Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Eminent journalist Ted Koppel has ventured in what is seemingly a mundane and unexciting area: the electric power grid in his latest book: Lights Out. What he neglected to say is that the book is actually a smoke screen for what he really wants to talk about: the national security apparatus, our lack of infrastructure, planning, and a clue as to how to proceed from keeping all of our citizens safe and fed through an extended disaster. He used the scenario of a cyber-attack to take down the national power grid as a conversation starter.

The electric power grid is an intricate and complicated piece of human construct; it ranks as the most ingenious human invention ever, ahead of the automobile, ahead of even the internet. The scale of the enterprise as it grew over the years is staggering. Since its growth came about gradually, and in an unplanned manner, the shape and form of the grid does not resemble anything that was well planned, it is a hodge podge of usable bits strung together to work together. There is some logic and reasoning to is, engineers being engineers, the national grid was redrawn, rebuilt, and redesigned to accommodate  the latest state of the art technology. Unfortunately, the time lag for something that size is measured in decades.

Mr. Koppel’s selection of the national power grid is a prescient one. It is probably one of the most trusted and taken for granted piece of technology that we have in our life. No one gives a second thought to the reliability and resiliency of the entire grid. This is as intended by the electric utilities and the planners of the grid. It is, however, a misguided illusion, as Mr. Koppel pointed out in very prescient fashion in this book. He goes into detail in the first part of his book. He lays out in some detail, but not enough detail, about the vulnerabilities of the grid. He also failed to research deeper into the technological advances that have been advanced since the 2003 blackout: the work that the DOE and NIST had proposed. The idea is called the Smart Grid, and it encompasses a massive amount of forward looking thinking and technological to come to such a conclusion. The fact that this concept was completely ignored in the book seems to be a massive oversight at best and a failure of clear vision and rational judgement at worst. Because even though the idea of the Smart Grid may not be the solution that Mr. Koppel is seeking, it, and the myriad of ideas the Smart Grid encompasses, may reasonably alleviate some of the unknown threats that Mr. Koppel is addressing.

Mr. Koppel does do a very good job laying out the threat that he wants to talk about: the threat of cyber-attacks that may come stealthily, which can be launched by anyone rather than from a monolithic superpower, and may result in a crippled continent for months if not years. He does this brilliantly in Parts I and II of this book.

Unfortunately, this brings us to Part Iii of Lights Out. Mr. Koppel chose to deviate from the path and he began to delve into some examples of survivalists, preppers, and four chapters on the Mormons and their massive and sophisticated food, fuel, and consumer product distribution network. While all of these stories are interesting, I learned quite a bit from his forays into the prepper world, it certainly does not address the imminent danger that he so eloquently addressed in the previous two parts of the book.

The point being made by Mr. Koppel, is that the non-existent planning on the part of the federal, state, and local government, or the laughingly elementary plans are logistically impossible and unrealistic.

In the end, Mr. Koppel returns to the point that there is a dire need for the government and the private sector to overcome the comfortable and unrealistic view that something like an cyber-attack on the national grid is not imminent and would be far down in the list of imminent disasters that could befall us. In other words, he is preaching that Black Swans, as describe by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is quite real.

In his summary, Mr. Koppel also indirectly appropriated Mr. Taleb’s idea of the state of anti-fragile, i.e. be in a state of preparedness in order to not only be resilient in the face of unknown events, but be able to benefit and profit from the event.

The tendency of modern bureaucracy to lean towards Just-In-Time planning and thinking is one of the themes that Mr. Koppel drew which resonated with me. His comparison of this probable situation with the Katrina disaster eloquently pointed out the tendency for us to only do what is necessary after the disaster has happened. Why be prepared for the unknown unless you knew what the unknown is, why stockpile supplies until you know the disaster is imminent. Mr. Koppel’s point is that you will never know what is coming until it gets here, and then it is too late.

In the end, Mr. Koppel is a talented and detailed story teller. He is also an inveterate name dropper. Of course, being Ted Koppel, you have quite an impressive list of name you can call upon to name drop. He does so with such frequency that what was once just impressive became a bit forced and awkward.

I feel like this was a missed opportunity. Mr. Koppel could have made a stronger, more informed case for the need to invest in infrastructure which is anti-fragile to the new threat on the national grid. He could have made it a goal to examine the ideas being driven within the electric utility industry to buttress the existing national grid and to create the Smart Grid, which is designed with the cyber-security function in mind. He could have foregone some of the interesting digressions in this book to lay out the fundamental problems that creates the threat that he wished to examine. Instead he wrote a fine book, an interesting book, but a very flawed book, from the standpoint of achieving the purpose that he sought to achieve.