11.21.12
National Academy of Sciences on the Electrical Grid
Last week, Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy blog pointed to a newly released National Academy of Sciences report on the vulnerability of the electrical grid to terrorism. In 2007 it had been classified by the Department of Homeland Security.
Aftergood writes:
Over the objections of its authors, the Department of Homeland Security classified a 2007 report from the National Academy of Sciences on the potential vulnerability of the U.S. electric power system until most of it was finally released yesterday.
The report generally concluded, as other reports have, that the electric grid is lacking in resilience and is susceptible to disruption not only from natural disasters but also from deliberate attack.
But even though the report was written for public release, the entire document was classified by DHS and could not be made available for public deliberation. Amazingly, it took five years for the classification decision to be reviewed and reversed …
The report contains no restricted information.
In the aftermath of the Sandy natural disaster, it has again been made obvious to some that the electrical grid can be damaged. And that electrical power, if it is disrupted for a long enough period of time, can result in death or the serious damage to the health of citizens in our modern world, particularly if they are old, sick and dependent on technological services.
For example, from the opening pages of the report:
“If such large [theoretically terrorism-caused] outages were to occur during times of extreme weather, they could also result in hundreds or even thousands of deaths due to heat stress or extended exposure to extreme cold.”
One of the recurring memes of the Cult of Cyberwar is the insistence that the electrical grid can be disrupted with little effort by cyberattack on the infrastructure.
This pernicious meme has created the impression that catastrophically turning off the electricity in parts or all of the United States can be done by many, simply by pushing software buttons from the internet.
The NAS report has this to say on “cyber vulnerability:”
If they could gain access, hackers could manipulate SCADA systems to disrupt the flow of electricity, transmit erroneous signals to operators, block the flow of vital information, or disable protective systems. Cyber attacks are unlikely to cause extended outages, but if well coordinated they could magnify the damage of a physical attack. For example, a cascading outage would be aggravated if operators did not get the information to learn that it had started, or if protective devices were disabled.
That’s about it, essentially.
The report describes the biggest hazard to the electrical grid as physical, not digital.
Physical attacks by terrorists, which are deemed not likely but possible, could — for example — destroy critical high voltage transformers. (The physical failure of such a transformer serving New York City, by Sandy and rising water levels, was recently and repeatedly on television and preserved on YouTube.)
“Although major terrorist organizations have not attacked the US power system, such terrorist attacks have occurred elsewhere in the world,” reads the report. “Simply turning off the power typically does not terrorize people. However, the United States should not ignore that possibility of an attack that turns off the power before staging a large conventional terrorist event, thus amplifying the latter’s consequences.”
The report lists many instances of cascading power failures worldwide.
Interestingly, it mentions the western United States, from 1998 to 2001, was afflicted by “rotating blackouts because of summer prices.”
Although not specifically named, this was the work of Enron gaming the power distribution market that served California. DD lived through it and while the turmoil that resulted did not directly lead to death or injury of anyone, it did eventually catalyze the voter recall of governor Gray Davis and his replacement by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As a result of Enron’s mischief, the Bush administration was compelled to place price caps on electricity sold in California. At that point, the rolling blackouts stopped. When deprived of this inflated profit, Enron collapsed and went into bankruptcy.
Reads an old news article from CBS:
Two days of rolling blackouts in June 2000 that marked the beginning of California’s energy crisis were directly caused by manipulative energy trading, according to a dozen former traders for Enron and its rivals.
The blackouts left more than 100,000 businesses and residential customers in the dark for parts of two days, trapped people in elevators and shut down some offices of high-tech companies such as Cisco Systems and Apple Computer, as well as chipmaking plants, costing millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The traders said that Enron’s former president, Jeff Skilling, pushed them to “trade aggressively” in California and to do whatever was necessary to take advantage of the state’s wholesale market to boost the price of Enron’s stock .
The NAS report also discusses the risk posed by such insider attacks and malfeasance. It characterizes these attackers as “Participants in power markets seeking a predatory competitive economic advantage by disrupting the operation of other market players …”
The Secrecy blog comment on the report is here. It contains a link to the National Academy of Sciences where “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System” can downloaded for free.