Summary/TLDR

• Modern society’s critical dependence on electricity creates severe vulnerabilities to catastrophic electrical system failures.
• The 2024 Cuban blackouts demonstrated how quickly electrical failures can trigger cascading societal disruptions, from failed water systems to nationwide protests.
• More severe scenarios like electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks or major solar storms could disable electrical infrastructure for months or years.
• A German study and research relating to the US (2024) indicates an extended power outage could lead to a myriad of serious problems in high-income countries, including severe food shortages.
• Understanding and preparing for these systemic risks is crucial for maintaining NZ’s national resilience in an increasingly electrified world.
• This blog provides background information ahead of a webinar with expert panel discussion scheduled for 7.30pm Wednesday 26 February 2025 (NZ time).
• Register for the webinar here. Or join at the scheduled time using this link.

Introduction

The reliable supply of electricity underpins virtually every aspect of modern society, from communications and transportation to healthcare and food distribution. While this electrical infrastructure provides immense benefits, our deep dependence on it creates serious vulnerabilities if the system fails.

In October 2024 Cuba lost power to the entire nation, but what if an electrical failure affected not just a single nation, but an entire continent? What if recovery took not days or weeks, but months or years? These aren’t just theoretical questions – they’re scenarios some governments and researchers are actively studying and preparing for.

The following blog provides introductory reading ahead of our Islands for the Future of Humanity webinar and panel discussion scheduled for 7.30pm NZ time, Wednesday 26 February 2025 (webinar registration).

You can view our previous webinar the ‘Kōrero on Catastrophe’ on the risks of nuclear war from the perspective of NZ.

Catastrophic Electrical Failure as a Risk

The 2024 Cuban blackouts provide a sobering case study. Throughout 2024, Cuba experienced multiple nationwide power outages, with the most severe occurring in October when the failure of a single power plant triggered a total nationwide blackout. The outages led to widespread disruption – water systems failed as pumps lost power, food spoiled in non-functioning refrigerators, and essential services like healthcare were severely impacted. The crisis culminated in widespread protests and required emergency fuel shipments from Mexico to help stabilise the situation.

While Cuba’s power grid was already stressed due to maintenance and fuel supply issues, similar vulnerabilities exist in more robust systems. Modern electrical grids are highly complex and interconnected, meaning that failures can cascade rapidly across regions. The system depends not just on functioning power plants, but on sophisticated control systems, specialised components that may be difficult to replace, and ongoing maintenance from skilled technicians. In a severe crisis, any of these elements could become a critical failure point.

Several identified threats could trigger catastrophic electrical failure:

• Physical damage to critical infrastructure from natural disasters or deliberate attacks
• Cyber-attacks targeting grid control systems
• Supply chain disruptions affecting essential components and fuel
• Loss of skilled personnel needed for operations and maintenance
• Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) events, either from solar storms or nuclear detonations

The growing frequency of extreme weather events and increasing geopolitical tensions may elevate these risks further. Additionally, the push toward renewable energy, while essential for addressing climate change, introduces new complexities in grid management that must be carefully considered in resilience planning.

German Government Study 2010

While governments are often reluctant to publicly examine worst-case scenarios of national power failures, a notable exception exists in a 2010 study from Germany’s Office of Technology Assessment. This comprehensive analysis offered an unusually direct look at how a prolonged, widespread power outage would cascade through modern society. Some of the study’s findings were highlighted recently in the Existential Crunch blog.

The Summary Report was stark. Severe impacts of catastrophic electricity failure on societal functioning included:

• Complete breakdown of communications infrastructure within hours/days – phones, internet, and most methods of communication between authorities and the public would fail, making coordination of emergency response and public information extremely difficult. Only radio would remain viable for mass communication.
• Collapse of food and water supply systems – Food distribution would break down within days as stores empty and cold storage fails. There would be refrigeration failures, non-functioning payment systems, and transport disruptions would empty store shelves. Even more concerning, modern livestock facilities would face a crisis as automated feeding, climate control, and milking systems failed. Water supply and sewage systems would fail without power for pumps, leading to severe hygiene and health risks.
• Paralysis of transportation systems – Traffic lights, rail systems, and fuel pumps would stop working. Emergency services would struggle to respond, and movement of essential supplies would be severely constrained.
• Breakdown of healthcare services – Hospitals could only maintain limited emergency operations on backup power. Most medical facilities would have to close, medications requiring refrigeration would be lost, and medical care would become extremely limited.
• Collapse of public order and security – The combination of failed infrastructure, scarce resources, and limited emergency response capabilities would likely lead to civil unrest (this was borne out in Cuba in 2024). The report indicates “feelings of helplessness and stress will develop if supplies are interrupted, information is unavailable, and public order begins to break down.”

