Natural disasters cost $210bn in 2020, the world's joint-hottest year

 Not a day passed after I posted the information on record losses from natural disasters in the U.S., another piece of information came about the global scale of the problem, which confirmed the trend.

Financial losses caused by natural disasters worldwide last year amounted to $210 billion in damage, a sharp increase from the $166 billion global bill in 2019, Munich Re said in an annual report.

The report came just a day before the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service said 2020 tied with 2016 as the world's warmest year on record, rounding off the hottest decade globally as the impacts of climate change intensified.

German reinsurance giant Munich Re on Thursday urged action to prevent climate change from bringing about more such hazards, after a record hurricane season and major forest fires last year.

The disasters claimed around 8,200 lives worldwide, the company said in its report, adding that the insured amount of damage came to $82 billion, or around 40 percent of the total.

"Climate change will play an increasing role in all of these hazards," said Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek. As part of the Paris Agreement five years ago, "the global community set itself the target of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. It is time to act," he added.

According to Copernicus, in 2020, temperatures globally were an average of 1.25 degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial times. The last six years were the world's hottest on record.

The Paris Agreement aims to cap the rise in temperatures to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.

Floods and cyclones devastate Asia

The year's most costly individual event was the severe flooding in China, from May 21 to July 30, during the summer monsoon rains. Overall losses from the floods amounted to approximately $17bn, only around 2 percent of which was insured.

Overall in Asia, which recorded serious cyclones and floods, losses from natural disasters were lower than in the previous year at $67bn compared with $77bn in 2019.

 Highest losses suffered in North America

However, it was a completely different story in North America, as six of the 10 costliest natural disasters were in the U.S., which suffered the most active hurricane season on record in 2020. The North Atlantic season was "hyperactive," Munich Re said, with a record-setting 30 storms including 13 hurricanes.

In addition, once again, a series of large wildfires raged across the western U.S. in 2020, including record-setting fires (in terms of area burned) in California and Colorado. The area burned by wildfire in California was more than four times larger than the 2015–2019 average.

Copernicus said this California heatwave in August pushed the temperature at Death Valley in the Mojave Desert up to 54.4 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature ever reliably recorded.

Natural disasters in the U.S. accounted for $95bn (2019: $51bn) of overall losses, $67bn of which were insured (2019: $26bn).

 Minimal natural disaster losses in Europe

Things were looking more positive in Europe in terms of natural disaster figures for 2020 being relatively benign.

Localized extreme losses – which are typical for the fall season – were triggered by heavy rainfall along the Mediterranean coasts of southern France and Italy. And winter storms in February caused losses of $2.5bn in the continent.

In March, an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.3 struck the region north of Zagreb in Croatia, resulting in property losses totaling $1.8bn.

Overall losses in Europe came to $12bn, of which $3.6bn was insured.

Hot years and extreme temperatures continue in the Arctic Circle

However, according to Copernicus data, the continent also experienced its hottest year on record in 2020, after an exceptionally warm winter and fall.

The Arctic and northern Siberia continued to warm more quickly than the planet as a whole last year, with temperatures in parts of these regions averaging more than 6 degrees Celsius above a 30-year average used as a baseline, Copernicus said.

The region also had an "unusually active" wildfire season, with fires poleward of the Arctic Circle releasing a record 244 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide in 2020, over a third more than in 2019.

Arctic sea ice also continued to deplete, with July and October both setting records for the lowest sea ice extent in that month.

Scientists said these data and figures from natural disaster losses are consistent with growing evidence that climate change is contributing to more intense hurricanes, fires, floods and other disasters.

The year's extreme weather fits "with the expected consequences of a decades-long warming trend for the atmosphere and oceans that is influencing risks," Munich Re's chief climate scientist Ernst Rauch said.

"We need another dictionary to help us describe how these extremes continue to play out and unfold year after year," said Adam Smith, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Actually, it's not a dictionary we need - we need to start thinking rationally! Stop polluting the planet and exhaust greenhouse gas emissions! Say no to fossil fuels! And be prepared for unavoidable. AMES is your source of uninterrupted clean energy delivered on demand to any location in the world - Autonomous Mobile Energy System. Clean, safe, where you need it and when you need it.

