solar. I think there's a purpose for those at the localized level, at the household level, but at the big Bulk electric grid level. It's done nothing but introduce problems with resilience.
[00:11:34] Speaker B: While we're on the technical piece, let's talk about the transformers because I said I'm surprised that basically get a magnet and what's wrapped around it is miles and miles of copper wire and the magnet spins and that creates the, the transformation that the transformer does that probably, probably didn't. It's probably not very accurate. But how does that work? And how are these handmade? And I understand most of them are not made in the United States.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So in layman's terms, the idea of the electricity when it comes out of a power generation facility, it's not like you can just take your toaster and you can plug it in. You're going to blow up your toaster. Right.
So you have to have what are called, called step up and step down transformers. And These are our EHV or HV transformers. They can be as, as big as 400 ton behemoths. And we, depending on where you draw the line, there's somewhere between three and six thousand of them in the country. And on average they have a lifespan 40 to 50 years. We only replace about a dozen of these a year.
So the high voltage transformers in our industry or in our movement, we typically refer to it as America's Achilles heel. Because without high voltage transformers you can't step up and step down power and take the power from the power generation long distances to where the distribution network is. We only replace about a dozen a year. And the vast majority of those come from South Korea and Germany. That was in the past. Almost all of them came from overseas. We don't produce them here in the United States.
Recently China's thrown their hat in the ring and they're starting to enter this fray with larger and larger transformers and selling them in the United States, which again I think Tommy will get into a little bit later. But that has its own set of consequences, that has its own set of threats. But the high voltage transformer is the lifeblood of the grid and unfortunately just that one piece of equipment in the grid. If we lost as few as nine to 12 high voltage transformers, depending on the location, you could block out the entire nation with as few as a dozen transformers being taken out.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Wasn't there a case where there's some transformers that were taken out by snipers In California, some 17, 18.
How did that describe that?
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's the Metcalf substation attack, basically. To this day we have not figured out who carried out this Attack there was we believe two to three people that crept down underground, cut fiber optic and phone lines and cable lines before this event leading to the control center that was overseeing this high voltage transformer. So they basically cut the phone line so they couldn't call in the situation.
They went to the Metcalf substation. We found triangle shaped piles of rocks on the hills where they shot from. They used AK47s and they basically unloaded on the high voltage transformer. We won't get into discussions as to what they did wrong in their attack approach because we don't want to give people ideas, but basically they shot the cooling the oil tanks and it started leaking out in the ground and the substation slowly started to overheat. The high voltage transformer started to lose the oil that kept it cold, started to overheat the control center.
I think it was less than five minutes or under five minutes. If it would have completely gone dark, they were able to reroute power around that substation. If they were not able to do that, we would have lost power in Silicon Valley for over a month before they would have been able to repair that section of the grid. And I mean that would have been front page news, right? No Facebook, no Google, no Microsoft for a month. So this was very close to a very big story. Unfortunately, within 60 seconds to 90 seconds of the police arriving on scene, those perpetrators disappear. And to this day we have no idea who. They believe it was a dry run to basically practice taking out a high voltage transformer station with just regular off the shelf semi automatic rifles.
And they have learned what they did wrong since then. If they chose to do that again, and we can get into kind of the special interest aliens, but if they choose to carry out this type of attack again, and they did it at the right locations at the right times, they could take down the grid with just physical attacks.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: Let's name the names of who might be the perpetrators. And then I want to jump in, I don't want to diverge too much, but you just piqued my curiosity because we're talking basic theme of this is threats to the grid and that's a very specific one.
Who speculated? Do we have any speculation about who did that? Was it China? Was it the Islamist? Was it, I don't know, cultural Marxist? Was it somebody that, you know, wanted to knock out, you know, what, what, what are the, who do you, who do you think might have done that? Because that's pretty sophisticated to know if you can do that.
What those transformers, if they were out would shut down and the target was pretty, it was a pretty juicy target if you want to, if you want to hurt America, hurt the world.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: So exactly. We, this was not, you know, Billy Bob and his cousins drinking beer on the back of a tailgate type event. Right. This, this was pre planned like, like I mentioned, they found the, the, the, I forget which company, which military organization they brought in to do the after action report, but they did find triangle shaped piles of rocks where the shell casings were. Again, they didn't find a single fingerprint on any of these shell casings.
