End of the world: what will happen if electricity is cut off worldwide

As a result of recent forest fires in California, about 2,5 million people were left without electricity. This caused a flurry of indignation and criticism from both consumers and authorities. Edition with the BBC said what would happen if electricity was cut off around the world.

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In addition to California, blackouts were also in Venezuela. As patients of Venezuelan hospitals can confirm, the doctors simply could not do anything. In the pitch darkness, broken only by the rays of a pair of flashlights and the shaky light of the screens of smartphones, medical workers watched helplessly as the patient died before their eyes.

An elderly woman was admitted to the hospital with a blood clot in her lungs. A fairly common life-threatening case if appropriate medications and equipment are not used.

Everything the doctors needed to save the woman, including a ventilator, was very close by - in the intensive care ward several floors below.

But there was no electricity, and the elevators did not work.

Approximately the same situation was repeated in many hospitals throughout Venezuela in March 2019, when there was a power outage for five days, which further plunged this country into a political and economic crisis.

Hospitals were unprepared for this. Standby generators in a number of medical institutions immediately collapsed, while others had enough energy only for the wards most in need.

When those five days passed, 26 people had died in hospitals as a result of the blackout, according to Doctors for Health, an organization that tracks the health crisis in Venezuela.

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The patients who died included those who needed an artificial kidney machine and those wounded in the firefight whom surgeons could not operate in almost complete darkness.

They also talked about women who gave birth in dark hospital rooms, surgeons who operated by the light of mobile phone screens, babies who froze in disconnected incubators in neonatal wards.

But the problems affected not only hospitals. Some elderly people living in high-rise buildings had to be carried down the stairs in their arms. People cooked at bonfires and dined by candlelight. Without electricity, food spoiled in quickly heated refrigerators. Traffic lights on the streets did not work, which led to chaos in the transport system.

Pumps pumping water also stopped working, people went for water to rivers and springs. They even used water from the sewer.

Venezuela has already experienced numerous blackouts throughout 2019. Some are short and localized, lasting only a few minutes. Others take several hours, or even days, to eliminate. Doctors for Health has confirmed more deaths of patients in hospitals.

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“Even when there is no electricity in a hospital for four hours, this is not normal,” says Julio Castro of the School of Medicine at the Central University of Venezuela, who collects data for Doctors for Health. “And the situation with water is even worse.” Some hospitals even ask patients to bring their own water.”

The situation Castro describes is like an apocalypse in a country that just a few years ago was considered one of the richest in South America, having the world's largest proven oil reserves.

Although the Venezuelan government blames the saboteurs and terrorists for everything, many indicate that for years nothing has been invested in infrastructure, which has led to the appalling state of the power grid.

However, such long and widespread blackouts do not necessarily occur only in countries on the verge of collapse.

Each year, the homes of millions of people in the US and Canada are plunged into darkness due to storms that damage power lines.

In June 2019, almost all of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay experienced the effects of a blackout that left almost 40 million people without light.

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In the summer of 2012, more than 600 million people in India spent more than two days without electricity. In 2018, the earthquake on the Japanese island of Hokkaido left more than 5 million people without light.

In August 2019 years almost a million people in the UK due to a malfunction in the national energy system, the country was left without electricity. People traveling to work at that moment spent several hours in trains that stopped.

However, all these cases may seem like children's games compared to what blackouts (and with what consequences) experts predict in the future.

The world's growing demand for electricity, population growth, and new technologies (such as electric vehicles) are leading to further disruptions in energy supply, especially as we increasingly switch to renewable but intermittent sources of energy - wind and solar.

Extreme weather conditions associated with global climate change further increase the risk of blackouts.

“So much of our lives (and almost everything we do) depends on energy supply, especially electricity,” says Juliet Mian, chief technology officer at Resilience Shift, an organization that helps prepare for infrastructure disruptions.

“We are used to saying “when there is no light.” But the lack of light is far from the most important thing that worries us,” says Mian.

And she's right. In the modern world, almost everything - from the financial system to communications - depends on electricity.

Other critical infrastructure elements, such as water supply and sewage systems, rely on pumps driven by electricity. Without electricity, gas stations, traffic signs, traffic lights will not work, and trains will not run.

Trade, the delivery of goods and fuels, food storage systems that rely entirely on computers will stop. Air conditioners, gas boilers, heating systems will not work.

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A little over a century ago, our cities delivered goods and took out garbage, relying solely on the muscular strength of humans and animals. In modern infrastructure, electricity has replaced them.

“Today’s world, all its systems are highly interconnected and intertwined. It is very difficult to find a system that is not completely dependent on the power supply,” says Mian. “A complete shutdown will affect everyone.”

Complete shutdown? But what could be the cause of such a disaster?

There are actually many reasons - from natural disasters (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes) to geomagnetic storms caused by solar flares that send charged particles throughout the solar system, creating an overload in electrical networks.

In the 1989 year, such a geomagnetic storm caused the 9-hour power outage in large areas of Canada.

Electric Infrastructure Security Council, an international organization that monitors grid threats, also lists human factorsthat may result in a large outage.

These include cyberattacks, coordinated physical attacks on infrastructure such as power plants, and electromagnetic pulses that can shut down power grids.

Measures against such potential threats are costly and complex. Yes, the main infrastructure can be protected from human attacks and electromagnetic pulses. New systems can also be built to protect transformers from solar flares.

But sometimes this happens, the need for protection from which it is impossible to foresee, especially if you take into account the complex, interconnected structure of our electric networks, which makes them especially vulnerable.

Let us recall at least what happened in September 2003, when a fallen tree cut off an electric wire on an alpine pass leading from Switzerland to Italy. After another 24 minutes, another tree fell onto a power line at the famous Great Saint Bernard Pass.

