Well clearly the US election did not go the way I thought or hoped it would. The result will affect us all for many years in many ways, but none of them are likely to be good. I wrote about how I felt about the 2016 election here and right now I can’t add to that right now. I have made a decision to move on and spend less time reading and thinking about US politics, even though it is a life-long interest. I will just take action where I can. I started by acting on my belief in the power of impact investing, impact managing and impact consuming by coming off of X and moving my social media activity to Blue Sky. It is impossible for me to support any of Elon Musk’s businesses as he is clearly anti-democracy and many other things I don’t agree with.

Anyway as part of moving on I am now re-focused on working, writing and speaking to help accelerate the very necessary transition to a net zero and regenerative world. To that end ep is working on a number of projects including: our Net Zero Delivery Vehicle, an innovative public-private partnership to bridge the development gap between good ideas and bankable, large-scale, systematic net zero projects; a project working on distributed energy solutions in Ukraine; and ep Assets move into delivering distributed energy projects in the UK in response to client demand. We announced a partnership with Pixii, the fastest growing technology company in Norway in 2023, to introduce their Pixii box technology and energy storage solutions to the UK. ZPN Energy, where I am non-exec Chair, is rolling out its battery backed rapid EV chargers and mobile charging solutions. At CBHH we continue to raise capital for impactful energy transition and natural capital companies.

It is clear that electrification, and particularly distributed energy systems using solar PV, batteries, EV charging and flexibility is the next phase of the energy transition – driven by the drive to decarbonisation, economics, power supply constraints, and a desire for higher levels of resilience. The impact of this change will be massive and produce much higher levels of overall energy efficiency as fossil fuel use is displaced. It will also require us to move on in our thinking in several ways. Firstly all building and facility owners need to think of themselves as energy producers as well as consumers – the now over-used word prosumer applies. We are no longer just consumers and we need to take responsibility for our own energy generation and use as far as possible. At ep we believe all buildings should be power stations, producing power as well as providing ancillary services in the various grid support markets.

Secondly we need to re-think ‘energy’. Since the 1970s energy has been used in a way that confuses fuel and electricity. We need to make the distinction clear again, electricity is very different to fuel. Try putting fuel into an electrical device, or try putting electricity into your internal combustion engine car. Electrification, switching from fuel driven heating or mobility, to a low or zero carbon electricity grid, or a local micro-grid, results in so many benefits at all levels including big reductions in emissions.

Thirdly we need to think in new ways about energy statistics. We need to think about the quantity of energy services being delivered, it is that quantity that will be linked to wealth and GDP, not the level of primary energy being used. Memes on the internet saying something like there are no rich low energy countries, primarily being used to push a fossil fuel or nuclear agenda, are meaningless. Energy intensity, as measured by primary energy, will fall rapidly as more and more energy i.e. electricity, is generated close to where it is used, and metered energy taken from the grid falls; it will also fall as high efficiency electrical heating and mobility displaces low efficiency fossil fuelled systems in heating and transport. As I have said before, the level of energy efficiency in the economy is a choice, it is just a choice that we have generally made without thinking about it.

Despite the undoubtedly chaotic efforts of the incoming US Administration, and other wannabe dictators around the world, I believe the energy transition and particularly the move towards distributed solar and batteries will prove to be unstoppable. Their efforts to protect incumbent fossil fuel interests may delay things but at the end of the day they are dinosaurs looking up as the giant asteroid approaches.

In other news my 2013 book ‘Energy Efficiency. The Definitive Guide to the Cheapest, Cleanest, Fastest Source of Energy’ is now out in paperback at a reasonable price, available from the publisher, all good book sellers and Amazon. It has stood the test of time well as a broad introduction to the subject but I am working on what will be a companion book, revisiting the subject and looking at some of the major changes that have happened in the last decade, notably the advent of cheap solar and batteries, and the growth of interest and activity in financing energy efficiency. I also published a collection of blogs from the first ten years of onlyelevenpercent.com – available on Amazon.

