(“This profound risk requires a new national focus. Significant public and private action is needed to prepare for and recover from a catastrophic outage that could leave the large parts of the nation without power for weeks or months, and cause service failures in other sectors — including water and wastewater, communications, transportation, healthcare, and financial services — that are critical to public health and safety and our national and economic security,” said the advisory council.
The report is an urgent call to action to organize a uniform reaction to a grid attack, harden it from attack, warn of the threats, and push regular Americans into preparing for the worst. )
It also calls for federal spending instead of a reliance on rate hikes by individual utilities to fix their systems and said that $1 spent to protect the grid will save $6 in the case of recovery.
“The power grid is a prime target for attack by nation states, and it is not fair for ratepayers to bear the full burden for this national security function,” said the report, which looked at the potential of a “catastrophic” half-year blackout that could impact 75 million.
The attack could also come with no notice and last half a year. "Long-duration, lasting several weeks to months (at least 2 months, but more likely 6 months or more) due to physical destruction to equipment, such as transformers or transmission lines; or the severity of the event resulting in limited work force to repair damage, or inability to create or transport replacement parts," the report said. “This profound threat requires a new national focus. The NIAC found that our existing plans, response resources, and coordination strategies would be outmatched by an event of this severity. Significant action is needed to prepare for a catastrophic power outage that could last for weeks or months."
According to DHS, the council "provides the president of the United States, through the Secretary of Homeland Security, with advice on the security and resilience of critical infrastructure sectors and their functional systems, physical assets, and cyber networks."