Who is Next?

 KYIV, Ukraine — As they struggle to maintain an electricity grid heavily damaged by Russian missiles, officials in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, say they have begun planning for a once unthinkable possibility: a complete blackout that would require the evacuation of the city’s approximately three million remaining residents.

The situation is already so dire, with 40 percent of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure damaged or destroyed, that municipal workers are setting up 1,000 heating shelters that can double as bunkers while engineers try to fix bombed-out power stations without the needed equipment.

 To try to keep the grid from failing altogether, Ukraine’s national energy utility said on Saturday that it would continue to impose rolling blackouts in seven regions.

 

The tremendous strain on Ukraine’s ability to provide power is the result of the widespread bombardment by Russian forces of critical energy infrastructure across the country, a tactic that analysts say President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has resorted to as his troops have suffered repeated setbacks on the battlefield.

The damage caused by the Russian strikes has heaped new suffering on Ukraine’s civilians and forced officials to reckon with the possibility that further damage could render them unable to provide basic services.

 

“We understand that if Russia continues such attacks, we may lose our entire electricity system,” Roman Tkachuk, the director of security for the Kyiv municipal government, said in an interview, speaking of the city.

Officials in the capital have been told that they would be likely to have at least 12 hours’ notice that the grid was on the verge of failure.

“If there’s no power, there will be no water and no sewage,” says Tkachuk. 

As winter approaches, the city is preparing 1,000 heating shelters that can also protect civilians from Russian missiles. Most are inside educational facilities, but the authorities have asked that their precise locations not be reported lest they become easy targets.

(Lack of heating during the coming winter can cause major humanitarian disaster. Portable, capable to be transported in small shipping containers, autonomous power and heating systems, such as the one developed by Ascent Systems Technologies, is a solution which could save thousands, potentially tens of thousands, lives).

When Russia launched its latest barrage of more than 50 cruise missiles on Monday, most were shot down, Ukrainian officials said. But those that got through hit power plants and substations, immediately depriving thousands of people of power.

Ukraine’s national electric utility, UkrEnergo, confirmed on Saturday the need to continue rolling blackouts, saying they were necessary to “reduce the load on the networks, ensure sustainable balancing of the power system and avoid repeated accidents after the power grids were damaged by Russian missile and drone attacks.”

The cuts would affect Kyiv and its environs, and the regions of Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy and Zhytomyr. Who is next?

The power damages in Ukraine affects not only Ukraine but also EU where significant portion of the Ukrainian power used to be exported. That exacerbates their own problems and already sky-high electricity prices. The power grid can also be hacked, if anyone needs a proof, look no further than hacking of the pipeline in the Eastern US in 2021 and previous multiple hacker attacks on the grid of Baltic republics and Ukraine. 

So who is next? Is it Vienna, or maybe it is Paris?  It doesn't have to be a war - it can be a strong solar flare, or sever storm. 

Isn't it a final wake up call to start re-thinking the entire approach to the centralized energy supplies and move towards decentralized, robust energy system?

 

Sources: The New York Times and Al-Jazeera

Replacing the North Warning System: Strategic competition or Arctic confidence building?

 

 

Canada and the United States have begun planning a replacement for the North Warning System, the network of air defence radars across the top of the continent. Jointly funded and operated through NORAD, though located primarily in Canada, the system’s renewal comes in the context of a persistent Cold War revivalism that presages a preoccupation with national defence and geostrategic competition. But another feature of the current context is broad recognition that the changing physical environment and increasing access to and activity in the Arctic drive a priority need for enhanced domain awareness within the region to support public safety, law enforcement, and sovereignty protection, while also serving national defence and strategic stability.

 

Replacing the North American Arctic’s North Warning System (NWS) will be an extended and expensive process, with construction unlikely to be completed before the mid-2030s. The chain of Arctic radar stations monitors air approaches to the northern mainland territories of Canada and the US. It came on line in the early 1990s as a replacement for the Cold War inspired Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line of northern radars built in the mid 1950s when the Soviet Bomber threat loomed large. The DEW Line never had, and the NWS does not now have, any capacity to monitor hostile aircraft over extended distances; the idea was and is to draw a line in the snow to serve as a tripwire signalling an attack from the north and heading south. 