 

 

 

 

 

Tens of Thousands are without power - AMES Could Help

'Grand Bahama right now is dead'

Tens of thousands in Atlantic Canada still in the dark after Hurricane Dorian

As hurricane Dorian swept across the Bahamas, Florida and Nova Scotia I can't not to think that if there was an autonomous energy source in a container  - the source which would not depend on the grid nor on the fuel supply, people would have power and heat hours after the disaster instead of days and weeks, possibly even without losing it. This is Autonomous Mobile Energy Station (AMES), developed by Ascent Systems Technologies, British Columbia, Canada.

 

A self-contained module, using only sun and air to generate energy and store it in the built-in energy storage, would survive  the storm and be ready to deliver energy on demand. A number of modules deployed in advance in the areas prone to natural disasters, would help communities survive. Such a module could be also brought to any place in the case of emergency, rapidly deployed and supply heat and power for medical personnel providing aid to victims and provide relief to people.

Do we need The Grid, part 2

It was only yesterday that I wrote: Do we need The Grid?
And today we hear the news: 
Argentina and Uruguay reel after massive power outage

So do we really need the grid? Many of you might think: "You can't be serious". We cannot survive without the grid! But this is exactly my point - we cannot survive without it TODAY! We are slaves of the big monster - The Grid. Do we have to be? As I stated many times before - we don't. We can generate energy where we need it and get rid of grid. Well, may be not immediately. But why not to do it incrementally? There lots of places on Earth without grid, and there millions of people who don't have power. We can start generating energy there instead of pulling hundreds or thousands of kilometers of power lines of fuel pipelines.

What if - a heretical thought - when power grid goes down we don't bring it back, but instead we bring energy generation right where it needs to be? It may not even cost more than restoring the old grid and waiting until it fails again, or somebody decides to cause it to fail.

The technology is here - it is called distributed autonomous generation. All what needs to be done is to combine state-of-the art solar thermal collector with an ultra-efficient thermal energy storage and an energy booster under proper control. We have done it at Ascent Systems Technologies. We even packaged it in a self-contained module that can be delivered on demand to any geographical location in the world, deployed within hours and start delivering uninterrupted clean energy.

