In between visits from my better half and children, wwoofers helping on the Fanny Farm, I tend to spend a lot of time on my own, often working away alone for days and hours. One way I keep myself entertained and fend loneliness, is by listening to podcasts I download onto my smart phone. Last year, I discovered Radio Ecoshock…. I highly recommend it for realists like me interested in keeping up with the latest news on energy, climate change, peak oil, the failing economy, etc etc etc……
I don’t agree with everything some interviewees come up with, but then again, neither does Alex Smith, the owner of the site……. he has interviewed John Michael Greer, Nicole Foss, Raul Illargi, Richard Heinberg, and many other luminary futurists I follow. I highly recomend it.
Dr Peter Pry
A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded a file in which Dr Peter Pry who is Director of the U.S. Task Force on National and Homeland Security; you’d have to give him the benefit of the doubt that he does know what he’s talking about!
Now I had heard of Electro Magnetic Pulses, but only on the occasional prepper TV show I might have inadvertently come across. Because I had only ever heard about these from preppers, whom I frankly think are nutcases, I dismissed the whole idea as a crank conspiracy theory…… but now, I’m not so sure.
EMPs of the non nuclear types are not things you can do anything about, unlike the list of man made disasters mentioned above; I will therefore not lose any sleep over a sudden solar burst that takes out civilisation, que sera sera.
However having listened to this podcast, I started wondering what would happen to my solar power station. After all, the electronics that keep my batteries going and the inverter that turns the energy into something useful are crammed full of fragile electronics that could potentially be taken out by an EMP.
What I discovered blew me away……. for starters, EMPs will not damage solar panels. Tick. nor the batteries. Tick. The electronics, however, are highly vulnerable, and would stop working. Untick.
Because Dr Pry mentioned that one way of protecting your electronics is by storing them in a Faraday Cage, I then began investigating how effective a shipping container might be as such a device; and lo and behold, it turns out that if properly grounded, containers are very effective indeed…. I might just add another grounding rod just to make sure.
Putting my power station in a shipping container may well turn out to have been an inadvertent stroke of genius…. I’m just putting this info out there for anyone else to consider. What do you have to lose?
Faraday Cage at the end of the Rainbow
Damn the Matrix 
Have been listening to Radio Ecoshock for about 3 years now and have corresponded with and donated to Alex Smith. Great program. Nice bloke.
This novel on what happens to a small east coast town in the US following an EMP strike and the sudden, permanent loss of electricity is a fantastic read and was no. 12 on the NYTimes list of bestsellers in 2009. There’s also a well narrated version on Audible.
“One Second After” by William R Forstchen
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After
EMP weapons can be extremely effective even without the nuclear option, even a device that could be placed in your pocket could do damage. A Carrington event, longer term, should be considered an inevitability.
Hardening the electrical grid, pipelines, against either involves the same steps. We are so much more vulnerable than we should be, but much could be replaced in fairly short order (larger transformers might be an exception). Powerful enough even longer fences could be at risk.
A whole planet event is not going to happen, but a little less than half of a hemisphere could. Fry one continent’s electronics and electrical grid is about the worst.
Hello Mike! I’ve wondered about the same thing with our solar power system. Your inverter etc are in a steel cage, but they’re wired to the panels outside, and house wiring, pump wiring etc.. If there was a pulse, all outside wiring would be an aerial collecting the energy and sending it straight to your electronics in the container. I recommend that if you feel an EMP coming, you whip out to the container and disconnect everything from outside wiring. Make sure you don’t just unswitch, you’d need to disconnect both poles. No worries…
Hi Bruce……. the guy in the podcast mentions some sort of protection device, commonly available as he claims they are built into the power plugs of modern computers…. I’ll have to listen again and do some more research.
http://beforeitsnews.com/survival/2014/05/how-to-protect-your-solar-gear-from-emp-part-2-2524654.html
I’m wondering if the fact our connection from house to container is underground (more than 600mm deep) and that most of the electrics in the house will be either underground or under 200mm + of concrete will help……. and of course we’ll have an iron roof and front wall.
Nothing I’ve read so far mentions wiring acting as an aerial.
Hi all … emp’s will tend to be localized. (Hey you can make your own .. look up some of the old Pop Mechanics and Pop Electronics .. a spiral of copper wire, a reflector and a stick of gelli). However – if the connections to your inverter, MPPT, and output from the inverter are filtered – using lossy ferrite filter toroids (or clip-ons) (and some VDR’s) it is highly unlikely you would have an issue. Besides they could protect you from lightning strikes. You may be able to listen to AM radio too….