In those early Cold War years Canada shared US concerns about the bomber threat (the Canadian Arctic being the route by which the Soviet aircraft would head to the US heartland), but a major factor in building the DEW Line was the recognition that the Americans required it and would not, and could hardly be expected to, tolerate a blind spot in the Canadian north that would deny them early warning of an attack en route to the lower American mainland – in other words, if Canada would not cooperate in building a line of radars, the US would find its own ways of monitoring Canadian territory for signs of Soviet attack, with major implications for Canadian sovereignty. 

Canada understood that in order to avoid that kind of American “help” it would have to support and be part of a credible system to monitor Canadian territory on behalf of both countries (hence, the frequently noted “defence-against-help” reality for Canadian defence policy). It’s a condition that also applied when the NWS was built, and it still applies. Canada shares a continent with the Americans and is simply obliged to make a credible contribution to its defence – and the American definition of credible is the one that counts.   

Soon after the DEW Line was built in the 1950s, the Soviet bomber threat was much degraded, with attention turning to the post-Sputnik Soviet missile threat. By the mid-1980s the old Soviet bomber threat was certainly not a central concern in the minds of North American defence planners, but the Soviet Union did continue to maintain a substantial strategic bomber capability that regularly, even if infrequently, patrolled within range of North America. Added to that, cruise missiles capable of being fired from those bombers were emerging. Thus, by the early 1990s, the DEW line was replaced with the NWS radars, supplemented by American Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft that were permitted to operate in Canada, and long-range radars on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.  

That was more than two decades ago, and now the Government’s June 2017 Defence policy document describes the NWS as approaching “the end of its life expectancy from a technological and functional perspective,” and reports that bilateral efforts are already underway to develop a successor early warning system.  

The cost is unknown, but given that the cost of the NWS ran into the billions, its replacement promises to cost many billions more.  The replacement timeline will extend over at least two decades: research and analysis into options to be completed by 2020; the chosen system to be approved in 2021; from that is to follow a request for proposals from industry to be completed by 2023; with the final contract to be awarded in 2024 (the Canadian procurement record might suggest that is an optimistic timeline). Delivery or installation of the system is expected to take a least a decade, with completion anticipated for the mid-2030s or beyond.  The plan is for a “system of systems” designed to integrate radars, maritime sensors, satellites, drones, and other technologies.

The All Domain Situational Awareness Science and Technology Program managed by Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) includes plans to spend $133 million over five years on research and analysis in support of enhancements to monitoring the air and maritime (surface and subsurface) approaches to Canada, with a particular emphasis on the Arctic. The effort will include international cooperation with the Five Eyes states (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, US),  with a focus on four areas:
•    Strategic surveillance of airborne traffic and aerospace warning;
•    Awareness of maritime traffic in Canadian approaches and Arctic littoral regions;
•    Awareness of sub-surface activity approaching or in Canada’s North; and 
•    Analysis of sensor mixes and information integration and sharing for all domain awareness to enable detection of modern threats beyond the threshold of the current systems.

....

This is a reprint of the portion of the paper written as part of Arctic Security Papers for The Simons Foundation by Ernie Regehr, Senior Fellow in Arctic Security and Defence. You can find the full paper here. While written in 2018, it is still, if not more relevant now. Except that hopes for international cooperation went literally into smoke ... smoke over Ukrainian cities and villages.

And Again...

Again and again...

In May of this year more than 150,000 customers across Ontario left without power three days after a powerful storm tore through the province, knocking down power lines and trees, forcing several schools to close and leaving behind significant damage.

Hydro One said the damage from the storm included more than 1,400 broken poles, 300 broken crossarms and nearly 200 damaged transformers as well as "countless trees."

In Ottawa, Mayor Jim Watson said "most" customers still without power should have service restored within the next two to three days. But he warned it will be several weeks before the storm damage is fully cleaned up.