And that type of triangle shaped piles of rocks is something that we were encountering in the Middle east when we were fighting over there with sniper positions and firing positions that they would have set aside the understanding of how to go take a man cover off, go underground, cut specific cables to prevent them from calling 911 or calling in some of these, the threat of the substation being shot up.
And again, it's something to circle back to as well in the sense that the security at these substations is incredibly underwhelming and not sufficient. We can circle back to that but if you're asking for a specific country, we have. There's been nothing ever stated. I would guess it was a Middle Eastern country just based on some of the data points, but we don't know if it was Russia or China or
[00:18:19] Speaker B: who or it could have been Russia masquerading as Middle east or could have been China masquerade. It's. Yeah, I, I didn't, I didn't expect we'd have a.
I don't think we, I don't think we'll probably ever know.
How did you two get get into this? I mean this is, I mean, I mean this is a big, this is a big issue and you seem to be covering in a way that most other people don't. Tommy, Jonathan, whichever wants to go first, how do you, how did you become knowledgeable about all this?
[00:18:51] Speaker C: Well, I'll just start by mentioning that it became part of my job at the center for Security Policy. Now how I got employed at the center for Secure Policy is its own story, which I feel called to do this work literally like a spiritual calling. But one of the founders of our organization, Frank Afne, sat me down and said hey listen, I need you to take charge of this secure the Grid coalition. Frank had created this coalition shortly after the Congressional EMP Commission had issued its second set of reports. You know that we're going to get into the topic. I'm sure of electromagnetic pulse, but it had been highly classified for many years. And so the first reports came out 2004. Frank knew all about EMP from the time that he worked in the Pentagon during the Reagan administration, but he couldn't talk about it. 2008, you had a series of additional reports from the Congressional EMP Commission. And then the thought was that if we got a coalition of like minded policy people and national security experts, people that work in the grid and on the grid together, figure out how we could go ahead and get policies created and passed in Washington to secure the grid. And so that's how I was introduced to the topic, Bill.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: But as Frank grabs all of us, I'm on Frank's board. I'm on your board now.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: Right, right.
Yeah.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: So he has a way of enlisting us and that's how, you know, Frank, Frank brought in Peter Pry to the show.
[00:20:12] Speaker C: Right.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: God rest his soul. What an amazing man he was. Died.
[00:20:16] Speaker C: Yeah. So.
And that's when we ended up being blessed to be mentored by People like Dr. Pry. Right. I mean, like, so I have right here, you know, in my office, all of his books, but, you know, the Power and the Light, that's the last one he wrote. And, and I gotta, I gotta show you, I mean, signed by not only Dr. Pry, but hey, look, there's your copy. You know, Dr. Pry and Dr. Graham both having signed it. So what ends up happening for me is I get this duty to work this issue and carry the torch for these amazing American heroes when it comes to trying to continue to get our country to wake up to the threat of electromagnetic pulse and secure ourselves. And as I'm going through the process of learning about it, I'm trying to draw from experts that are not only in the field of threats to the grid and how to protect the grid, but I started to also look for people who had a knowledge about the consequences well, if the grid goes down. And that's how I came across Jonathan. I started reading books and, and I found his, you know, and how did,
[00:21:22] Speaker B: yeah, you've, you've, as I mentioned, the asset. You're sort of the back end of this, of what happens to the people if this fails.
How did you get involved in this? And what's your, you know, how did you, how do you, and what do you, you know, I want a little bit about your building these compounds for wealthy families. That's a very interesting
[00:21:45] Speaker C: story.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: This would have gone back to, I believe around 2006, 2007, I read a book called One Second After when it first came out by the great William Fortune. In fact, there's a movie coming out about that at the end of the year. Be sure to check that out. But that put this on my radar. Put this on my radar. And that book's about a small town that survives in the aftermath of an EMP attack.
And I'm an analytical guy, right? And a former United States Air Force sear instructor. Survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. When I read through that book, there were a couple details that just from a seer and a background in understanding starvation, psychosis and what it does to the mental capacity of humans. I kind of wasn't sure about some things. So as an analytical guy, I just ran out. I read the 2004 Congressional EMP Commission report, and these are highly technical documents, right?
Then, like you, Bill, I'm like, what is the grid? I mean, everybody just goes out and they flick their light on. They expect the lights to come on, right? And they don't have no idea how it gets there. Like magic jelly beans, right?