Autonomous Mobile Energy Station

The Future of Grid, part 2 - NOT the Future We Want

Augmented Reality: An electromagnetic pulse can take down North America's electricity grid.
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This article appeared in the The World If section of the July 13, 2017 Economist print edition under the headline "A flash in the sky"
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ON MARCH 13th 1989 a surge of energy from the sun, from a “coronal mass ejection”, had a startling impact on Canada. Within 92 seconds, the resulting geomagnetic storm took down Quebec’s electricity grid for nine hours. It could have been worse. On July 23rd 2012 particles from a much larger solar ejection blew across the orbital path of Earth, missing it by days. Had it hit America, the resulting geomagnetic storm would have destroyed perhaps a quarter of high-voltage transformers, according to Storm Analysis Consultants in Duluth, Minnesota. Future geomagnetic storms are inevitable.
And that is not the only threat to the grid. A transformer-wrecking electromagnetic pulse (EMP) would be produced by a nuclear bomb, designed to maximise its yield of gamma rays, if detonated high up, be it tethered to a big cluster of weather balloons or carried on a satellite or missile. A midrange missile tested by North Korea on April 29th 2017 exploded 71 kilometres (44 miles) up, well above the 40km or so needed to generate an EMP.
Imagine a nuclear blast occurring somewhere above eastern Nebraska. Radiating outwards, the EMP fries electronics in southern Canada and almost all of the United States save Alaska and Hawaii, both safe below the horizon. It permanently damages the grid’s multimillion-dollar high-voltage transformers. Many are old (their average age is about 40). Some burst into flame, further damaging substations.
America runs on roughly 2,500 large transformers, most with unique designs. But only 500 or so can be built per year around the world. It typically takes a year or more to receive an ordered transformer, and that is when cranes work and lorries and locomotives can be fuelled up. Some transformers exceed 400 tonnes.
After the surge, telecom switches and internet routers are dead. Air-traffic control is down. Within a day, some shoppers in supermarkets turn to looting (many, unable to use credit and debit cards, cannot pay even if they wanted to). After two days, market shelves are bare. On the third day, backup diesel generators begin to sputter out. Though fuel cannot be pumped, siphoning from vehicles, authorised by martial law, keeps most prisons, police stations and hospitals running for another week.
With many troops overseas or tasked with deterring land grabs from opportunist foreign powers, there is only one American “peacekeeper” soldier for every 360 or so civilians. Pillaging accelerates. This leads many with needed skills to stay home to protect their families. Many of the rock climbers who help overwhelmed fire departments free tens of thousands from lifts begin to give up on day four despite the heart-wrenching banging that continues to echo through some elevator shafts.
Utilities can neither treat nor pump water or sewage. Raids on homes thought to have water become frequent and often bloody. Militias soon form to defend or seize control of swimming pools and other water sources. Streams and shovelled-out pits provide water in some areas, but sooner or later rain sweeps in faeces-ridden mud. Deaths from cholera and other diseases multiply.
As relief ships arrive, food, water filters and fuel are offloaded by hand amid chaos, but demand cannot be met even in port cities, much less inland. Where food can be grown without pumped irrigation, rural militias cluster into “aggie alliances” not keen to share with the hordes streaming out of cities. Some aggie alliances hole up in newly abandoned prisons, the better to defend scavenged crops and farm animals. The value of cash collapses along with faith in government.
The death rate picks up. Eventually, months later, about three quarters of the benighted area has power for at least ten hours a day. It would have been worse had 41 countries not dismantled transformers for reassembly in North America. (The most generous donors have to accept rolling blackouts.) Martial law ends six months after the original energy surge. Roughly 350,000 Canadians and 7m Americans have died.
A similar nightmare could happen in any rich country—grids outside America are vulnerable too. Such scenarios necessarily dip into “uncharted territory for an industrialised society”, as Thomas Popik, head of the Foundation for Resilient Societies, a think-tank in New Hampshire, puts it. But shorter blackouts suggest that things can get bad fast. Just three hours after Chile’s grid-collapsing earthquake on February 27th 2010, even relatively wealthy people began looting stuff they did not need. With electricity gone, normal rules had suddenly vanished and “out of control” emotions took over, says Roberto Machiavello, then rear-admiral and top martial-law official in Chile’s Concepción area.
Without soldiers at hospitals, Admiral Machiavello says, doctors would have stayed at home. Less than a week after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, many police officers opted to protect their families rather than work. Chris Ipsen, spokesman for the Emergency Management Department of Los Angeles, estimates that, with the grid down, Angelenos would be foodless in less than ten days. In poor areas, he reckons, groups would quickly form and say, “Hey, let’s go over to the mansions in Bel Air.”
In the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake in January 2010, cholera alone killed at least 10,000. Jacques Boncy, head of Haiti’s National Laboratory of Public Health, reckons that, in three months of blackout in America, faecal contamination of water would kill several million. That might be optimistic. The EMP Commission, an expert group set up by America’s Congress to study the threat, reckoned in 2008 that the first year of societal breakdown could finish off two-thirds of Americans.
A country’s electricity grid can be knocked out in other ways. One is cyber-attack. Hackers cut power to 230,000 Ukrainians in December 2015—but only for hours. Long-term damage from cyber-assaults is unlikely, says Kenneth Geers, a security expert who studied the attack.
What about terrorism? Shooting up transformers at just nine critical substations could bring down America’s grid for months, according to an analysis performed in 2013 by the Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), says its then-chairman, Jon Wellinghoff. Others think more transformers would need to be taken out. At any rate, information on which substations are critical is secret. In 2013 gunmen knocked out 17 of 21 transformers at a substation in San Jose. It was not a critical one.
The sun probably poses a greater risk of a sustained outage than hackers or saboteurs. That is one reason the EMP Commission reconvened in January 2017. Kit that protects transformers from EMP also saves them from geomagnetic storms, though the reverse is not true. George Baker, a staffer on the commission and a former boss of EMP research at the Pentagon’s Defence Threat Reduction Agency, says that critical military systems have been EMP-proofed. But other agencies, he says, have done “precious little” to safeguard civilian infrastructure. The commission will issue an updated report in September. It will be as grim as the assessment in 2008, he says.
The expense of installing surge-blockers and other EMP-proofing kit on America’s big transformers is debated. The EMP Commission’s report in 2008 reckoned $3.95bn or less would do it. Others advance higher figures. But a complete collapse of the grid could probably be prevented by protecting several hundred critical transformers for perhaps $1m each.
Yet not much is being done. Barack Obama ordered EMP protection for White House systems, but FERC, the utilities regulator, has not required EMP-proofing. Nor has the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) pushed for a solution or even included EMP in official planning scenarios. (The Pentagon should handle that, DHS officials say; the Pentagon notes that civilian infrastructure is the DHS’s responsibility.) As for exactly what safeguards are or are not needed, the utilities themselves are best equipped to decide, says Brandon Wales, the DHS’s head of infrastructure analysis.
But the utilities’ industry group, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), argues that, because EMP is a matter of national security, it is the government’s job. NERC may anyway be in no rush. It took a decade to devise a vegetation-management plan after, in 2003, an Ohio power line sagged into branches and cut power to 50m north-easterners at a cost of roughly $6bn. NERC has repeatedly and successfully lobbied Congress to prevent legislation that would require EMP-proofing. That is something America, and the world, could one day regret.
 