Joanna Eyquem, managing director of climate-resilient infrastructure for the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, said efforts to slow climate change mean we are becoming more reliant on electricity and it is more important than ever to safeguard the power grid against major breakdowns.

"We can't have everything kind of falling apart because we have power outages as well because it just makes us less resilient," she said.

 A 2019 climate vulnerability study done for Hydro Ottawa warned that storms with winds above 120 kilometres an hour posed an extremely high risk for the city's power grid.

 

And now.

Powerful storm Fiona made landfall in eastern Canada's Nova Scotia early on Saturday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, with maximum winds of 90 miles (144 kilometers) per hour.

"Fiona is expected to affect portions of Atlantic Canada as a powerful hurricane-force cyclone today, and significant impacts from high winds, storm surge, and heavy rainfall are expected," the NHC said.

Although a gradual weakening was forecast during the next couple of days, Fiona was expected to maintain hurricane-force winds until Saturday afternoon, the NHC said.

The storm has blown over trees and powerlines and leaving hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without electricity, according to Reuters on Saturday.

Some 79 percent of customers, or 414,000, were without power in Nova Scotia, and 95 percent, or 82,000, had lost power on Prince Edward Island, utility companies said. The region was also experiencing spotty mobile phone service. Police across the region reported multiple road closures, Reuters said.

Formerly designated a hurricane, the storm battered Caribbean islands earlier in the week, killing at least eight people and knocking out power for virtually all of Puerto Rico's 3.3 million people during a sweltering heat wave. Nearly a million people remained without power five days later.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delayed Saturday's departure for Japan, where he was to attend the funeral of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, to receive briefings and support the government's emergency response, Press Secretary Cecely Roy said on Twitter.

A hurricane warning was in effect for much of central Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, home to more than 150,000 people, and parts of Newfoundland, the Miami-based NHC said.

Canadian Hurricane Center meteorologist Ian Hubbard said on Friday the effects of Fiona would be felt over a wide area.

"The center of it is one thing, but the weather that's associated with it in terms of the rain and where all the strong winds are, it's going to be over a much larger area," he said.

"Many, many places away from the center of the storm are still going to be seriously impacted from this," said Hubbard.

Canadian authorities sent emergency alerts in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, warning of severe flooding along shorelines and extremely dangerous waves. People in coastal areas were advised to evacuate.

The storm could prove more ferocious than the benchmarks of Hurricane Juan in 2003 and Hurricane Dorian in 2019, Canadian Hurricane Center meteorologist Bob Robichaud told a briefing.

The country's two largest carriers, Air Canada and WestJet Airlines, suspended regional service starting Friday evening.

...

There is a solution: Autonomous Mobile Energy System (AMES). An array of the AMES modules would be located in areas prone to energy disruptions and wait in a "sleeping" mode. Then, when the moment comes, they are activated and deployed automatically, providing much needed energy for rescue and relief workers, residents and businesses. The AMES, developed by Ascent Systems Technologies, is currently in the final round of the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) contest developing a prototype for the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) relocatable temporary camps. Most recently Ascent was awarded a contract to develop a prototype of the autonomous environment monitoring and security system for the DND assets in the Arctic.

 

ARE WE READY?

I talked about that the world needs to prepare for disasters before.

We have already a disaster on our hands and it could quickly become much worse. The Russian invasion into Ukraine created a massive flow of people, mostly women and children, looking for safety. The refugee crisis is not new for the world, but this time this is inside Europe. Europe is not prepared for this even after the Middle East refugee crisis several years ago. 

Ukraine and countries accepting refugees, need a lot of shelters, together with infrastructure, first of all heating, water, including hot water and sanitation.

Autonomous Mobile Energy System (AMES) can be a hub of such infrastructure. 

The AMES module fits in a standard 20 foot shipping container, can be delivered to any geographical location in the world, rapidly deployed and almost immediately start providing clean energy, especially heat, with no need for any fuel or connection to the power grid.

