In one of my classes this past week a discussion topic of severity of power grid hacking/attack came under debate. What makes this topic so interesting is also that it appears in the news all the time and in politics. So the article by Washington Post from January named "Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say." must make you scared. Don't worry friends, I will not discuss politics this week, and the article was debunked as fake anyways.
What I wanted to share is that based on all the research I have done, the impact of power grid outages is in vast majority of cases are only short lived. This means even the most devastating power grid blackouts in U.S. history have been resolved in less then a day. The only outages that lasted longer then one to two days are tied to natural disasters such as hurricanes that have caused such damage. From the empirical and a risk perspective I cannot back up the hysteria with evidence, that a hacker caused event could trigger a long lasting power grid outage that could bring the U.S. economy down.
As I said to one of my fellow classmates if anything a brief power outage would do good for the economy. While most businesses can write off any income loss from their taxes the real benefit would be in the sale of goods to recover loss of spoiled food, generators during outage, fuel, wood, batteries and so forth. I guess you can just look at goods being sold before major hurricane strike and you should be able to predict the economic growth. I also did look at historical stock data and compared it to the dates of each of the major U.S. power grid outages and I have not seen a specific dip indicating a long term effect of any kind on the economy, as some people have claimed.
Anyways please let me know what you think?
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