Powered Down: Vandals sent a resounding wake-up call to power companies last year when a highly organized rifle assault on a San Jose substation nearly turned off the lights in California’s Silicon Valley.
While much attention had been focused on cyberthreats to the interconnected electric grid, the low-tech attack highlighted the impacts that could cascade from an assault on physical infrastructure.
The blitz on the substation began about just before 2 a.m. on April 16, 2013, when at least two individuals accessed an underground fiber optics vault and cut cell and landline transmissions in the area, the San Jose Mercury News reported. With communications severed, at least one shooter fired nearly 120 rounds from a high-powered automatic rifle at transformers from about 40 feet away.
There wasn’t much of an outage because Pacific Gas & Electric was able to quickly reroute power from the disabled Metcalf station, according to the Los Angeles Times. But the minimal impact can probably be credited to luck rather than a lack of savvy by the perpetrators, experts said.
“This wasn't an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskies, to come in and shoot up a substation,” former PG&E vice president for transmission operations Mark Johnson is quoted as saying by the Wall Street Journal. “This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components.”
In all, 17 transformers were damaged. The Federal Bureau of Investigation ruled out terrorism immediately after the incident. But an ongoing investigation hasn’t led to any arrests in the case, according to a recent Los Angeles Times article.
Reboot: Just weeks ahead of the one-year anniversary of the transformer shootout, the Wall Street Journal reported on a disturbing analysis by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The analysis that found a similar attack on a handful of substations could plunge the entire country into darkness for more than a year. “Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer,” according to a FERC memo obtained by the Journal.
That is possibly a worst-case scenario, but it’s difficult to tell because the FERC report has not been made public, and FERC officials would not comment. The May 12 Journal article does not make it clear how reporters came by the memo or the report results, but it does state that some federal officials see the level of vulnerability as overstated. Others, however, feel it’s at least close to accurate.
“This study used a relatively simplified model, but other models come to the same conclusion,” A.P. “Sakis” Meliopoulos, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told the Journal.
Meliopoulos used simulations common to the electric industry to estimate that it would take “a slightly larger number” of substation attacks to cause a nationwide blackout, according to the article.
Although FERC Chair Cheryl LaFleur has criticized the Wall Street Journal for giving “those who would do us harm a roadmap to achieve malicious designs,” others have pointed out that the shooting and the FERC findings are an opening to much needed conversations about how to ensure electric grid security.
Charging (ahead): Currently, utilities aren’t required to put security measures in place that would protect the grid. On March 26, however, legislation was introduced that would change that. The Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act (GRID) would give FERC the authority to ensure vulnerabilities were addressed.
It’s not the first time the GRID act has been run up the flagpole. According to the Los Angeles Times, the bill’s authors, Rep. Henry Waxman and Sen. Ed Markey, have introduced the bill two previous times. In each case, it met with pushback from industry experts who thought that grid management should be the purview of energy companies, according to the Times. Fears of costly security measures driving up electric prices were also cited.
There’s hope, however, that last years shooting incident and the attention drawn by the FERC findings will help the bill find traction this time around.
“The security of the electric grid is a critical and urgent issue,” Waxman said in a statement. “We will remain vulnerable to attacks that could cause devastating blackouts until security is increased and regulatory gaps are closed.”