The title of this blog comes from the lyrics of ‘Move On’ by David Bowie

The news that Jeff Bezos has stopped the editorial board of the Washington Post from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris reminded me of a piece I wrote back in 2021 entitled ‘Upstanding and Bystanding – Time for some Personal Corporate Social Responsibility’, which seems even more relevant now. This was inspired by a visit to the Dallas Holocaust Museum which categorised people during the holocaust as; perpetrators; bystanders; upstanders and of course victims.

It is clear, as it has been for a long time, that Donald Trump is a narcissistic psychopath who is threat to democracy, the rule of law, the global economy and global security, as well as many other bad things. He has created a cult that supports him, aided and abetted by Republican politicians like Mitch McConnell and many others who made the decision that supporting Trump was in their best interest, even though they knew full well what he was like and what he stood for. Even if they are not direct perpetrators they are collaborators.

The events in the USA since 2016 demonstrate clearly how any country can slowly slide towards authoritarianism, and answers once and for all the old question: how did Hitler and the Nazis came to power in pre-WW2 Germany? The process must have been very similar. Now we have leading newspapers, the Washington Post and the LA Times, spiking endorsements because their owners don’t want to upset Trump. If Trump is elected, next they will be publishing positive pieces about him and spinning news stories to make him look good. What comes after that? Amazon sourcing and delivering the modern equivalent of SS uniforms or AWS providing data services for the equivalent of the Stasi Records Agency?

The real irony of course is that The Washington Post is the newspaper that broke the Watergate story, and that four years after the takeover by Jeff Bezos the paper adopted the masthead ‘Democracy dies in darkness’. Bezos has at the very least dimmed the lights on democracy.

The original piece is here.
https://www.onlyelevenpercent.com/upstanding-and-bystanding-time-for-some-personal-corporate-social-responsibility/

Although our main focus at ep Group is the energy transition, we recognise that climate and energy is only part of the transition we need to make to move towards, and then beyond, sustainability. The issue of biodiversity loss is as important as climate. In 2022 we did some work for Cambridge Conservation Initiative looking at the emerging area of investing in natural capital and in 2024 we are working on a natural capital transaction through Cameron Barney. This piece is a primer on natural capital.

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What is natural capital?

Capital can be defined as a resource used or available for use in the production of goods and services. Typically we think of financial capital when using the term but there are five types of capital:

– Manufactured capital e.g. machinery and buildings
– Financial capital
– Human capital e.g. knowledge and skills
– Social capital e.g. levels of trust and connections amongst people
– Natural capital – the stock of natural ‘resources’ including eco-systems, species, water, soils, minerals, the atmosphere and the oceans, as well as natural processes and functions

Natural capital underpins all other types of capital and our ability to produce actual goods and services.

Natural capital is crucial for our survival because it produces essential ‘ecosystem services’ which can be divided into five categories:

– Provisioning: material outputs from nature such as food, water, timber and energy
– Regulating: indirect benefits generated through regulation of ecosystems such as carbon sequestration, the water cycle and crop production
– Supporting: fundamental ecological processes that support the delivery of other ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling and soil formation
– Cultural: non-material benefits from nature which can be spiritual, aesthetic or recreational.

If the contributions of natural capital were to be valued in the same way as other types of capital, they would be valued at $125 trillion , equivalent to 1.25 x Global GDP in 2022.

Biodiversity, defined as the variety of life, is a critical aspect of natural capital, and one we should be deeply concerned about. According to the WWF Living Planet Report 2022 , between 1970 and 2018 wildlife populations declined 69%, while freshwater species declined by 83% and migratory fish declined by 76%. Almost everywhere we look we see declining wildlife populations and biodiversity. One particularly important part of this is the decline in insect life – sometimes known as ‘insectageddon’. Insects provide ecosystem services valued at between $235 and $577 billion per annum and are absolutely critical for food production as three quarters of the crop types grown by humans require pollination by insects. In the UK ‘wider countryside butterflies’ declined by 46% between 1977 and 2017 while habitat specialists fell by 77%. For those of us old enough to remember the 1970s the famous cartoon that shows a driver with a car windscreen covered in insects in the 1970s, or even the 1990s, and a driver with a car windscreen with no insects in 2020, accurately reflects our experience.

