Power Matters
for Critical Infrastructure

All Too Real Examples

That may sound abstract, but there are all too real examples to illustrate the relationship. Sometimes the easiest way to see what’s needed to make a system strong is when something fails. That’s what happened in Texas in February 2021, when the state’s power generation network more or less collapsed after a severe winter storm.

In the chaotic aftermath, there was a lot of confusion and misinformation about what caused the collapse. But what really happened all comes down to one thing. The statewide power generation system had been starved for years of the one element it needs the most – systemic thinking.

Another telling example occurred 10 years ago, in Fukishima, Japan. The most powerful tidal wave in 300 years killed more than 18,000 people, and then the tsunami flooded Fukishima’s 40-year-old nuclear plant, causing meltdowns in the cores of three of its six reactors.

We’re still contemplating the aftermath of the Texas power collapse, and we’re still absorbing the lessons of Fukishima a full decade after its meltdown:

• How can we apply learnings from events like these?

• How can we add this new knowledge to what we already know?

• How do we build a resilient power generation network that functions not as a haphazard gathering of parts that sometimes break down, but as a system that responds to the toughest stresses?

Developing the systemic thinking that’s needed to ensure a power generation system that’s resilient when facing extremes requires getting back to some of the basics – revisiting how raw energy gets turned into power in the first place. Most of us assume we understand this, but we ought to be humbled by the fact that in more than 10,000 years of human existence, it’s only in the last few hundred years that we even knew electricity existed, and more recently that we have managed to harness it.

Understanding Electricity

All matter is composed of atoms, and when broken down to small enough pieces, everything in the universe is some combination of a nucleus orbited by one or more electrons. Each of these electrons has a negative charge.

Atoms combine to form matter. Different atoms with different nuclei and different numbers of electrons behave in different ways. Some are dense, some are more porous. The ways in which the atoms are constructed determines how they respond to the energy that comes from their electrons.

In some materials – wood, glass, plastic, ceramic, cotton or even the air, for example – the electrons are tightly bound to the nuclei within the atoms. They stick to the atoms. Because these atoms are so reluctant to share electrons, they don’t transmit the energy they use to spin around the core. These materials can't conduct electricity very well, sometimes not at all. These materials are electrical insulators.

Other atoms are electrical conductors. These materials, the atoms within metals for example, have electrons that can detach from their atoms and move across the larger latticework of similar atoms that are bound together into molecules, which in turn form substances and materials. These free electrons are able to move – they are conducted within the material.

This flow of electrons is electricity. Power generation is the means to harness the activity of these electrons and move it along a designated path.

This may sound like a review from a middle-school science class, but it’s important to understand this basic information about electricity in order to pinpoint what can – and does – go wrong in the critical infrastructure we depend on for electrical generation. Understanding what’s wrong – and what is missing from the picture, is the way to find solutions that are right for building a safe, secure and resilient network.

When Things Go Wrong

One of the biggest mistakes societies make, including our own, is to assume that something which is unlikely to happen will not happen. The mistake is that, sometimes it does. The price we pay when unlikely things go wrong is often severe.

We have paid the price for this type of mistake many times. We’re still absorbing the lessons. Ten years ago, the Fukishima nuclear disaster killed more than 18,000 and displaced nearly half a million people. Today, we know all about the complexities that caused the destruction to be so extensive and severe. We’re only now understanding the simple, underlying cause — not being prepared to deal with the inevitable question: what could possibly go wrong?

The plant was built on a coastal site where tsunamis were a risk. Its reactors were older style, 1960s units with weak and outdated water containment vessels. The station ought to have been built 30 metres above sea level; instead, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) opted for only 10 metres to save money After all, the probability of a tsunami with flood water higher than this was unlikely.

Fukishima had flaws in design, construction, operation, maintenance and regulatory oversight. But the real, overriding reason for the disaster is simple. As a Japanese parliamentary panel concluded, government, regulatory authorities and TEPCO (a private plant operator) “failed to correctly develop the most basic safety requirements.”

For all the complexities, it came down to neglecting that fundamental idea of being prepared for anything that could possibly happen, no matter how unlikely. That ought to have included assessing the probability of potential damage from a natural disaster such as a tsunami, preparing for collateral damage and having an evacuation and recovery plan for worst-case scenarios.

The planning, design and construction didn’t do this. In Kobe, Japan, there is a stirring earthquake memorial museum that includes an extensive exhibit about Fukishima. It shows in human terms what happens when strategic thinking about critical infrastructure is neglected.

