How could you accidentally cause a global blackout?

Question

Besides geomagnetic storms, obviously. This has to be man-made. At first I considered a HEMP, but who would've guessed nuclear weapons had so many failsafes to prevent premature detonations? So then the question is "how could I cause an accidental global blackout without using nukes or The Power of the Sun"? Alternatively, "how could I make enough nukes detonate prematurely without any elaborate sabotage"?

P.S. The "accidental" part is really important. It has to be an unexpected consequence of something, or at least appear to be one on the surface.

Answer 1

A security researcher accidentally loses control of a highly infectious worm that affects IoT devices.

IoT devices are increasingly common, and they're connected to things that require large amounts of power like air conditioners. They also have really bad security, though because of awareness, hopefully this will improve. However, the general trend is towards more of them controlling more things, and security will always be an issue in some form.

Power grids need to be balanced in terms of supply and demand, also across regions, otherwise bad things can happen like the 2003 Northeast US blackout. If you were to synchronously increase load and shed load you may be able to destabilize grids, triggering cascading failures.

So, if your worm turned everything it had control of on every even minute, off every odd minute, that might cause many power grids to react extremely poorly, and potentially shut off as power plants disconnect. More advanced patterns that exploit the connections in a power grid might be able to cause more damage to what is already aging infrastructure, but the on-off thing might be what someone creates as a simple test.

You could also have this worm created by an AI, or an AI infecting all the things, and the power plants, but even if power plant computers are throughly "air-gapped", crazy load patterns could still trip them into disconnecting. Omniscient, omnipotent AIs are kinda cliche though.

This is not likely to affect anything on the smaller scales like the T'au microgrid which are more resilient because they're small and relatively modern. Certainly is going to do nothing to your diesel generator out in the woods.

Answer 2

You say you want to go with something accidental, but you can take it even further. What if some people do something they think is helping and it causes catastrophic failure.

Imagine this:

A private software firm develops a new program for power grid management. You may or may not be aware of this, but most power grids need constant maintenance to balance supply and demand of power. Too much provided, and the grid shorts. Too little supplied, and systems shut down. As a result, the power plants for each regions grid are constantly changing output. It is inefficient and relies nearly exclusively on human influence. Water flow through dams, burn rate for coal plants, and number of cells active in nuclear plants are all dependent on people, with very little computer influence. What if that changed? What if our software company found a way for a computer to observe supply and demand for power and learn when and why to adjust output, adapting to all forms of generation. This company would instantly become rich, as energy firms seek to use their hopefully patented tech. It starts small, taking root in cities first and then is applied to nationwide grids. It is amazingly effective, causing the energy industry to reduce failures and increase reliability.

BUT THEN

It was a simple mistake. The software firm is working on an update to their system, one that energy firms are deadly waiting for. When it comes out, all of them want it, and they allow some of their newly computerized systems to accept the update and all goes smoothly. They wait a week, a month maybe. All seems well. So, they push the update to more systems it until all of their grids use it. After all, if it didn't fail within a month, it must be safe. And it was, for a time. But unknown to all, there is a glitch in the update, a miswritten definition in one of the program's library files. This particular file isn't called on by the main function very often, so the glitch remained unnoticed. Then, one day, catastrophic power failures everywhere. Coal plants stop working. Dams are frozen at their current flow rate. Nuclear plants completely shut down, their cells grow cold. The lights go out. The world is dark.

Basically this idea depends on a glitch in computerized grid maintenance causing a global shutdown. This idea, scarily enough, is plausible even today. I'm sure the energy industry would love a way to manage the grid without constant human attention, and a bad update is something everyone deals with eventually, from iPhones whose hardware can no longer handle the new iOS to government websites with broken links.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Linked: biggest blackouts of all time. http://mentalfloss.com/article/57769/12-biggest-electrical-blackouts-history

Here is described a huge one from 2003 which affected a big piece of the northeastern US and Canada. It was an attention getter because so many people were affected, and because blackouts of this sort were thought to be relics of the 1970s. When no explanation was forthcoming people started imagining weird explanations.

