Apr 1, 2016 5 min read

Despite its advanced age, vastness and lack of structural uniformity, the U.S. power grid remains 99.996 percent reliable, providing the most fundamental service for Americans’ daily lives.

It’s also highly vulnerable, not just to natural disasters but to acts of cyberterrorism, a panel of grid experts said Wednesday during the final segment of a four-part “Grid Academy” series that began in the fall at Washington & Jefferson College.

“Threats: Protecting the Grid,” the title of Wednesday’s panel discussion attended by about 60 people, was moderated by Bill Flanagan, chief corporate relations officer for Allegheny Conference on Community Development.

The panel was composed of Steven Bossart, senior energy analyst for the U.S. Department of Energy’s office of energy project management at the National Energy Technology Lab; Dr. Gregory Reed, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Energy; and Dr. David Tipper, associate professor at Pitt’s School of Information Sciences. They acknowledged the grid’s multiple vulnerabilities, but also said there are solutions.

When Flanagan kicked off the discussion by asking for a show of hands of those who had experienced a power outage, the response was unanimous, with most stating the cause was a result of local storms knocking out sections of the grid near their residences.

While restoration of service was usually speedy, some in the audience noted they had been without electric service for days, and in some cases, more than a week.

Reed noted that if a substation is seriously damaged, some neighborhoods could be without power for weeks or even months, especially if the station needs to be rebuilt.

Bossart, who in addition to his job at DOE is a member of the department’s emergency response team, recalled working in New Orleans in the days following Hurricane Katrina. When one of the large utilities in the area began restoring power, Bossart noted one of the biggest challenges was determining which homes were there to receive it.

He remembered telling crews, “We have the ability to restore power to a house, but it’s not there … it was blown away.”

Reed noted some have said the March 2011 tsunami that took out the nuclear power station at Fukushima in Japan could have been prevented if back-up generators had been in place. He disputed that notion by noting the entire facility would have needed to have been encased by a massive protective covering to escape the floodwaters, something that was an impossibility.

“We have (power stations) out there in the open, and they’re vulnerable to natural disaster,” he said. “We know these physical vulnerabilities are out there.”

Reed and Bossart noted power engineers used to build plants with the idea that a highly destructive weather occurrence was a “one in 50-year event.” Now, they said, events of that scale are occurring once every two or three years.

What is newer on the scene is cyberterrorism, which Reed, Tipper and Bossart said tends to be more of a threat to substations and other parts of the distribution – not transmission – network of the grid.

The issue, as Flanagan showed in a brief video, is viewed by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz as DOE’s biggest focus in terms of preventing the disruption of the grid.

The threats, according to the panelists, range from people who break into substations to steal copper wire and do physical damage to hackers who attack the vulnerability on the consumer end of the grid because of its web-based connections.

Both Tipper and Bossart said so far most threats in the U.S. have been thwarted before being carried out, but that’s not the case internationally.

Tipper said the Ukraine’s grid system recently suffered shutdowns in multiple segments as a result of the use of operating software infected with malware.

Some of the solutions to fortifying the power grid include burying more of the infrastructure to providing security guards at substations to advances in “smart grid” technology that includes more advanced hardware and semiconductor-based systems. Bossart said some damage from natural disasters could be avoided by replacing wooden poles with those made of steel or concrete.

Tipper also suggested utilities need to do a better job in training employees.

“They’re going to have to do a lot of workforce education for following best practices in the security” of their systems, he said.

And all of the recommendations come with a price tag, Reed reminded the audience.

“It always comes back to economics,” he said, adding that as one looks out across the country, it becomes evident not all power systems are created equal.

“The solutions are not universal,” he said. “Urban networks are different from rural networks.”

Despite the discrepancies and the age of the power grid, Reed noted the system remains one of the most reliable anywhere.

“Reliability of electricity in the United States is 99.96 percent,” he said. “Nothing else is that reliable.”