How much capital flows into natural capital and what is needed?

So how much financial capital flows into natural capital and what is needed. UNEP, in 2021, estimated that the flow of funds into natural capital was $133 billion, up from $52 billion in 2010, a 9.85% CAGR. Of this $133 billion only $18 billion was private finance. Deutz et, al. estimate that the financing gap between what was invested and what is needed is between $598 and $894 billion per annum. For comparison purposes the global carbon markets in 2023 were estimated at $949 billion and global investment into the power sector in 2023 was $1,200 billion .

To bridge that gap we need to do two things: reduce the flow of capital into activities that have negative impacts on biodiversity, including reforming harmful subsidies; and scale-up mechanisms to increase private and public capital flows into conservation and regeneration. Areas such as biodiversity offsets, natural infrastructure, green financial products, nature based solutions to carbon emissions, are all expected to grow rapidly.

Growing recognition of the need to invest in natural capital

There is growing recognition amongst financial investors and corporates of the need to increase the flow of capital into protection and restoration of natural capital and biodiversity – becoming ‘nature positive’. This is driven by several factors including:

• growth of ESG investing and ‘green’ or sustainable finance – driven by demand and recognition of the problem
• regulations such as the EU Taxonomy and its national equivalents
• Pillar 3 of the Basel III Accords – disclosure requirements on capital adequacy and operational risks
• disclosure guidelines and increasingly regulations e.g. the Taskforce on Nature Related Disclosures (TNFD).

Why invest in natural capital?

Why should institutions invest in natural capital? There are four main reasons:

– risk management; including: physical risk, litigation risk, transition risk and systemic risk
– market opportunity: there is a large opportunity to deploy capital at scale
– regulations such as the EU Taxonomy and national equivalents
– ESG drivers

The barriers

Despite the need and the interest in investing in natural capital there are many barriers. Surveys of investors have identified the following barriers:

• Terminology: there is no common language between project developers and the finance sector
• Multiple, diverse stakeholders: including the private sector, the public sector, NGOs, and local communities – many of which have very different view points and objectives
• Lack of awareness: failure to understand he consequences of insufficiently valuing natural capital
• Measurement tools and metrics: investors want quantifiable, standardized information
• Mindset: natural capital lies outside normal investment concerns and is seen as complex
• Valuation: no framework and legislation, and quantification of tangible value is difficult
• Stock vs. flow: natural capital is not reflected as a capital stock, but rather a flow of resources
• Cash-flow implications: evidence is lacking on how natural capital impacts on cash flows
• Timing / short-termism: conflict between short-term investment horizons and long-term nature of biodiversity projects
• Reporting: trustees and asset owners require visibility and frequency in reporting
• Policy: policy makers not currently designating value for natural capital
• Diversified global firms: natural capital risks are considered small relative to overall business activities
• Performance criteria: consequences for mismanaging natural capital are sufficiently minor as not be a disincentive, at least in the short-term
• Corporate strategy: natural capital is not linked to corporate strategy
• Perceived costs: perception that sustainability related activities are a cost and not profitable
• Diversified portfolio requirements: institutional investors obliged to take all attractive investment opportunities despite their impact on natural capital
• Lack of opportunities: a lack of credible investment targets rather than a lack of capital. Developing projects requires multiple stakeholders coming together and is complex, lengthy and expensive.
  

These key barriers can be boiled down to:

– Risks – real and perceived
– Development time and complexity
– Lack of capacity in project development as well as in project evaluation and underwriting
– Lack of standardization.

The issue of standardization is fundamental – investors like standardisation but by its very nature it is hard to standardise nature and biodiversity!

Of course, as well as specific ‘natural capital’ or biodiversity projects, we need to ensure that every-day, ‘normal’, projects address biodiversity issues. For example, we should not be funding solar farms when we can design solar farms that increase bio-diversity. Every project, whatever its core purpose, should be evaluated for its impact on biodiversity and measures incorporate to improve it.