An unexpected disconnection of the two lines caused an overload of the European networks, as a result of which the power plants stopped throughout Italy.

The whole European country was left without electricity due to two fallen trees that provoked the domino effect.

Modern electric power networks are very complex and combined into a single system. Most of Europe is now huge power grid - perhaps the largest in the world.

It supplies electricity to over 400 million consumers in 24 countries. The US electrical system consists of five different electrical networks.

But there are specialists who are looking for ways to predict power outages and involve artificial intelligence in solving this complex problem.

For example, if a power plant fails, it dramatically increases the load on the others included in this network, their generators work more slowly, and the voltage drops throughout the network.

As a result, there is a risk of destabilizing the fragile balance between the power grids. Operators have to take measures very quickly, almost instantly, to prevent the disconnection of entire sections of networks.

Researchers from the German Ilmenau Institute, a member of the leading European association of applied research institutes Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (Fraunhofer Society), recently reported that they are developing an artificial intelligence system that can automatically detect such network problems and take steps to eliminate them.

Department eUS energy industry invests 7 million dollars in research funding ways to use artificial intelligence to predict accidents in power grids, and also, in case of problems, maintain the supply of electricity at the same level.

General Electric uses machine learning algorithms to analyze past weather-related outages, as well as on-site information from personnel, to predict the damage storms and hurricanes can cause to grids and to properly deploy repair crews in the event of an outage.

“Grids can take care of creating large reserves of energy for a rainy day - e.g. in large batteries.But it is almost impossible to completely protect our power grids from disruptions,” Mian emphasizes.

“We can't create a system where outages don't happen,” she says. “Our networks are so complex that when there are outages, a domino effect begins to occur, and often this simply cannot be avoided. But we can develop systems that respond very quickly to failures and recover quickly.”

That's what Resilience Shift is working on right now. In collaboration with the Council for the Safety of Electric Power Infrastructure, it organizes studies for large organizations, universities, schools, community groups and even families, preparing them for the right actions in cases of large-scale and long-term blackouts.

The domino effect in such situations carries the main danger. As the citizens of Venezuela already know, when the power is cut off, even services such as water supply cease to function.

“We end up going back to the dark ages,” says John Heltzel, director of resiliency planning at the Electric Infrastructure Security Council.

В University College London report describes how a power outage will affect life - from the inability to provide medical care to citizens to a complete shutdown of the transport system.

There will also be severe social consequences. Typically, during shutdowns there is a spike in crime - darkness and broken alarms open up more opportunities for theft and fraud.

ATMs and readers will stop working, and a society that is used to relying on electronic payments will be forced to return to cash. But how many now keep a large supply of cash under their mattress?

The connection will not work, and you will no longer be able to find out on WhatsApp from a loved one how his affairs are. Persons with disabilities and the elderly will be completely isolated.

Without power supply, a business cannot do business, and the economic effect of all this will be unpredictable. In 2004, the US Department of Energy Unveiled outage damage assessment in the USA - about 80 billion dollars a year.

When in October 2019, 2 million consumers in California were left without electricity for two days, experts estimated the damage to the economy at about 2,5 billion.

John Heltzel knows better than anyone the chaos a large power outage can cause, having served as a brigadier general in the Kentucky National Guard for 33 years.

“In 2009, the state was hit by a series of ice storms and snowstorms, causing wires to break under the weight of ice and accumulated snow.The icing was so severe that it destroyed metal structures that could withstand hurricane-force winds, he recalls. “The wooden posts were breaking like toothpicks.”

“All of western Kentucky was shut down,” Heltzel said. — A state of emergency was declared in 114 of 120 counties. People could not leave their homes to go shopping. Wells froze, municipal water systems did not work, and people were hungry. The connection also went out, and it was impossible to call or ask for help.”

The Kentucky National Guard mobilized 12 thousand reservists to go around the house, door-to-door, and provide people with food.

Emergency generators were delivered to resume water supply. Emergency communications stations were brought in from other states to make radio and telephone communications work.

And with all this, the most affected areas remained without electricity for weeks.

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“We flew our helicopters to the repairmen wherever they needed to go, to all the cliff sites,” Heltzel recalls. “But even with all the resources involved, it took more than a month for all the houses to be reconnected.”

In those weeks, about 35 people died in Kentucky and 30 in neighboring states. At least eight deaths were attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning from diesel generators and kerosene heaters used indoors without proper ventilation.

That's why Heltzel believes preparation and planning for large-scale power outages is so important—especially for large organizations and hospitals.

But each of us can take certain steps so that the disaster does not take by surprise. You can start with such simple things as flashlights and a sufficient number of spare batteries for them, as well as creating reserves of drinking water.

The international organization Electricity Infrastructure Safety Council recommends having a two-week supply of water at the rate of 2 liters per day per person and one liter per pet.

It is also worth making sure that the house has a supply of non-perishable foods - rice, pasta, canned vegetables.

But Heltzel and his team also have several non-banal tips in store. Canned food for children, for example, is a very nutritious thing, even if you don’t have kids in the house.

A supply of black garbage bags is also important - they will help you get rid of waste when there is no water in the toilet and the only way out is to take everything outside (the bag is secured with the toilet seat).

Think about always having a cash supply at home for a rainy day. It can save your life.

“We would like for people to be the solution in an emergency, not the problem, not the victims, but the ones who help the recovery effort, who help those who were unprepared for the emergency,” says Heltzel.

“The behavior of doctors in Venezuela is a good example. With each new blackout, the number of deaths in hospitals steadily decreased.Partly because the shutdowns became shorter, but also because hospital workers were already better prepared for them,” says Julio Castro.

Now they make sure the hospital has enough fuel and all the backup generators are working,” he says. “They have a special shift schedule in place in case they need to manually ventilate and so on. All this saves people’s lives.”

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