Grid Down, Power Up: The Threat the Documentary Named — The Framework FIR Built to Answer It

Dennis Quaid’s documentary showed America the problem. The Foundation for Infrastructure Resilience built the community-level solution.

The Documentary That Named the Threat

Grid Down, Power Up, narrated by Dennis Quaid and produced by David Tice through Paul Revere Films, is the most widely seen documentary on American power grid vulnerability. First screened at the Anthem Film Festival in 2022 and subsequently featured on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, and Tucker Carlson, the film delivers an unflinching assessment of what happens when the grid goes down — not for hours, but for months.

The documentary covers four threat vectors: physical attack on substations and transformers, cyber attack on grid control systems, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a high-altitude nuclear detonation, and geomagnetic disturbance (GMD) from an extreme solar storm. Experts featured in the film include Lt. Col. Tommy Waller (USMC, Ret.), Texas State Senator Bob Hall, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and security specialists who have spent decades warning about grid vulnerability.

The core message is stark: the American power grid is the largest machine in the history of the world, and it is dangerously unprotected. Large power transformers — the backbone of the transmission system — are manufactured overseas, many in China, with replacement lead times measured in months to years. A coordinated attack on a relatively small number of substations could black out entire regions. A high-altitude EMP could take down the grid nationwide.

Dennis Quaid put it plainly: an extended grid failure would take America back to the 1880s. No gas. No food. No transportation. No refrigeration. No medical care. The Congressional EMP Commission estimated that 90 percent of the American population could perish within the first year of a nationwide long-duration blackout.

What the Documentary Gets Right

Grid Down, Power Up is technically sound on the threat landscape. The four vectors it identifies — physical, cyber, EMP, and GMD — are real, documented, and confirmed by federal agencies. The 2013 Metcalf substation attack in California, the 2022 Moore County substation attacks in North Carolina, the ongoing Volt Typhoon cyber campaign confirmed by the FBI and CISA in 2024, the 1859 Carrington Event, and the near-miss 2012 solar storm that would have caused trillions in damage — all of these validate the documentary’s premise.

The film is also correct that the solutions are known and affordable. Grid hardening, transformer protection, and distributed generation technologies exist today. The estimated cost to protect the grid — roughly $30 to $50 billion over several years — is a fraction of what the country spends on other infrastructure programs annually.

The documentary’s greatest contribution is awareness. Before Grid Down, Power Up, grid vulnerability was a subject discussed almost exclusively among national security professionals, utility engineers, and a small community of EMP researchers. After the film, millions of Americans understood for the first time that the grid is a single point of failure for civilization.

What the Documentary Leaves Out — And Why It Matters

Grid Down, Power Up focuses on the grid itself: how it works, how it breaks, and how to harden it. That focus is correct as far as it goes. But the documentary does not address what happens at the community level when the grid fails and federal help doesn’t arrive for weeks or months. It identifies the threat but does not provide a community-level response framework.

FIR’s work begins where the documentary ends.

The Four-Party Ecosystem framework extends the documentary’s four threat vectors by adding a critical fifth dimension: the institutional actor. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do not operate their grid-attack capabilities in isolation. Their cyber pre-positioning (Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon), physical attack capability, EMP weapons programs, and institutional influence operations form a Combined Arms attack sequence: cyber at T+0, physical at T+1 hour, institutional disruption at T+24 hours, and EMP at T+168 hours. The documentary treats each vector independently. FIR models them as a coordinated campaign — because that’s how adversaries actually plan.

The documentary also does not address what communities need to do to survive the 30-day gap between grid failure and federal response. FEMA’s emergency management system was built for disasters that last days to weeks. It depends on mutual aid, federal logistics, and a functioning grid to coordinate. A nationwide long-duration blackout defeats every one of those assumptions simultaneously. There is no mutual aid when every jurisdiction is in crisis. There are no federal trucks when fuel distribution has stopped.

That’s the gap FIR fills.

From Awareness to Action: The FIR Framework

The Foundation for Infrastructure Resilience provides the community-level response framework that the documentary’s audience is looking for. If you watched Grid Down, Power Up and thought “what do I actually do about this?” — here’s the answer.