And so I just started digging and digging and researching and researching. I started buying more books and researching, and I basically decided to put a book out, a fiction series, which ended up doing very well online. That kind of put me on the map. This would have been back around 2008, 2009, maybe.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: What's the name of the series? What's the name?
[00:23:11] Speaker A: So the EMP Equipping Modern Patriots series. Okay, so it's kind of instructional fiction. So it's kind of a fiction story of a post EMP environment. But it also kind of gives recommendations in the stories of why the characters are doing the things, why he chooses the equipment he does. Right. So instructional fiction. And then I finally wrote Survival Theory, how to Survive the End of the World on a Budget. And that was back when.
Yeah, and so it's difficult. Surviving the end of the world on a budget is difficult. So I think that's the book that Tommy read that kind of introduced me to him in that direction. And I was brought into the Electromagnetic Defense Task Force to kind of play devil's advocate to some of the thinking that happens in government, which is, this is a problem, let's just tackle it. But the problem is his normalcy bias. In the military, they have a hard time thinking outside the box. They just expect their troops always show up for work, they always show up for duty. They always go where you tell them. But I'm trying to explain to them, when you take away their food and their H. Vac and their fresh water. Like when you take away all their human comforts and then cities are burning around the country and they don't know where their family's at. That, you know.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Well, yeah, there's a. Yeah, that's. You put your finger on something I've wondered about. If you're a soldier standing duty someplace and your family somewhere else and your family is starving, how long do you stay on that post before you go take care of your family? And how do we maintain order? I mean, there's a, you know, we think of as sort of having police or troops to, to, to, to manage things, but they've got their own personal crises going on, which is very different from a soldier off, you know, overseas fighting.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So that is a. That's an entire chapter in my report, Grid down Death of a Nation.
The psychology and physiology of human desperation, starvation and living a world without rule of law. So that's 122 page report. You can download it for free.
That's kind of the mea culpa of my life's experience and my life's work. In this. I have a chapter on the military and how difficult it would be to feed the military in this kind of environment. And it discusses.
It's not just the military. It's police, it's firefighters, it's hospital workers.
They show up for work because their family is safe. I actually, with the military, I go back to the Civil War during Sherman's March. Right towards the end of the war, Sherman marches and he's burning farms and he's burning crops and he's creating all kinds of destruction on his way to the sea.
And a lot of people don't know kind of what sped up the end of the Civil War is all these women and children sending letters to their men on the front lines, the Confederates saying, we're starving, we have no food, we're not going to make it through the winter. There was a mass amount of awol. Like there's a lot of troops at the end of the Civil War, Confederates that just went home to find their family and to save and protect their family. So that's the last time that type of situation has happened to the US Military.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: And that's why his reputation, I think is for utter ruthlessness, was that he figured out that the way to get the army disband was to go after their families.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Well, our foreign nations, our foreign enemies have that same view.
That's the beauty. I shouldn't say the beauty, but the devastation of an emp Attack is you can win the war on day one without firing a bullet against a superpower if you take out our civilian electric grid. And up to 99% of our military bases rely on the civilian infrastructure, the civilian electric grid. They get their food on their bases every two days just like your grocery store. If they can take out the civilian electric grid in this country country the, the kind of the war ends right there. We do not have the ability to, to fight a prolonged war in that environment with, without the grid functioning in the U.S.
i want to trouble I, I, you'll.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: I'm terrible. I. All these digressions, one sentence each if you could on what survived. Because we're talking about this Survive, evasion, resistance, escape. I mean how does that, how does that break down both as a combatant and then how would that apply to how we'd be dealing with the world if the grid weren't there?
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Yes.
So survival, evasion, resistance and escape.
The resistance and escape side of this, you could kind of set off to the side because that's anti interrogation techniques. Escape from capture from an enemy soldier. Right.
So survive and evade are the kind of the key aspects here. And a lot of people ask me about my time at Seer and I tell them less about the how to rub sticks together and what berries to eat in the woods. In my opinion, my, my what I took away from that sear experience was watching how people react to starvation and how when you take their creature comforts away, you put them in an unfamiliar environment. And in this, in an EMP situation there's no police, there's no safety, no one's coming to help you and you, then you take away their food.
You see them just kind of lose
[00:28:30] Speaker B: sanity to a degree different ways the grid that go down. We've got EMP which you'll describe. We've got a solar flare cyber physical attack. We talked about the physical attack with the snipers trying to take out the transformers.
What's empty.
