Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.
WASHINGTON – German industry is having increasing grid problems, with sophisticated production machinery halting abruptly and being damaged, adding to the costs of restarting a production line, says a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
And analysts say the problem could be far worse if there is an electromagnetic pulse event resulting from a massive solar storm or, worse, a high-altitude nuclear explosion.
An intense EMP event, if it results in a direct hit on the earth or over a major populated area especially in an industrial country, would shut down vulnerable infrastructures that rely on electricity and electronic components to function.
Experts, including those from the National Aeronautical and Space Administration and the National Academy of Sciences, have told WND/G2Bulletin that the most intense storm in this 11-year solar cycle is expected in 2013. They said that some of these solar flares can be as large as the Earth itself.
They add that the cost of a direct impact from an intense EMP event could be trillions of dollars in the first two years of recovery efforts. And tens of millions of lives would be affected by serious personal deprivation that could include the loss of food and water supplies and result in massive starvation.
Experts say eight critical infrastructures of an advanced society could be damaged, and costs to production equipment either to repair or replace, if replacement equipment is available, also could put companies out of business and create massive unemployment.
Germany’s industrial production disruptions have increased by 29 percent, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the Association of German Industrial Energy Companies, as outlined in a recent Spiegel article.
While many industries are resorting to backup generators and batteries in the event of a disruption, just the sudden halt, even for a second, may affect sophisticated computer-controlled production equipment. In some cases, emergency measures can fail, causing the destruction of production equipment and production losses, due to the delicate machinery’s sudden stoppage.
Because of increased concern over the reliability of a stable grid, some production companies are thinking of leaving Germany altogether. With Germany being a center of industry, such a development would be unacceptable.
In the United States, experts say that local utilities have been reluctant to harden transformers and the grid system due to costs. Right now, the federal government doesn’t have the authority to order local utilities to harden their facilities against an EMP attack.
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