6. NORTHEAST UNITED STATES AND CANADA // AUGUST 14-15, 2003 It took months before the real cause of the Northeast Blackout of 2003 was finally determined. Initially, Canadian Defense Minister John McCallum blamed an outage at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, which the state's Emergency Management Agency denied. What actually happened was a high-voltage power line in Northern Ohio brushed against overgrown trees, causing it to shut down. When the alarm system that would typically alert FirstEnergy Corporation failed, the incident was ignored. In the next 90 minutes, system operators tried to figure out what happened while three other lines switched off as a consequence of the first line's failure.

The official "tree branches" thing still smells a little bit to me like "weather balloons...the planet Venus".

Centralized power generation is efficient, but new technology comes with new hazards, and the possibility of old hazards manifesting in new ways. I could imagine a circumstance where a technological breakthrough (for example: fusion power and Tesla-type aetheric power transmission) results in the entire world getting their power from a single facility. This facility - enormously expensive but so efficient there is no need for duplication (and no funds or political will to do so) - becomes the proverbial one basket that all eggs are in. The disaster which shuts it down does not need to be some Siberian fireball; it should be some prosaic like tree branches or an anchor fouling some sort of stay, which echoes and ramifies thru the new system to result in a total shutdown.

Answer 4

You probably already know about the Morris Worm, but in case you don't, here's a short summary:

In 1988, Mr Morris, a grad student, wanted to highlight the inherit risks of weak email passwords. He decided to raise awareness by creating a short code that would be sent by email to someone, take a hold of that person's computer, then send copies of itself to each of that person's email contacts.

This was the first ever software that you could consider to be a computer virus. Although Morris never intended it to be very serious, his worm caused a denial of service typeattack on the infected computers, due to the overload of messages being sent by computers with multiple copies of the worm on it.

It could be fun to bring back this sort of miscalculation to create an accidental global blackout. Imagine an eco-terrorist group wanting to highlight our society's dependance on electricity. One of their hackers develops a code worm that infects a city's power grid to shut it off for one hour (except vital services, like hospitals etc), then turn it back on, and then the group can send a message out for big impact.

But something goes wrong in the deployment. Maybe the hacker didn't configure the "turn back on" sequence properly, so the power grid misfires and melts down. Maybe someone higher up in the organisation (less versed in IT) wants to spread the virus to other cities, all across the globe, for higher impact. Maybe while the power is out, something goes wrong due to a lack of power, like someone trying to force it back on (the hospital still has power, but does the prison? Does the military base?), and it damages the system. Maybe some of all this at the same time!

Just this might not hit the whole world, but as others have mentioned, once a few things go wrong, it can be quite easy for everything to cascade out of control. This could go quite well with @Terraformer8's scenario of power grids trying to replace their technicians with an AI.

Answer 5

• Start with a wouldwide live event, that most people in the world are watching on TV or Internet etc.

• No one predicted how many people would watch the event, hence none of the grids planned for it.

• The "presenter" without warning explains they will be a break and say it is a good time for everyone to make a hot drink, or heat up their food.

That number of kettle being turned on will bring down most grids. However without something else going wrong most grids will recover and reconnect power users within hours.

There is no need to have the grids connected to each other or running the same software etc, to have them all fail due to the same event.

(Princess Diana's wedding the in UK required many power station that would not be normally used at that time of year to be fired up and on "spinning standby" to cope with the registrator being signed)

Answer 6

Lots of grid equipment now uses the GPS system to get timing signals. I think their may be a way to make grids fail if the different parts of each grid was given a different set of timing signals.

Answer 7

your question of causing a global blackout as of yet is not fully possible...each power grid is powered by individual power systems...to be able to wipe out the power grid globally all power grids would have to be chained together and powered by a new higher powered outage system...it would also be operated by several monitoring stations...this means if one monitoring station fails the others take over until the problem is fixed...which is where a hidden glitch can find it's way into the system where it can infect the entire system...it may become a reality one day but for now we can only but dream of a world without power...a world where the art of survival is key...the human race started without technology but we have become so independent on it that if it were to disappear we as a human race wouldn't know what to do...unless your a survival expert like me...the human race would look to true survivors for help...many people would become manic for supplies and kill...others would end their lives...a dystopian world of death and survival...is this the world you want...is this why you've asked of an accidental global blackout...