Published on Apr 21, 2015 <br />In the administration's first ever "Quadrennial Energy Review," the department suggests that modernization is a must and estimated the cost at updating just the grid of transmission and distribution lines at $900 billion. Add in updating power plants, and the price reaches $2 trillion. <br /> <br />The department has been warning of an "aging, inefficient, congested" electric grid for a decade. In recent years, fears of terrorism, climate change storms and even solar flares have added to the list of concerns and prompted a national debate on protecting or modernizing the grid. <br /> <br />In the new report, the Energy Department warns that modern life could be endangered if the grid went down. A congressional report has warned that a solar flare or terrorist attack could darken the grid for a year, during which most of those supplied by the grid would die. <br /> <br />"Modernization of the grid has been made all the more urgent by the increasing and now virtually pervasive dependence of modern life on a reliable supply of electricity," said the just-issued Energy Department report. <br /> <br />"Without that, navigation; telecommunication; the financial system; healthcare; emergency response; and the Internet, as well as all that depends on it, become unreliable. Yet the threats to the grid — ranging from geomagnetic storms that can knock out crucial transformers; to terrorist attacks on transmission lines and substations; to more flooding, faster sea-level rise and increasingly powerful storms from global climate change — have been growing even as society's dependence on the grid has increased," the report said on page S-5.