Multiple financial instruments

There are multiple types of financial instrument for natural capital including:

– Carbon markets
– ‘Carbon +’ (i.e. incorporating biodiversity criteria into carbon markets)
– Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD)
– Biodiversity offsets
– Specific species bonds e.g. Rhino Bonds
– Green Bonds

Multiple standards

Another issue is that there are multiple evolving standards and metrics for measuring biodiversity including:

– Biodiversity Metric 3.0
– Global Biodiversity Score (GBS)
– Biodiversity Footprint for Financials (BFFI)
– Species threat abatement and recovery metric (STAR)
– Net Environmental Contribution (NEC)
– ENCORE

There are several initiatives underway to standardize or align different measurement systems. Biodiversity data is location specific & unique to the asset, and therefore it is inherently difficult to aggregate data.

It seems that we are at a turning point in investing in natural capital. Research from 2024 suggested that over half of UK investors were looking at natural capital investments.

Some examples of natural capital investing

Mirova’s Sustainable Ocean Fund (SOF)
A public-private partnership with Conservation International and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the SOF is dedicated to implementing ocean-friendly practices in developing countries and small island states. Projects include supporting fisheries to maintain sustainable levels of marine fish stocks, providing financial incentives for low-impact aquaculture, responsible seafood supply chains, and wastewater management. The SOF has pledges from EIB, AXA, IADB, and Caprock Group. USAID has committed a $50m risk-sharing guarantee to attract further investment into the fund. The SOF is expected to deploy $100m with USAID support and closed in early 2022 at $132m in capital commitments.

Agriculture Capital
Agriculture Capital is a regenerative agriculture and food investment firm that currently manages two investment funds. The Funds invest in permanent cropland and synergistic midstream assets to create a vertically integrated enterprise that grows, packs and markets high-value produce. Through an owner-operator model, the Funds employ a value-added approach to farm and food operations, focused on regenerative farm practices and the processing and sale of that produce as a means of enhancing returns. Agricultural Capital applies its regenerative agriculture model to farms, marketing, packing and nursery companies. The total portfolio covers 20,000 acres and produces table grapes, citrus, blueberries and tree nuts across California, Oregon, Washington and Australia. It has consistently reduced water and energy use, increased soil health and increased wild pollinators by a factor of 9x.

The AGRI3 Fund
The AGRI3 Fund was created by UNEP and Rabobank, together with partner IDH and supported by FMO, the Dutch development bank. It aims to catalyze private investment into forest protection and sustainable agriculture with the aim of unlocking at least $1 billion in finance towards deforestation-free, sustainable agriculture and land use. The Fund provides de-risking financial instruments and grants for technical assistance for food value chain actors, and particularly farmers.
The fund targets $150m to allow an exposure of up to $300m. It is an evergreen fund with an open architecture allowing future partnerships with commercial banks beyond Rabobank. IDH manages the AGRI3 Technical Assistance Fund which provides reimbursable grants to projects at pre- and post-investment stages to improve project quality and strengthen environmental and social impacts.
The fund has closed transactions including:

– Forest protection and renovation of degraded pastureland in Mato Grosso. $5m, 10 year project covering >2,500 hectare forest protection and replanting, and renovation of 1,200 hectare of renovation of degraded pasture land
– Sustainable pepper farming in the Chongquing region. $10m, 3 year project.
– Sustainable production of citrus fruit and sugarcane in Brazil. 10 year loan $20m from Rabobank.

Rhino bonds
Rhino bonds were issued by the World Bank in 2022 and were the world’s first wildlife conservation bond. The total issued was $150 million as five year bonds and the returns were outcomes based related to net growth in Black Rhino population. The outcomes were independently measured and the project was supported by grant funding from the Global Environmental Facility. Purchasers of the bonds included:

– Nuveen (lead)
– AllianceBernstein
– ASN Impact Investors
– BlueBay Asset Management
– Mackenizie Investments
– HNWs.

Overall population of black rhinos has increased.

Phyla

Phyla Uses high yielding Pomgania tree to restore degraded land and produce biomass, seedcake and oil which can be used to produce multiple products including synthetic aviation fuel (SAF). It aims to regenerate one million hectares of degraded land by 2030 and has projects and partnerships in multiple countries. Cameron Barney are advising Phyla.