Understand Your Community’s Actual Vulnerability

FIR’s Fresh Start Initiative provides free, data-driven infrastructure assessments for municipalities, utilities, and community organizations. The assessment loads your community’s critical infrastructure from 10 or more federal databases — power plants, substations, transmission lines, water treatment facilities, hospitals, fire stations, military installations, pipelines, telecom towers, and more — maps the dependency chains between them, and identifies the single points of failure that would cascade in a Black Sky Event.

The deliverable is a 12-document suite: a localized Resilience Framework with 672 checklist items, a BSE Readiness Roadmap, a Grant Navigator mapping federal funding to your specific gaps, a Program Management Guide, a Training and Certification Plan, a Workforce Scoping instrument, and an Infrastructure Inventory — all generated from your community’s actual data. Traditional consulting for this scope runs $75,000 to $175,000 for a mid-size municipality. The Fresh Start package is free and delivered in minutes.

Build the Diamond Blue Community

The documentary asks: what happens when the grid goes down? FIR answers: a Diamond Blue community keeps going.

Diamond Blue is FIR’s highest readiness certification — a community that can sustain essential services for 30 or more days without the national grid. Clean local power through distributed generation and microgrids. Water independence through community-controlled treatment and distribution. Food security through local agriculture, community stockpiles, and supply chain alternatives. Communications through amateur radio networks and mesh systems. Governance through pre-authorized continuity structures. Security through organized community readiness under civilian governance authority.

This is not survivalism. It is engineered infrastructure, certified professionals, and a community that has planned and practiced together. The towns that build Diamond Blue capability will be the ones that thrive after a grid-down event — not because they’re lucky, but because they prepared.

Get Trained

FIR’s Course Catalog runs from BSE 099 (a free orientation course anyone can take) through Diamond Blue Assessor certification for professionals who will lead community assessments. Every course is delivered 100 percent remotely and uses OODA Loop pedagogy — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — the same decision framework used in military and emergency response training.

If Grid Down, Power Up gave you the awareness, FIR training gives you the capability.

The Ecosystem Working This Problem

FIR is not alone. The grid security ecosystem includes organizations that have been working on these threats for years:

The EIS Council (Electric Infrastructure Security Council), led by Avi Schnurr, produces the EARTH EX exercises — the largest all-sector, all-continent Black Sky resilience exercises in history — and publishes EPRO Handbooks on utility restoration planning.

The Foundation for Resilient Societies, led by Thomas Popik, conducts regulatory advocacy before FERC and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and publishes research on cost-effective grid protection.

The Secure the Grid Coalition, including Lt. Col. Tommy Waller (who appears in the documentary) and Michael Mabee, coordinates advocacy for grid hardening legislation and public awareness.

FIR’s contribution is the community-level framework that connects the grid-hardening advocacy of these organizations to the municipal, military, and household readiness actions that determine whether communities survive the gap between grid failure and grid restoration.

Learn more about the broader ecosystem on our Related Organizations page.

Take Action

Dennis Quaid said it: “This is not The Day After Tomorrow. This is tomorrow.” The documentary named the threat. Here’s what you do next:

Take BSE 099. The free orientation course gives you the foundation. Less than an hour. No cost.

Request a Fresh Start assessment. Apply here — it’s free. FIR will assess your community’s infrastructure and deliver the 12-document suite.

Share the assessment with your local government. The Roadmap and Grant Navigator are designed to be presented to city councils and county commissions.

Volunteer or donate. FIR is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with 120 or more volunteer professionals. Your skills or your support directly advance community resilience. Volunteer or donate.

The grid is vulnerable. The documentary proved it. The framework to protect your community exists. The first step is yours.

The Foundation for Infrastructure Resilience is a 501(c)(3) national security nonprofit. FIR is not affiliated with Dennis Quaid, David Tice, Paul Revere Films, or the Grid Down, Power Up production. We cite the documentary as the most widely viewed public presentation of the grid vulnerability that FIR’s framework is designed to address.