HOW EMP hardened is the system you work with? Say what %?
I can't give you an honest answer. I know that the system is, and has been hardened against the likes of lightning and such for decades, but that isn't the same as an EMP. Upgrades have been made, particularly to control circuitry in substations which would likely be the most vulnerable.
I think (my opinion) that the biggest vulnerability would be the CPU-based equipment, probably communications stuff also. Manual operation would be the alternative, providing that the field equipment is operational.
A lot of older electromechanical control devices have been upgraded to CPU-based over the last 25-30 years and I'm not privy to the resilience of that equipment to EMP type situations. It is something that, for the benefit of this board, I shall look into.
It is definitely on the industry radar, and we are working on it, but I am not in a position to know just where we stand on that. A lot of moves have been made to build in more redundancy in the transmission grid, which is prudent anyway, but the primary thing is to make something like an EMP a more local issue rather than system-wide.
On the EMP issue, and I don’t think this is a very good link. Seems to be more of a politically written paper than factually driven (nuts and bolts stuff). It seems to downplay the likelihood of an EMP, but I don’t necessarily agree with that assessment.
The EEI is the Edison Electric Institute, which is an organization comprised of entities in the electric utility industry. Usually, they’re more involved with research projects and such to improve the quality of the product.
Lemme think.....