Conclusions

The decline in natural capital is as life threatening as the worst scenarios for climate change. We have to arrest the decline in natural capital, restore it and ultimately regenerate it. This can be done by applying private financial capital – often blended with public capital, and there are now enough examples of how this can be done.

Natural capital is an emerging asset class but there are still many barriers including: development complexity; lack of clarity on revenue models; lack of understanding & know-how; lack of standardisation & competing standards. Natural capital investing shares some characteristics with infrastructure – in that it is long-term and large-scale. As well as investing in projects surrounding natural capital there is a burgeoning private equity opportunity of ‘natural capital tech’ or ‘agri-tech’ or ‘bio-diversity tech’ including: sensors; data; drones, DNA sampling, AI applied to measuring and regenerating natural capital.

Investing in natural capital, and ensuring projects of all type are nature positive, has to become the norm rather than the exception.

The recent death of astronaut Bill Anders led to a lot of the media attention on the famous photo taken by Bill during the Apollo 8 mission called ‘Earthrise’. The photo, taken on Christmas Eve 1968, is often described as being the most viewed image and one of the inspirations for the environmental movement.

Former US Vice President Al Gore used the photo in his ‘An inconvenient truth’ presentation and said:

“That one picture exploded in the consciousness of humans. It led to dramatic changes. Within 18 months of this picture the environment movement had begun.”

The story behind the mission and the photo, like much of the Apollo programme is, incredible. In 1967 and 1968 Apollo was recovering from the terrible fire of Apollo 1 which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee on the launch pad, while trying to meet President Kennedy’s target of reaching the moon by the end of the decade, and beating the Russians in the space race. The fire required an extensive redesign of the Apollo Command Module to improve its safety which delayed the programme. The fire was in January 1967 and the first crewed Apollo flight, Apollo 7, flew in October 1968 to test the newly designed Command Module and its Service Module. During the planning of the Apollo programme it was envisaged that the next flight would test the Command Module and the Lunar Module in high earth orbit but as 1968 rolled on the incredibly complex Lunar Module was late. At the same time there were intelligence reports that Russia, having completed the uncrewed, circumlunar Zond 5, was planning a manned circumlunar flight before the end of 1968. In August 1968 George Low, then Manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, proposed that Apollo 8 leave earth orbit and orbit the moon without a Lunar Module.

The next crew in line, commanded by Jim McDivitt, was offered the flight but turned it down, preferring to stick with their planned joint test of the Command and Service Modules and the Lunar Module in earth orbit. The final decision to proceed with the lunar orbit mission was delayed until Apollo 7 flew successfully but between August and December new procedures had to be developed and the crew trained. The fact that the flight went from proposal to implementation in five months is incredible now. Obviously at some point to land on the moon there had to be a lunar orbital test but there were still a lot of unknowns at that time, and the procedures had to be developed and tested, and the crew trained in a very short time. It was an audacious decision.

Apollo 8 was the first crewed flight, and only the third ever flight, on the massive Saturn V. This in itself is incredible, especially when you see how many test launches some of the current privately financed launchers have made and know that one of the two previous un-manned Saturn V launches had not gone well at all, but NASA was confident they had solved the problems. The launch on 21st December went well, and after two and half hours in earth orbit, the Capsule Communicator (‘CapCom’) Michael Collins – later to become the first person to orbit the moon alone on Apollo 11 – quietly said the words, ‘you are go for TLI’, (trans lunar injection). With the successful firing of the Saturn’s third stage, humans left the relative safety of earth orbit for the first time.

On its flight to the moon and its first three lunar orbits orientated in a way that meant the crew couldn’t see the earth, and so the earth rise was a surprise. As the spacecraft came round the moon Bill Anders saw the earth come up. The first few photos were in black & white but Anders quickly asked for a colour film and got the famous shot. Frank Borman, the Commander, and always a stickler for following the flight plan, said, jokingly: ‘Hey, don’t take that, it is not scheduled’. The photo is usually reproduced with the lunar horizon horizontal but in reality as the spacecraft orbited the lunar equator the moon was orientated 90 degrees to how you normally see it. Bill Anders famously hung a copy in his office in the ‘correct’ orientation (as shown here).

