2014-02-06

Attack on the U.S. Power Grid

Have you ever heard of an EMP attack? A nuclear missile detonated high in the atmosphere could wipe out electronic components across a large portion of the United States. If there was a Carrington class solar flare could prove even more damaging, wiping out all electronics across the portion of the Earth in the path of a massive flare. Estimates for restoring power run not in weeks or even months, but years. Or more commonly, people have seen extended periods without power due to hurricanes and winter storms.

What may be shocking to people is that due to the weakness in the security and design (age) of the power grid, it is possible for terrorists to take out portions of the power grid and trigger cascading blackouts on par with a small EMP attack or a major storm. While they wouldn't destroy all electronics as with an EMP or solar flare , they could leave a large portion of the nation without power.

To solve the problem will take billions of dollars in security and upgrades, money that will mean higher power costs for consumers and businesses, or higher federal spending. In other words, there's no good news here.

Assault on California Power Station Raises Alarm on Potential for Terrorism
The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.

Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.

To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.

Sniper assault on US power station could have been the rehearsal for an 'even bigger terrorist attack', warns industry expert
This knocked out 911 and landline service to the power station, as well as mobile phone service to the surrounding area.

PG&E employees had no means to call for help when, at 1am, gunmen began their attack.

More than 100 rounds were fired from high-powered rifles at many transformers – 10 were damaged in one area and three transformer banks in another, a PG&E spokesperson said at the time.

Study: U.S. power grid vulnerable to terrorist attack
"We could easily be without power across a multistate region for many weeks or months, because we don't have many spare transformers," says M. Granger Morgan, engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and chairman of the NRC committee that wrote the report. He says a terrorist attack could cause disruptions worse than Sandy and rack up "hundreds of billions of dollars" in damages.

Overloaded Circuits: Outage Signals Major Weakness in U.S. Power Grid
The nation is stalled in the middle of a massive but incomplete shift from old-fashioned state-regulated utilities -- which generate their own power, move it over their own transmission lines, and sell to local customers -- to a system in which ownership of plants and transmission lines is broken up among a variety of players, and government oversight is fractured.

"What we have created is an unstable environment here for our energy infrastructure because some of it is regulated and some of it is deregulated," says Andrew Lundquist, a former Bush White House aide on energy policy. Clearer rules and penalties would discipline power-company behavior and boost investor confidence in the capital-starved industry, he adds.

Q&A: What You Need to Know About Attacks on the U.S. Power Grid
How many big substations would have to be knocked out to bring down the grid?
It’s probably not smart to say, but federal officials think it’s not a huge number.

Then the question is, how long would it take to put the pieces back together again?
Some grid officials think they could restore power service in a few hours. Others think it could take days or even weeks, depending on the level of damage.

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