The study’s ultimate conclusion was grim – after only a few days without power, it would become impossible to maintain the supply of vital goods and services across affected regions. This would mark a threshold beyond which government authorities could no longer fulfil their fundamental duty to protect citizens’ lives and wellbeing, effectively constituting a national catastrophe.

This detailed German study raises several important questions for NZ, including:

• Is awareness of the risk as much in its infancy in NZ as it was in Germany?
• How do NZ central and local government decision makers coordinate, and what is the plan for national communication without electricity? (Radio on batteries? Loud speakers?)
• Can we devise and mandate a specified minimum level of communication service in a prolonged power outage (across days, weeks, months)?
• Is decentralised generation a solution? How much damage would distributed renewable generation suffer in various scenarios?
• How will vehicles refuel without electrical pumps and can we move food from production to consumption?
• Do we need food distribution points or communal kitchen plans if people can’t cook at home?
• How will people pay for food?
• How will ships be unloaded?
• How will cows be milked?
• How at risk is water supply or wastewater? Can a roof water collection mandate help?
• Can NZ give more prominence to construction of systems that don’t depend on electricity (eg, gravity fed water where possible)?
• How do we do all this across weeks or months without electricity?

Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Risk

While the German study provides a comprehensive overview of electrical grid failure scenarios irrespective of the triggering cause, specific threat vectors like electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks or solar storms (see below) warrant particular attention, in part because they could disrupt electricity supply across continents or even globally.

Indeed the United States EMP Commission has published several reports and Congress held a hearing in 2015 on the EMP threat. An EMP event, whether from hostile action such as high altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon, or natural causes, could have devastating effects on NZ’s electrical infrastructure and modern society.

A high-altitude EMP detonation over NZ or nearby (eg, an attack on Australia) would generate three distinct waves of electromagnetic disruption. The initial E1 pulse, occurring in mere nanoseconds, would induce extreme voltage surges in electrical equipment across thousands of square kilometres. This would likely destroy unprotected electronic systems including computers, telecommunications equipment, and solid-state control systems that manage power grids. The subsequent E2 and E3 waves would then induce powerful currents in long conductors like power lines and communication cables.

Steven Starr doesn’t sugar coat it in his detailed description of an EMP attack on the US:

“Ground, air, and sea transportation systems, water and sanitation systems, telecommunication systems, and banking systems are all knocked out of service. Food and fuel distribution cease. Emergency medical services become unavailable. The multitude of electronic devices that society depends on have suddenly stopped working.”

For NZ specifically, key vulnerabilities might include:

• NZ’s interconnected national grid system, which could experience cascading failures as protective systems are overwhelmed.
• Telecommunications infrastructure including satellite and cellular networks and internet systems, which could fail.
• Transportation systems, water and wastewater treatment facilities dependent on electrical pumps and control systems, banking and financial systems requiring functional computers and networks, medical equipment in hospitals and healthcare facilities, food storage and distribution systems requiring refrigeration and computerised inventory management, all at risk.

NZ’s isolated geographic position increases vulnerability as replacement equipment and expertise would largely need to be sourced from overseas, potentially resulting in extended recovery times. NZ’s relatively concentrated population centres also mean that damage to key infrastructure nodes could affect large portions of the population simultaneously.

Food supply could be critically at risk.

A 2024 study published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science examined how a severe EMP attack over North America would affect US food supplies. The findings were stark: food consumption could drop by 38-65% in a scenario that takes a year to recover from – potentially pushing large populations into famine conditions. Even in a more optimistic scenario with recovery taking just two months, food consumption would still decline by 24-50%. The study highlighted how modern food supply chains’ reliance on electricity makes them particularly vulnerable to prolonged power outages, affecting everything from farm irrigation to food processing and distribution. NZ would likely share many of these problems, especially the cities and large towns.

Solar Storm

While EMP represents a potential hostile threat, naturally occurring space weather could also pose a risk to NZ’s infrastructure. Solar storms and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can create effects similar to EMP, but typically developing over hours rather than nanoseconds, allowing some opportunity for protective measures if adequate warning systems are in place.

NZ’s mid-latitude location means it would typically experience less severe geomagnetic effects than polar regions. However, NZ’s increasing reliance on long-distance power transmission lines and interconnected infrastructure has heightened vulnerability. The national grid stretches the length of both islands, with submarine cables crossing Cook Strait – these long conductors can act as antennas for geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) during solar storms.