The Apollo 8 crew stayed around the moon for ten orbits and in one of the most famous, and most moving TV transmissions of all time, read from the book of Genesis. Exactly on schedule, and behind the moon, they fired the Service Module’s engine and as they rounded the moon and re-established radio contact with Mission Control, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, later to go on and command the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in 1970, radioed, ‘Please be advised there is a Santa Claus’. On 27th December the crew safely splashed down in the Pacific and were recovered by the USS Yorktown.

There is no doubt that the photo had a huge impact on our view of the earth, and it did help jump start the environmental movement. It has been reproduced so many times we tend to take it for granted but seeing the earth as ‘the grand oasis in the big vastness of space’, as Jim Lovell called it, has to make you think about the fragility of earth and our place in the universe. Many people might argue that the space race, and indeed any space exploration, is a waste of money. I would argue that it is built into our DNA to explore, and that images like Earthrise which help change our perspective and help us realise our true place in the universe make it worth every penny. Bill Anders once said: “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

After Apollo 8 the programme proceeded at an amazing pace. In March 1969 Apollo 9 tested the Lunar Module in earth orbit and included a spacewalk using the lunar spacesuit. Two months later, in May 1969, Apollo 10 flew to the moon in a dress rehearsal for the landing and flew the Lunar Module down to 50,000 feet. Then in July 1969 Apollo 11 made the first landing, only seven months after Apollo 8.

With the passing of Bill Anders, there are now only 6 of the 24 men who visited the moon between December 1968 and December 1972 left alive, and the youngest, is 88. Most of the managers and engineers who made it all happen have also left us. The Apollo programme was an incredible and inspirational achievement and the men and women who made it happen, some 400,000 in total, were truly legends who walked amongst us.

The spectacular aurorae that were recently seen by millions of people in parts of the world they don’t usually appear in were truly incredible, and a reminder of the beauty and the wonder of the universe. However they also brought to mind another threat to the global energy system, and society, that we really ought to think about – the threat of electromagnetic pulse disrupting the power and communication grids. I know we have more than enough to worry about, what with the worsening effects of climate change, Gaza, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian and Chinese aggression in several parts of the world, and the rise of authoritarianism and last bit not least the risk of Trump being elected President of the US. But the threat of a major electromagnetic pulse also needs to be on the worry list.

The effects of electromagnetic pulse (EMP)
All electrical and electronic systems can be affected by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), also referred to a transient electromagnetic disturbance, which is a brief burst of electromagnetic energy which can either occur naturally, such as from solar storms, or be created by the use of a nuclear (1), or specialised non-nuclear (2), weapon. An EMP can occur as an electromagnetic field, as an electric field, as a magnetic field, or as a conducted electric current – all forms of electromagnetic interference (EMI). The electromagnetic interference caused by an EMP can disrupt communications and damage electronic equipment and power grids and many such instances have occurred, including the following.

In 1972 there was major disruption of telephone lines in the US Mid-west.
In March 1989, a solar storm over Quebec caused a province-wide power cut which lasted nine hours.
A 2003 storm temporarily disrupted satellite services, and in one case permanently damaged space borne infrastructure.
In 2017 a geomagnetic storm affected radio frequency and satellite communications around the world, as well as Position, Navigation and Timing satellites.

Although there haven’t been that many reports of damage by the May 2024 solar storm some did occur. The broadband internet connection provided by Starlink reported some temporary degradation in the quality of its signals, and radio and GPS systems experienced some problems. In anticipation of the extreme solar activity, New Zealand’s electrical grid operators took protective measures and temporarily turned off some circuits around the country to prevent equipment damage. Although not damaged, some satellites did stop making scientific observations during the storm.