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This is NOT the future we want. Distributed generation with universal energy modules is the answer.



Read the previous and the following posts. 

 

The Future of The Grid

Distributed generation and automated transactions will change how we produce and consume electricity

Developing technology is like driving a race car: You push the machinery as fast as it’ll go, and if you can avoid a crash, a prize awaits you at the finish line. For engineers, the reward is sometimes monetary, but more often it’s the satisfaction of seeing the world become a better place.
Thanks to many such engineers driving many such race cars, a lot of progress is about to happen in an unexpected are: energy and distribution. The power grid’s interlocking technological, economic, and regulatory underpinnings were established about a century ago and have undergone only minimal disruption in the decades since. But now the industry is facing massive change.
What’s happening in this industry stems from technology improvements, economic forces, and evolving public priorities.
For about a century, affordable electrification has been based on economies of scale, with large generating plants producing hundreds or thousands of megawatts of power, which is sent to distant users through a transmission and distribution grid. Today, many developments are complicating that simple model.
At the top of the list is the availability of low-cost solar and other renewable sources of power. Generators based on these resources can be built much closer to customers. So we are now in the early stages of an expansion of distributed generation, which is already lessening the need for costly long-distance transmission. That, in turn, is making those new sources cost competitive with giant legacy power plants.
Distributed generation has long been technically possible. What’s new now is that we are nearing a tipping point, beyond which, for many applications, distributed generation will be the least costly way to provide electricity.
While it certainly helps, the declining cost of renewables and gas-fired electricity is not all that’s spurring this change. To be competitive, the entire distributed system will have to work well as a whole. Quite a few technological advances are coming together to make that possible: advanced control; more compact, smarter, and efficient performance monitoring with real-time feedback; ever-growing ability to extract actionable information from big data.
Amid this changing scene, a picture is beginning to emerge of what a typical electrical grid may well look like in 10 or 20 years in most of the developed world. Yes, generation will be much more decentralized, and renewables such as solar and wind will proliferate. But other aspects are also shifting. For example, the distribution network—the part of the grid to which your home and business connect—will likely become more of a negotiating platform than a system that just carries electricity from place to place. Similar trends are taking place with centralized fossil fuel production and distribution via pipeline networks.
It must be understood that decentralization is going to be neither simple nor universal. In some places, decentralization will prevail, with most customers generating much of their own energy, using solar photo­voltaic and solar thermal systems. Others might use small-scale wind turbines. In regions where sunlight and wind are less plentiful, natural gas may still predominate for some time. Intertwined among all of those, a continuously improving version of the legacy grid will survive for decades to come.
Many analysts expect that grid-connected, distributed solar power will be fully cost competitive with conventional forms of generation by the end of this decade.
Ultimately, the lowest-cost form of generation will dominate. But figuring out what the lowest-cost option actually is will depend on both local conditions and local decisions.
Although not everywhere on the same level and not without some steps back, generally regulators are increasingly convinced that the burning of fossil fuels leads to significant societal costs, both from the direct exposure of those living near some power plants to their noxious emissions and from ­greenhouse gas induced climate change. Historically, these costs were difficult to quantify. So they were typically borne not by the producers or consumers of the energy but by the victims—for example, farmers whose crops were damaged, residents of towns close to fracking operations, and a population as a whole.
There is growing public interest in understanding the true cost of pollution and possibly shifting more of it to energy producers and possibly consumers as well. Fortunately, we now have the modeling and computational capabilities to begin to put a reasonable lower limit on those costs, which gives us a defensible way to reallocate them.
Although the best strategies for reallocating those costs are still being debated, the benefits of distributed renewable generation are already very apparent—as is the feasibility. Data collected during the Pecan Street Project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, indicates that a house in Austin, Texas, outfitted with solar panels typically generates 4 or 5 kilowatts during the midday hours of a sunny day in summer, which exceeds the amount of power the home typically uses during such a period.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot initiative has as its goal making solar power cost competitive—without subsidies—by 2030. (A Chinese government agency has a similar agenda.) Specifically, SunShot’s goal is to reduce the cost of distributed, residential solar power to 5 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour by 2030; it costs about 18 cents today. Today, a 6-kW rooftop residential solar system in the United States typically costs between $15,000 and $20,000; the exact figure depends on where you live. According to data from the EIA, the average retail cost of electricity delivered by the grid in the United States is 12.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. So at 18 cents, rooftop-generated solar is not yet, on average, competitive with grid-delivered electricity. But many governments, for example U.S. state governments, subsidize the purchase of solar-power systems to make them competitive.
Meanwhile, many utilities are experimenting with ­alternative-ownership options. One is community solar, in which individual consumers buy a small number of panels in a relatively large, utility-scale system. They then get monthly credits for the electricity generated without having panels on their roofs. Another experiment, being run by CPS Energy, in San Antonio, uses rooftop solar, but CPS Energy owns the equipment and pays the homeowner for the use of the roof.
One challenge with distributed solar is storage. For electrical energy the obvious and most known solution is a battery, although there are other alternatives such as pump storage, flywheels and others. For storing solar thermal energy highly insulated double-wall tanks, phase-change materials are good options, and of course underground storage otherwise known as geoexchange.   Incorporating non-traditional typically intermittent sources of power into the grid is not straightforward. For example, right now, the grid could not handle a changeover to 100 percent solar PV (even in areas where it would make sense, like the southwestern United States or the North African desert). The grid we have today was designed around sources whose output generally varies little from day to day.
The grid must evolve in other ways, too, and quickly. One of the most important trends, already well under way, is the increasing use of microgrids. A microgrid is a group of connected power sources and loads. It can be as small as an individual house or as large as a military base or college campus. Microgrids can operate indefinitely on their own and can quickly isolate themselves if a disturbance destabilizes the larger grids to which they are normally connected.
This is an important feature during both natural and man-made disasters. Consider what happened when Hurricane Ike hit the Houston-Galveston area of Texas in 2008: Blackouts were widespread, but 95 percent of the outages were caused by damage to less than 5 percent of the grid. The grid effectively distributed the effects of what was only modest equipment damage. (I have previously written about the blackout in Calgary and other similar events, pointing to the advantages of distributed generation).

