Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Ten: Power Stations and Grids 131mission to lower voltages for distribution over subtransmission lines and overfour million miles of retail distribution lines. 50 Lead times for replacing mostsubstation transformers range from weeks to a year. Although some analyststhink that damage to substations and distribution networks “would have sucha slight effect on the overall system as to make this type of sabotage unlikely,”51 many saboteurs evidently do not see it that way. There are over fourtimes as many substations handling over ten million volt-amperes (a capacityroughly equivalent to ten megawatts) as there are central power stations. 52Thus near almost every load center there is a corresponding substation, generallyout in the open and next to a public road. Such substations are effectivesoft targets for highly selective blackouts, and convenient ones for merelysymbolic damage. Some attacks can serve both ends at once, as when threefired workers at a strife-ridden naval shipyard were charged in 1980 with plottingto blow up its power transformers. 53Both transmission substations (serving mainly large industrial customers atsubtransmission voltages) and distribution substations (serving mainly residentialand commercial customers) have been attacked by many means. In1975 and again in 1977, the same Pacific Gas & Electric Company substationwas damaged by pipe bombs, interrupting tens of thousands of customers. 54Four other PG&E substation bombings caused transformer-oil fires and localblackouts in 1977. 55 In the same year, shots fired into transformers did a halfmilliondollars’ damage and blacked out eight thousand customers in four suburbanAtlanta counties for up to five hours. 56 The same amount of propertydamage was done on 28 March 1981 when gunshots and bombs—reportedlyshowing signs of expertise in explosives—destroyed transformers and damageda substation at three Florida sites, blacking out parts of Palm Beach and environs.57 A transformer bombing blacked out eastern Puerto Rico in 1975, 58 andBasque separatists bombed a Spanish substation in 1981. 59 In the U.S., additionalsubstation and transformer bombings occurred in California and Seattlein 1975, in Colorado in 1974 (causing a quarter-million dollars’ damage), andin Albuquerque in 1977. 60 To simplify the saboteur’s task, utility transformersoften contain cooling oil that can be released and ignited by standoff methods,including rifle fire. The oil may contain highly toxic PCBs, which greatly complicaterepairs and can require difficult cleanup of a substantial area.During 1972–79, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported a total ofmore than fifteen thousand actual or attempted bombings in the UnitedStates. 61 Most of these were successful. Over half the successful ones wereexplosive, the rest incendiary. Public utilities—most of them electrical utilities—represented generally one or two percent of the total targets. This percentagepeaked at nearly two and a half percent in 1978, when an American utility was