The situation is so bad in western North Carolina especially that Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) issued a press release detailing the progress of emergency responders and repair crews.

“More than 30 swift water and helicopter rescue crews from across North Carolina and seven nearby states have rescued more than 200 people since Thursday,” Edwards says.

“Thousands of linemen from across North America, including crews from Canada, have been deployed to our community to restore power, and we’ve seen the state come together to transport dozens of trucks filled with potable water and food to our shelters.”

While a valiant effort, these operations will still take a lot of time considering the scope of the damage. Twelve counties along with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians are basically disaster areas that are now eligible for assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

“Individual Assistance provides financial aid and services to eligible individuals and households that have been affected by a disaster to assist with the recovery process. Individuals can officially begin applying for Individual Assistance online at www.DisasterAssistance.gov, or by calling the application phone number at 1-800-621-3362 (TTY: 800-462-7585) between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. EST.”

The destructive path of #Helene has left extensive damage to @DukeEnergy infrastructure in the #NC mountains and Upstate #SC . We believe around 50% of remaining outages in these areas will require significant replacement and rebuilding of poles, lines and substation equipment. pic.twitter.com/b7eANjX0ta

— Jeff Brooks (@DE_JeffB) September 30, 2024

(Related: Just a few weeks remain until Election Day and huge swaths of the Carolinas will not be able to vote due to Hurricane Helene – coincidence?)

No backup transformers available thanks to Biden, Ukraine, EVs and AI

As of this writing, there are more than one million households throughout the Southeast that are still without power due to Hurricane Helene. Nearly 300,000 of those are located in western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina where authorities expect there to be infrastructure problems well into the coming months.

Edwards notified his constituents that 360 power substations in western North Carolina alone “are out.”

“Many of these substations were completely flooded and Duke Energy is unable to assess the damage until the flooding has lowered, the water has been pumped out, and the equipment is thoroughly dried,” he said.

There actually would have been backup transformers available to fix all these broken substations had President Biden not just sent off the nation’s strategic stockpile of them to Ukraine so Volodymyr Zelensky can use them to advance his interests.

The ballooning artificial intelligence (AI) industry is also snatching up transformers and other similar equipment to build data centers, not to mention all the electric vehicle (EV) nonsense that is similarly funneling much-needed supplies away from the damaged energy grid.

“Distribution transformers are a bedrock component of our energy infrastructure,” commented National Renewable Energy Laboratory researcher Killian McKenna to PV Magazine about how Big Tech is gobbling up the supplies needed to properly maintain America’s energy grid.

“But utilities needing to add or replace them are currently facing high prices and long wait times due to supply chain shortages. This has the potential to affect energy accessibility, reliability, affordability – everything.”

Many are now wondering out loud if geoengineering may have been used to “steer” Hurricane Helene towards the battleground states of Florida, North Carolina and Georgia to rig the election results. Find out more at Rigged.news.

Sources for this article include:

• ZeroHedge.com
• Edwards.House.gov
• NaturalNews.com
• PowerOutage.us

Many of the greatest among them emanate from a key geopolitical rival, China.

That’s partly because the new technologies frequently use inverters. When solar panels, wind turbines, and battery systems generate or store direct current electricity, inverters turn it into the alternating current electricity that flows through the grid.

Paul N. Stockton, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, opened what he called a “rabbit hole” in response to a question on inverters during the House Energy & Commerce hearing.

“Do we have a satisfactory supply of inverters for all of the renewable energy that’s being brought into the grid?” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) asked Mr. Stockton, who also holds positions on subcommittees in the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.

“Manufacturers in China are important producers of inverters being deployed nationwide, across the United States,” Mr. Stockton responded.

He explained that the country’s reliance on Chinese inverters could jeopardize grid security.

“Sure, we’ve got inverters. Some of them are made in China. Others may be manufactured for final assembly in friendly nations, but they might have components—hardware, software, and firmware—that could provide attack vectors. And the constant updating of firmware from the cloud and by service providers—who’s on top of that for maintaining adequate security? Congressman, that’s an opportunity for progress,” Mr. Stockton said.

Solar Panels With Parts From China

The United States’ use of solar panels with parts from China that are assembled in Southeast Asia has been a source of controversy in this Congress. President Joe Biden vetoed a bill that would have ended his temporary pause on tariffs affecting those panels.

In his written testimony, Mr. Stockton elaborated on the ways inverter-based resources “provide China with new opportunities to disrupt the grid.”

He referred to a 2022 report from the Department of Energy outlining the cybersecurity risks associated with the changes to America’s grid.

“I propose that we prioritize our efforts to prevent Chinese leaders from accomplishing their goals in attacking the grid,” Mr. Stockton wrote.

He noted that inverter-based resources have some advantages, testifying in writing that they “have provided reliable, much-needed power during the 2023 heat domes and other extreme events.”