In this exhibit there is a telling video of a man clinging to an antenna at the top of a building as tsunami water levels completely engulf the building well above its highest walls and roof. The building was supposed to be where all the emergency services would operate in a disaster, to coordinate and to assist the public. Trouble is, it’s a three-storey building.

The designers of the Fukishima power plant, and evidently the people at the emergency services coordination and response centre there, figured the emergency services building was tall enough because there hadn’t been a tsunami that big in hundreds of years. What could possibly go wrong?

A Texas-sized Mess

Texas found out in early 2021 that quite a bit can go wrong when attention is lacking to likely or inevitable scenarios in complex systems. Texas is one of the most energy-rich places on earth, not just with abundant oil and gas but also wind, solar and nuclear power. Yet in mid-February 2021, some 4.7 million homes and businesses were left without power. The state’s grid was found to be minutes away from complete failure before it was shut down and the damage – to infrastructure and the economy as a whole – was estimated early on to be $195 billion.

Politicians began slinging agenda-driven blame for the failure, saying it was the fault of frozen wind turbines; in fact, frozen natural gas pipelines were more of a problem and one of Texas’ two nuclear plants had to shut down because of disruption in a feedwater pump to the reactor  that was caused by the cold weather.

The real failure, though, is lack of vision. Texas was warned by federal regulators 10 years ago that its infrastructure needed to be more resilient to harsh weather, but those who oversee its electricity market didn’t prepare. To make matters worse, Texas is the only state in the U.S. Lower 48 whose grid is not connected outside the state, so it could not tap into emergency power.

Swiss Cheese Risk Management

What happened at Fukishima, in Texas and in other critical infrastructure failures of various magnitude, points to the need to look at what analysts call the Swiss cheese model of risk management. It sounds like a model that’s full of holes, but this is exactly the point.

Swiss cheese risk management assumes that failure can and will occur across many points in a system. Also sometimes called the cumulative act effect, the model can be applied to different types of infrastructure – in aviation, building safety, roads and bridges, for example. It also can be deployed to manage risks in power generation or in complex supply chains and infrastructure networks as a whole.

The principle of the model is that, like pieces of cheese stacked together, there are holes in random places. In infrastructure, these holes are weaknesses, where failure is more likely than in other places. The holes in stacked pieces of cheese are spread out so that they are not directly on top of each other though; if the weaknesses in infrastructure are distributed evenly, one part may fail but the system will remain strong and intact.

The Swiss cheese model can apply directly to the critical infrastructure of North America’s power generation system and in fact to all critical infrastructure and supply chains, to make them better, in several ways.

First, it’s a method of strategic thinking – if you anticipate weaknesses across different parts of the system, you can organize the system so that when one part falters or fails, the rest will still be strong and be able to compensate.

Secondly, Swiss cheese thinking has bearing on the choices we make for power supply. For decades, there has a been an increasingly pointless debate about how one type of energy must prevail, and other types forsaken.

As the worldwide climate emergency deepens, some people advocate eliminating all fossil fuels; others, whose livelihoods and economies depend on oil and gas, attack the growing prevalence of wind and solar energy. Still others decry nuclear energy, concerned about potential accidents and the need to store spent nuclear fuel. And many people look to the promise of hydrogen as a fuel – it is in use already, but often it now requires expending energy twice, once to produce the hydrogen and the other time to use it.

In reality,  all types of fuel will have some role for the foreseeable future. It’s increasingly apparent that power generated by coal, oil and gas will decline in prevalence, and major automakers are getting on track to convert their production to electric vehicles by the mid-2030s. But that is not the complete picture.

Applying this Swiss cheese approach to our power generation and distribution grid tells us that we’re still going to need all kinds of energy sources to meet our needs. Critical infrastructure depends on backup to ensure it does not fail us; all kinds of sophisticated high-technology materials require petrochemicals. Distributed, decentralized power based on isolated solar panels or hydrogen fuel cells has a place in North America’s energy future as well, but there will always be holes in any system, and a robust, resilient grid that depends on a variety of fuel sources will still be important.

Only by keeping our power generation system strong, stable – and reliable at extremes, with adequate risk mitigation in place – can we maintain and enhance our living standards, protect and grow our food supply, and develop pharmaceuticals and new vaccines at warp speed. If the past year has taught us anything, that’s what we need to do.