Key vulnerabilities include:

• The high-voltage transmission network, particularly extra-high voltage (EHV) transformers which are especially susceptible to damage from GICs
• Satellite-dependent systems including GPS/GNSS navigation, critical for aviation and maritime operations
• Communications infrastructure, especially long-distance cables and satellite links that keep NZ connected to the global internet
• Pipeline networks carrying gas and oil can even experience accelerated corrosion from induced currents

A major solar storm comparable to the 1859 Carrington Event could cause widespread disruption lasting weeks or months. Even a more moderate event, like the 1989 Quebec storm that left millions without power for 9 hours, could damage transformers and cause regional blackouts. NZ’s geographical isolation compounds the recovery challenge – replacement transformers typically take 6-16 months to source from international suppliers, and shipping logistics (also impacted by the event) could extend this timeline further.

The cascading effects would impact essential services, again including:

• Food distribution networks needing pumped fuel and refrigeration
• Water and wastewater treatment requiring electric pumps
• Financial systems dependent on electronic transactions
• Healthcare services relying on powered medical equipment
• Telecommunications systems to coordinate responses or emergency services

While NZ’s smaller scale might allow faster recovery in some areas compared to larger nations, its isolation and limited domestic manufacturing capacity for critical components like large transformers makes it particularly vulnerable to extended disruption. Planning for space weather events might require monitoring of solar activity, hardening of critical infrastructure, a more modular and distributed electricity network (islanding), and development of replacement component stockpiles given our distance from major manufacturers.

Unlike the near-instantaneous impact of EMP, space weather events typically provide some warning through solar monitoring systems. This makes preparedness and early warning systems crucial for protecting vulnerable infrastructure before the arrival of solar storms.

Given the above, NZ’s National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has recently published a Space Weather Plan focused on monitoring, information gathering, communication channels, and coordination.

NEMA’s plan is a great start, but it does not yet address options for ongoing consequence management during an extended recovery phase. It also says nothing about any infrastructure strategies for building resilience to these events, or about the infrastructure and resources that might need to exist ahead of time so there are affordances for any National Action Plan. Our organisation, Islands for the Future of Humanity, is particularly interested in fostering discussion about these prior components of resilience strategies.

We can further ask:

• What consequences are expected and how could investment/action ahead of time mitigate or avoid these?
• What resources/capital stocks would help in the recovery?
• How could we prevent fuel, food, water, medical supplies being used up when they may not be able to be replaced?
• What can we learn from other big electricity failure events (eg, Cuba, Quebec – see above) about what happens behaviourally, socially, and what might be needed?
• What infrastructure might be destroyed and not just disrupted in these events and how do we rebuild/replace these (eg, without trade)?

Managing the Risk of Catastrophic Electricity Failure

Catastrophic nationwide or even global electrical failure is an understudied event that poses some of the largest risks to NZ. In recognition of this, we are holding a webinar and expert panel to facilitate public discussion of this risk. The webinar will take place at 7.30pm NZ time, on Wednesday 26 February 2025. The intended audience is individuals, organisations, government advisors, and decision makers. Register here, or click to join on the day.

With maximum solar activity forecast for July 2025, deteriorating global geopolitical relations raising the spectre of nuclear war, and advances in AI threatening to facilitate global cyber-attacks, the likelihood of catastrophic electrical failure is probably rising.

Existing research in NZ has started to consider the dense interdependencies among critical systems and how these networks might be impacted by regional natural disasters. More of this analysis is needed, and with a focus on catastrophic national and global risks. This is because, as the Covid-19 pandemic showed us, the downstream effects of perturbances are not always obvious.

NZ needs to include these catastrophic global risks in its National Risk Register and make this document and the relevant mitigation plans publicly available so NZ businesses, organisations, public services and individuals can consider these risks. Recent critique of climate and security policy in Australia illustrates the need for public information, with Green and independent MPs and senators persistently asking the government how can we address risks when we are not even told what the government knows about them.

Mitigation starts with public discussion supplemented with information from experts, key agencies and industries. Informed discussion can help influence what kinds of information, infrastructure and resilience strategies we ask of our governments.

Debate and discussion could potentially inform strategic planning, for example via NZ’s Infrastructure Commission Priorities Programme, or facilitate feedback to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s (DPMC’s) 2025 Long-term Insights Briefing (which looks set to address global risks), or by informing ongoing revisions to NEMA’s Space Weather Plan or CatPlan handbook, updates to NZ’s National Fuel Plan, or a range of other risk mitigation plans.

Join us on 26 February for our webinar on catastrophic electrical system failure. The session will begin assuming attendees have read this blog, or are otherwise familiar with a broad outline of these risks, allowing us to dive straight into discussing some of the questions raised above and the question of what to do about these risks?

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