“Yet, they are also prone to catastrophic failures that can put the grid at risk.”

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) also asked Mr. Stockton about inverter-related vulnerabilities facing the United States.

Mr. Stockton offered a central recommendation to the lawmakers in attendance:

“Above all, ensuring that at the level of the devices, we hold manufacturers’ feet to the fire and ensure the adoption of safe and secure inverters, instead of relying on individual utilities or energy aggregators or other entities within the larger electric system to do their own homework.”

Bruce J. Walker of the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure Security voiced similar concerns about the threat from China, citing the U.S. intelligence community’s 2023 threat assessment.

Yet, he and Mr. Stockton offered contrasting perspectives on the decentralization that could be afforded by the rise of wind and solar.

Mr. Stockton argued in written testimony that decentralization could make the grid “more difficult to disrupt than today’s version, which relies on a small number of critical, high-value assets that adversaries can selectively target.”

Mr. Walker, on the other hand, testified that decentralization “has increased the surface area for cyber penetration.”

Manny Cancel, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), named China alongside Russia, Iran, and North Korea as foreign adversaries that could threaten the United States’ grid.

“Chinese cyber activities are probably one of the largest and most dynamic cyber threats to critical infrastructure and continue to demonstrate an increasing sophistication, including new and adaptive techniques to gain access to networks and conduct espionage,” he explained in written testimony.

More Threats From China or Russia?

“Are you seeing more threats from China or Russia?” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-W.Va.) asked Mr. Cancel.

“Probably China right now, but it’s not consistent,” Mr. Cancel replied, adding that Russia is a “very complex adversary.”

The grid experts’ concerns weren’t limited to the threat from China and other rivals on the world stage.

“The accelerating decarbonization and retirement of coal generation is forcing the United States toward an electric generation fleet reliant upon natural gas pipelines, further increasing the electric sector’s cyber and physical attack surface area,” Mr. Walker testified.

One of the most high-profile attacks on America’s energy infrastructure targeted a similar system, the Colonial Pipeline for jet fuel and gasoline.

Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) asked Mr. Walker if he favored more reliance on coal over improvements to pipeline security as a strategy for mitigating such threats.

“I actually advocate for an all-of-the-above approach,” he told the lawmaker.

America’s emerging electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure, including existing and planned charging stations, was another recurring topic.

In his written testimony, Mr. Stockton observed that EVs open up more space for internet-managed “demand-side management”—in other words, policies and technologies designed to influence consumer behavior—”on a massive scale.”

“These same capabilities are opening the door to unprecedented opportunities to manipulate demand for power, and exacerbate rather than remedy grid instabilities,” Mr. Stockton added.

In response to questioning from Mr. Griffith, Sam Chanoski of the Idaho National Laboratory sounded more optimistic about the cybersecurity of EV charging infrastructure, based on testing at his facility and other national laboratories. He told the lawmaker that the results were on par with “any other product.”

“There is not a digital product that is invulnerable,” he said.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

Utility companies are already bracing for impact as they all seem to just know that energy usage will reach an all-time high in the coming months, leaving millions without power in the dead of the summer heat.

The powers that be say that it is warmer than usual in some parts of the country, which they are already blaming for future blackouts. (Related: Rolling blackouts are expected to sweep the entire country this year.)

“Federal agencies responsible for power reliability, like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), have warned that grids in the western half of the country could face reliability issues this summer as consumers crank up air conditioners to escape the heat,” claims a report from Refinitiv data.

As energy equipment breaks down over the summer, power companies say they probably will not have the spare parts or other resources necessary to fix it fast enough to keep the power on – supposedly because of the heat.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which mismanaged the infamous Texas blackouts of early 2021, says it is already asking customers to cut back on their energy use and turn up their air conditioning units after six power plants shut down back in May during an alleged heatwave.

How do they know for sure that nationwide blackouts are coming?

Another event in Ohio that was blamed on a “storm” left some 200,000 homes and businesses without power. The grid operator there said it had to intentionally shut down power in some areas to prevent remaining lines from becoming overloaded.

There sure are a lot of this mysterious incidents happening at once, almost as if someone is testing the grid to see how easy it is to knock out at a later date, which they already appear to be planning for in advance.

They already introduced us to the “Great Reset” followed by “Reset the Table.” Is this the part where they reset the energy supply and force everyone into darkness as part of some bizarre initiation into the New World Order?

Or, it could just be that America’s energy system is now so overloaded and mismanaged, coupled with a forced transition into “green” energy, that the systems currently in existence are simply unable to handle the load whenever it gets a little bit hot or rains.

According to Ralph Izzo, head of the New Jersey-based Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), energy utilities are having to be frugal with their replacement parts inventories in order to avoid running out in the event of a weather emergency – or even just a few consecutive days of heavy heat.