In the integrated camp infrastructure, the AMES can absorb heat released by the solid waste process module - incineration, gassification or pyrolysis - and store it in the built-in thermal energy storage with phase-change material (PCM). This heat can be used for heating of the camp shelters and providing hot water for the camp use as well as for the medical needs. It can also be used to preheat inflow of waste water to increase efficiency of the water treatment unit, which will provide potable water for the camp and reduce the need for external supply of water.    

This solution is currently getting ready to be tested for the Canadian Armed Forces relocatable temporary camp. Together with the partners, Ascent is planning to participate in the DND Camp Sustain Program.  

We are partnering with AdvanTec Global Innovations in manufacturing the AMES module in Canada.

We have access to manufacturing facilities in Poland and Lithuania at scale for quick delivery to any place in Europe or elsewhere.

For any inquiries please contact directly: ascent@ascentsystems.ca

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P.S. Putin ordered to put Russian nuclear forces on high alert. Are we ready?

Preparing for Disasters

 

NASA reports:

In 2021, Hurricane Ida left over 1 million people without power, tornadoes tore across the American Midwest, volcanoes forced people to evacuate their homes, wildfires covered the American West and unusual flooding wreaked havoc on Central Europe.

Some characteristics of natural hazards, such as hurricanes, floods and wildfires, have been historically predictable and have informed disaster preparation. However, with human emissions of greenhouse gases increasing Earth’s temperature, we’re seeing changes in those characteristics: wildfire and drought seasons are lengthening, hurricanes and rainfall are becoming more intense, and coastal flooding is increasing.

The Economist:

As the threat from natural hazards grows, from climate change-fueled fires to zoonotic pandemics, the world must live with more risk. The countries that fare best will be the resilient ones. In “The Resilient Society”, Markus Brunnermeier, an economist from Princeton University, argues that “Resilience can serve as the guiding North Star for designing a post-covid-19 society.”

Japan is a “department store of natural hazards”, says Nishiguchi Hiro of Japan Bosai Platform, a group of firms that develop disaster-related technologies. Few countries have been shaped so much by hazards and disasters. Besides earthquakes and tsunamis, there are typhoons, floods, landslides and volcanic eruptions. Japan has had to learn to live with risks, making it a laboratory for resilient societies. “The concept of resilience is key to what others can learn from Japan,” says Rajib Shaw, a disaster expert at Keio University in Fujisawa.

New York Magazine:

The biggest lesson is the value of preparation. It’s too late if you start acting after the disaster happens. That this sounds banal in much of the world makes its absence more striking. Of $137bn provided in global disaster-related development assistance from 2005 to 2017, 96% was spent on emergency response and reconstruction, less than 4% on disaster preparedness.

Preparedness usually involves building a more solid and resilient infrastructure. Still, in every physical science discipline they have a similar quote within their field. In hydrology, it’s “water finds a way”. In Jurassic Park, it’s “life finds a way.” In the fire community, it’s “fire finds a way.”

 

On Thursday afternoon, December 30, 2021  in the space of a few hours just a day before the new year, 100-plus mile-per-hour winds carried the most destructive fire in Colorado history through the suburban sprawl of greater Denver, destroying much of the towns of Louisville and Superior and forcing tens of thousands to flee, including many who’d entered shopping malls from sunny skies just a few minutes before. As many as 1,000 homes were destroyed. Three people currently remain missing; if the death count stays at zero, Colorado governor Jared Polis said Friday, it would be “a New Year’s miracle.”

Ascent Systems Technologies:

To be resilient, the infrastructure should be distributed and decentralized. Or, to begin with, there should be distributed and decentralized backup options for energy, water and other human needs in case a disaster strikes.

Autonomous Mobile Energy System (AMES) module can be delivered to the site of disaster in hours, deployed in minutes and start generating energy with no fuel or connection to a power grid required. The module can sense when the external conditions become dangerous to operate and would automatically retract into a “turtle” mode and deploy again when the conditions are safe again. It could withstand recent tornadoes in Kentucky and provide energy while the permanent infrastructure is being restored. In many situations, such as providing energy to field hospitals, it would save human lives.