Building Resilience and Recoverability of Electric Grid Communications

Industrialized society depends on continuously operating critical infrastructures, especially the electric grid and its associated telecommunications systems. A widespread, long‐term outage of grid systems can result from natural disasters, accidents, or intentional actions. When such an outage occurs, outside assistance may be unavailable or impractical. Resulting societal impacts can be severe—even deadly. Therefore, infrastructures should be designed for resilience to prevent collapse and to facilitate rapid recovery. The telecommunications system for the U.S. electric grid exemplifies a subsystem vulnerable to such a long‐term outage. An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) can cause such an outage to telecommunication systems. To ensure resilience to an EMP event, the equipment can be shielded and collocated with protected on‐site power and long‐duration fuel storage. Building resilience and facilitating reconstitution of the grid telecommunication system would have societal benefits far exceeding the investments required to obtain these capabilities. The cost estimation methodology we use in this analysis is broadly applicable for a variety of hazards and threats to complex critical infrastructures.