“You don’t want to deplete your inventory because you don’t know when that storm is coming, but you know it’s coming … If we have successive days of 100-degree-heat, those pole top transformers, they start popping like Rice Krispies, and we would not have the supply stack to replace them,” he is quoted as saying.

Nick Akins, head of the Ohio-based grid operator AEP, added that many utility operators are changing their maintenance habits as well.

“We’re doing a lot more splicing, putting cables together, instead of laying new cable because we’re trying to maintain our new cable for inventory when we need it,” Akins says.

In the comment section at RT, one person was quick to point out that perhaps the United States should stop sending billions of dollars to Ukraine and instead “fix the country.”

“But no profit is as good as war,” this person added.

The latest news about the energy situation in America can be found at PowerGrid.news.

Sources for this article include:

• RT.com
• NaturalNews.com
• NATURAL NEWS
• Image by Dan Nguyen via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

If you can’t live without a cup of joe every morning, make sure you have a French press or a manual coffeemaker so you can brew coffee even if you decide to go off-grid. (h/t to TheOrganicPrepper.com) Here are five ways to brew coffee at home and while bugging out or camping.

French press

A French press is easy to use and you only need hot water and coffee grounds. You just add the coffee ground into a French press, pour hot water, then wait for seven minutes.

Once the coffee is done, press the plunger to filter the grounds out of the coffee. This method doesn’t produce plastic waste. If you’re using a wood stove, you don’t need electricity either.

The only downside to using a French press is that it’s not a very portable means of brewing coffee. It’s too bulky to bring in a bug-out bag, and they are usually made of glass, making them too fragile to pack in your survival bag.

But if you plan on bugging in at home when the grid goes down, a French press is one of the best and easiest methods you can use to brew coffee without electricity. (Related: 15 Ways to use spent coffee grounds on your homestead.)

Instant coffee packets

Instant coffee packets are a convenient way of making coffee after the grid goes down. Instant coffee doesn’t taste as good as freshly brewed coffee, but it’s a quick way to get your caffeine boost without needing bulky equipment like a French press.

When you’re bugging out, get some instant coffee, add hot water and shake your reusable water bottle before drinking. Alternatively, you can pour the hot water into an enamel mug and stir the coffee with a spoon. Include some instant coffee packets in your bug-out bag so you can quickly brew coffee while on the go.

Manual coffeemaker

A manual coffeemaker like an Aeropress is easier to pack in your bug-out bag and it’s less likely to break compared to a glass French press. To use an Aeropress, you first need to heat up some water. Once the water is hot, add coffee grounds to the bottom of the Aeropress and then pour the water into the tube. Place the tube over an enamel mug.

Stir the mixture and let it sit as long as you want, depending on how strong you want your coffee to be. Your coffee will be ready in as fast as 30 seconds. Drink the coffee as is for an espresso-style drink, or add hot water to fill your mug to make American coffee.

When you press down on the plunger, the coffee will be pushed through the bottom and into your cup. A manual coffeemaker like an Aeropress is easy to use and will produce a nice, smooth brew.

Collapsible coffee drip

If you prefer drip coffee and you don’t want to drink hot coffee sitting in plastic, consider getting a metal Snowpeak collapsible coffee drip. Stock up coffee filters so you can make coffee even during a long-term survival scenario.

A Snowpeak collapsible coffee drip will fold flat for easy storage when you’re not using it. The design was inspired by traditional pour-over coffee set-ups, and you can pair a collapsible coffee drip with a small camp kettle. To use a collapsible coffee drip, open it up, put it on top of your mug, place a clean filter and then pour hot water into the top to make a cup of brewed coffee.

“Cowboy” coffee

“Cowboy” coffee is the most low-tech method of coffee brewing on this list. To make cowboy coffee, boil water and then pour it into a mug with the coffee grounds resting at the bottom. Let the brew sit for a few minutes, then tap the side of the mug with your fingernail or a spoon to make all the grounds sink to the bottom of the mug.

Drink the coffee. Once you’re down to the last sip or two, the coffee will contain the grounds. Throw this away if you don’t want to drink gritty coffee.

Use the appropriate coffee brewing method if you’re bugging in at home or bugging out when the grid goes down so you don’t have to miss your daily cup of joe. Watch the video below to learn how to make coffee at home without a coffeemaker.

This video is from the Frozen In Time channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

• Why coffee is an essential prepper item – even if you’re not a regular coffee drinker.
• 13 Brilliant uses for used coffee grounds.
• For coffee-loving preppers: 2 Ways to make coffee without electricity.

Sources include:

• TheOrganicPrepper.com
• Aeropress.com
• Snowpeak.com
• Brighteon.com
• NATURAL NEWS