 A residential microgrid connects a group of homes that have their own power sources and energy storage. The homes communicate with each other wirelessly and connect to the main grid at a distribution transformer. In an electrical disturbance, the microgrid can protect itself by disconnecting from the main grid at that transformer.
This isolating capability of microgrids also promises enhanced cybersecurity. That’s because microgrids can help keep localized intrusions local, making the grid a much less appealing target for hackers.
When disaster strikes, whatever its cause, microgrids can limit the consequences. If it is not physically damaged, a microgrid can operate as long as it has access to a source of power, whether that’s the sun, or wind, or other source, ideally with a local energy storage.
In the long term, with the timing depending as much on economics and regulation as technology, it is quite possible that the grid will evolve into a series of adjoining microgrids. Utilities have proposed to build such microgrid “clusters” in, among other places, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Taiwan, a tropical island where grids are prone to storm damage. These adjoining microgrids would share power with one another and with the legacy grid to minimize energy cost and to maximize availability.
In an era of adjoining microgrids that are privately owned and operated, what will become of the utility company? There are at least two possibilities. It might simply supply power to the microgrids that need it, rather than doing that for individual customers. Or it might manage microgrids and their connections with one another and to the legacy grid. Across the United States, the concept of a utility is already being reinvented in some places as more competition is introduced. Microgrids are going to accelerate that trend.
The spread of distributed generation and the rise of microgrids will also be shaped by two other factors: the expansion of the Internet of Things and the growing influence of Big Data.