Solar storms
The recent aurora were the result of an extreme solar storm. Solar storms, which result from disturbances on the Sun can affect the entire solar system, including the Earth and its magnetosphere and the frequency and severity of solar storms is related to the eleven-year solar cycle which reaches its next peak in 2025. Solar storms are caused by sun spots, disturbances in the sun caused by concentrations of magnetic flux that inhibit convention. The cluster of sun spots that caused the recent electromagnetic pulse responsible for the aurora is around 17 times as wide as Earth. Around 8 May, this active region sent at least seven coronal mass ejections, (blasts of magnetized plasma), towards Earth at speeds of up to 1,800 kilometres per second. These waves of charged plasma swamped space-weather detectors. On the scale of one to five that describes geomagnetic storms, this one ranked a five and according to an index of changes in Earth’s magnetic field it was a ‘super storm’.

Scientists expect the current solar cycle to peak in July 2025 and the biggest storms typically happen months to years after the peak. As the solar cycle progresses, sunspots tend to appear closer to the Sun’s equator, increasing the chances of coronal mass ejections that will head directly for Earth rather than out into space,

The Carrington Event, in September 1859 is usually known as the most intense solar storm in recorded history, and created aurora as far south as Havana and bright enough to read by as far south as Missouri. Similar scale events also occurred in 1879 and 1921. On 23 July 2012, a coronal mass ejection, (on the same scale as the Carrington event), narrowly missed Earth (3).

With our dependence on electrical devices and electronic systems increasing as we electrify our energy and transport systems, our vulnerability to the threat of EMI is growing. The scale of the economic damage that could result from a major solar storm was highlighted by joint research at Lloyds of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (4) in the US in 2013 which estimated that a Carrington Event scale solar storm today could result in between 20 and 40 million people being at risk of extended blackouts lasting between days and months, and a total economic cost of between $600 billion to $2.6 trillion. Electrical distribution systems, communications systems, all electronic devices and modern vehicles would be taken out of operation by such an event. The delays in restoring power would primarily be driven by the long-lead times on major equipment such as grid-scale transformers. Although the probability of a Carrington scale storm may be small, the impacts would clearly be very large.

Of course EMP can also be caused by nuclear weapons. A limited nuclear exchange using EMP weapons would be devastating and are very well described in ‘One Second After’, a novel by William Forschten (5), which was cited in the US Congress.

We need to increase resilience

The need to increase the resilience of critical infrastructure in response to a whole range of threats including EMP, is recognised by the National Preparedness Commission in the UK (6) and the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency in the US.

In summary, EMP is a major risk for the power grid and for critical systems and infrastructure such as solar farms and data centres, which are increasingly dependent on electronics and computers, a risk that will grow as the world continues to electrify at exponential pace. There is a technology that can reduce the vulnerability of such systems, High Frequency Alternating Current (HFAC). HFAC, in which AC fluctuates in kilohertz or megahertz rather than the conventional 50 to 60 hertz, was first promoted by Nikola Tesla and after several false starts over more than 100 years it is now finally being commercialized together with some breakthrough EMP technology by a UK company, Energy Research Lab. Widespread use of HFAC would mitigate the risk of EMF as well as bring considerable benefits in terms of energy and material savings. As we increasingly electrify the global economy, we need to consider the risks from EMP and adopt technologies to mitigate the risk.

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I rarely, if ever, quote Shakespeare, (probably due to bad memories of school days having to read several plays), but here is the whole quotation the title of this piece comes from.

And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger,
At whose approach, ghosts, wondering here and there,
Troop home to churchyards. Damned spirits all.
A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Act 3, Scene 2

References

(1) EMP from a nuclear weapon is abbreviated as NEMP, Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse, when it is necessary to distinguish it from a naturally occurring EMP. (2) For a discussion of non-nuclear EMP weapons see:
https://science.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb3.htm
(3) Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012. NASA. 2014.
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/planetary-science/23jul_superstorm/
(4) Solar storm risk to the North American electric grid. Lloyds. 2013
https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the-north-american-electric-grid/1/pdf-Solar-Storm-Risk-to-the-North-American-Electric-Grid.pdf
(5) One Second After.
https://www.onesecondafter.com
(6) UK Severe Space Weather Preparedness Strategy. September 2021.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1020551/uk-severe-space-weather-preparedness-strategy.pdf