Black sky: Exposing electricity as the Achilles’ heel of resilience

Abstract

The national power grid is the most critical and the most vulnerable life-support infrastructure in modern society. Electricity serves as the essential element in sustaining every other sector of critical infrastructure including water, fuel and communications. Collective experience with responding to and recovering from widespread, long-duration power outages — known as black sky events — is nearly non-existent. Understanding these risks and weaknesses requires a collaborative planning effort with the public and private sectors to identify and protect critical nodes within the interdependent infrastructure to ensure that recovery from a catastrophic event is possible. This also requires a ‘whole community’ approach to planning and execution to facilitate a response on an unprecedented level.