Despite the hopeful vision of the future, it would be remiss however not to point out some of the challenges. These include financial ones, regulatory ones, and technical ones. And they come in all shapes and sizes.

One of the most fundamental is slow growth. To pay for costly system upgrades, utilities in the past would have relied heavily on growth in demand, and therefore sales. But improvements in efficiency, which consumers seek (and rightly so), have slowed growth in demand to the extent that it is now increasing at a rate lower than that of the growth in gross domestic product. And the figures are sobering: In 2014, the U.S. DOE predicted that in the period from 2012 to 2040, the demand for electricity will grow by only 0.9 percent per year. So, utilities cannot expect to fund the required system changes in the same ways as they have in the past, through growth. This makes utilities a victim, therefore a natural enemy of the progress toward more wide implementing of renewables and distributed generation - unless they radically reinvent themselves.
Software will play much bigger, in fact critical role in future energy strategy.
The biggest unknown is how swiftly the regulatory process can adapt. If it can’t move quickly enough to keep up with the technology (which happens already), expect agonizingly slow change. And what if governments try to prop up outmoded technologies with subsidies? That could drag out the process further. Some politicians even argue that regulators should artificially slow the rate of change (?!).
The United States’ National Academy of Engineering recently selected electrification as the top engineering accomplishment of the 20th century. But electrification now needs to be reengineered to meet the needs and opportunities of the 21st century. This is our chance to show that we are as good as our forebears of two, three, or four generations ago at technology, regulation, public policy, finance, and the management of change in general. And to leave to posterity a legacy as fine and enduring as the one that was left to us.

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The post is mainly a reprint of the article by Robert Hebner originally published in IEEE Spectrum, which also available online at: Nanogrids, Microgrids and Big Data. 
Some parts were skipped and some additions and minor edits are shown in italic.

The paper version of the article has a subtitle: "Rooftop solar, micro-grids and big data will revamp how we produce and consume electricity". If "electricity" would be substituted by general term "energy", and rooftop solar would include not only photovolataic but also solar thermal, I would 100% sign under that. All benefits of the micro-grids and utilizing big data would not only stay but even enhanced. Heating and cooling take a substantial portion of residential energy use (e.g. 40-45% in USA, 60-70% in Canada) and not negligible for commercial applications either, plus domestic hot water (12-15%). Employing solar thermal technology which is much more efficient in utilizing solar energy than PV (90%+ vs. 15-20%) is most cost effective for those applications. At the same time it will significantly reduce the demand for electricity, therefore make fluctuations in the (micro) grid much more manageable, and requirement for battery storage much lower. Resistance of such system against natural disasters and terrorist attacks will be higher. Real time data collection and advanced control methods will optimize performance. Eventually, the need for centralized energy generation will be if not eliminated completely but reduced dramatically, perhaps limited to very large commercial and industrial applications. Even those, with implementing efficient energy recovery technologies, may migrate to local grids. No more transmission losses. And big Thanks from Mother Nature.

Wake up Canada, part 4

Lac-Megantic, Calgary, Saskatchewan, Canadian economy dependency on oil, etc, etc.

And now another wake-up call: Toxic fuel spill in English Bay. How many more we need?

Will we finally open our eyes and see that we are committing a collective suicide?

Dear Government, did industry lobbyists bought the future of your children?

At least Provinces appear to be listening - now it is time for actions!

Technology and Society

We came to rely on technology in almost everything in our life. We already cannot imagine how we lived without cellphones and other "everyday" things.  However the society dependence on technology is also its vulnerability.
Relying on a centralized intertwined interdependent grid can be dangerous. Take down power grid and you will see a true disruption in the very fabric of a country.

From:
Renewable Energy and Protecting the Grid from Terrorism and Natural Disasters
by Tom Lombardo

Onsite generation technologies such as solar, solar thermal, geo-exchange and others - combined with energy conservation measures - will significantly reduce the load on the grid, making it easier to address security threats and natural disaster associated problems. Furthermore, it will allow significantly reducing if not eliminating losses associated with transmission of electricity. Managing, maintaining and upgrading such small individual systems is simpler therefore their operation will be more reliable and predictable. Eventually individual systems would be connected in the intelligent network with the real-time feedback control, in which resources will be shared in the most optimal and efficient way.