Nine Substations.

Some very astounding numbers.

“There are a bunch of newsletters out there I have read. News Items is the one I want to read.” — Jane Metcalfe, Chair of the Board of Directors, Human Immunome Project, co-founder Wired magazine and Wired Ventures.

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1. The power grid relies on thousands of aging, hand-built transformers. If enough fail, the blackout could last years. The grid is perhaps the most complex machine ever built, but it was created without a master plan and made subject to the distortions of greed and local orneriness like every other big project in the United States. As a result, we have not one grid but three: the Western, Eastern and Texas Interconnections. Within each area, thousands of utilities generate and distribute power, and the flow is managed by one of 101 regional balancing authorities across the United States. FERC conducted a power flow analysis, which modeled the cascading effects of knocking out the most critical substations in each interconnection, ones where multiple high-voltage lines came together. “We came up with some very astounding numbers,” Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of FERC, said. “If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.” (Sources: nytimes.com, ferc.gov)

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2. The modern electric grid is built on a backbone of transformers. These giant machines, some as large as a shipping container and weighing as much as 800,000 pounds, allow utilities and grid operators to move electricity across the country at high voltages. They are also incredibly difficult to build and increasingly hard to find: Wait times for large power transformers — the kind needed to connect new power plants and gigawatt data centers to the grid — are as long as five years. To understand how this laborious process (of building transformers) unfolds, the photographer Christopher Payne visited Delta Star, a transformer manufacturer based in Lynchburg, Va. (Source: nytimes.com. The photo essay is great.)

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3. Residents of Kyiv are sleeping once again in overcrowded metro stations or in cars in underground garages. Above, the air war is turning into a turkey-shoot. Russia is bombarding the city with ever more ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Ukraine, which had previously thwarted most such attacks with Patriot anti-missile batteries, is “going Winchester”—military jargon for running out of ammunition. Ukraine’s plight is the most acute sign of the West’s shortage of interceptors. America’s depleted arsenal also helps explain why President Donald Trump has repeatedly retreated from threats to return to war with Iran. America’s allies are alarmed. Switzerland expects its order of Patriots to be delayed by up to seven years. Taiwan worries that 102 ordered years ago will not arrive this year as scheduled. Lockheed Martin, which makes the most advanced version, the PAC-3 MSE, says it cannot guarantee delivery times to any foreign client, given the Pentagon’s power to divert them. Shortages of munitions are common in wartime, especially in big, attritional wars. Yet America is running short after a brief war against a medium-sized power. What if it had to fight China? (Source: economist.com)