I have a close friend who is getting ready to retire from the power industry up in PA. He has been involved with the grid (mostly the NE) for his entire career until the last few years. He is management now. He worked his way up through the system as a lineman and then into larger infrastructure management and plant management and development.

We have talked over the last few years quite a bit about EMP and more often recently on the CME/Flare risks and the grid. His take pretty much agrees with yours Karl, but where he gets really worried is for concerns on the large trunk lines, which transfer the highest voltages over long distances from the generating plants. This is where he feels we have the greatest weakness. Those parts of the infrastructure are some of the oldest components to the system and as he put it to me a while back, they are being held together with "bubble gum and bailing wire".

There are very large swaths of the US grids transmission capabilities which are in dire need of upgrade, transformers being a part of this, and in a CME/EMP type event these are going to be extremely vulnerable. He says there are plans that have been around for quite a while to make them "better" able to withstand these kinds of events, but the implementation isnt happening for money and manpower reasons. It also was not considered a large enough threat to add the cost of hardening and redundancy when our grid was built out during the middle part of the last century.

All of this depends on any type of attack and or large enough CME/Flare event of course, but IMHO this is a big enough threat that we should probably doing more to prevent against it. My buddy agrees.

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"Alas, alas, that great city of Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour thy judgment come"