The technical community is not waiting on a definition. There are published waveforms and test methods for the early, intermediate, and late pulses. What lags is demand. Utilities and cities buy to price, efficiency, and delivery, because nobody is scored on an event that did not happen this quarter.

A published waveform describes an insult the equipment might see. A test method is how a lab puts a specimen through it and records whether the specimen holds. Neither becomes a property of the box on a feeder until a purchase document cites it and a vendor is allowed to lose the bid for missing it.

The lag is not a mystery of knowledge. A buyer graded on rates, efficiency, and the ordinary outages of this year will take the cheaper box that meets the specs actually written down. The storm that is not in the score stays out of the specification. Naming that cowardice is less useful than naming the incentive.

A modest policy change with teeth is to require an EMP and geomagnetic specification on a short list of critical purchases: control systems, black-start plant auxiliaries, emergency-communications power. Not every parking-meter. The assets whose failure cascades.

Black-start auxiliaries are the small machines a plant needs before it can put power out when the grid cannot feed it: controls, batteries, the pumps and fans that have to come up first. If those are ordinary commercial boxes bought on a delivery date, the plant that was meant to help restart a region is waiting on the same kind of failure it was meant to end.

Emergency-communications power is on that short list for the same reason. A radio system that dies with the first evening cannot be the way anyone coordinates the second day. The specification belongs on the power that keeps the radio alive, not as a sentence in the after-action report.

Until that is normal, “hardened” will remain a word salespeople like. It will sit on brochures for equipment no bid ever asked to meet a published waveform. The change that matters is a line in the bid package.