north carolina — Mayor Carol Haney was baffled when Moore County, North Carolina, suddenly went dark last Saturday night. There were no storms or warnings, but it was just darkness that Holiday He was the festive night of the season.it turned out Gunfire attack on two substations It pushed tens of thousands of people off the grid for the better part of a week.
“This beautiful part of the world is thwarted,” Haney said. “I mean, it can happen to anyone. Perhaps the scariest thing for anyone is that this can happen to anyone.”
done. Today, there are approximately 55,000 substations in operation across the United States, primarily converting high voltage from large power lines to low voltage for homes and businesses. Many of them sit saboteur ducks.
“The grid is America’s Achilles heel,” says Mike Maby, a self-proclaimed “gadfly of grid security,” infused with utility data to highlight vulnerabilities.
Like many, he worries about Russian or Chinese cyberattacks, but he says the easiest way to hurt Americans is to hit substations with widely-used assault rifles. He said it wasn’t too outlandish.
“If a terrorist organization, whether domestic or foreign, wants to visit damage to the U.S. power grid, the easiest way to do it is with a physical attack,” Maby says.
This is not lost on domestic extremist groups and governments.of The Department of Homeland Security issued a Law Enforcement Bulletin in January. It warned that domestic terrorists had developed “credible and concrete plans to attack power infrastructure,” and considered the power grid “a particularly attractive target.”
Substations are soft targets because the main component in them, the giant transformer, is cooled by circulating oil. High-powered rifle bullets can easily pierce transformers, causing leaking springs, overheating and shutting down. Larger transformers are about the size of a railroad wagon. His M. Granger Morgan professor at Carnegie Mellon University says the exchange won’t be easy.
“We don’t make many of them in this country, and we have a long backlog of getting new ones,” Morgan says.
Backlogs can stretch as long as 18 months, and price tags can reach millions of dollars. Also, the cost of replacing equipment pales in comparison to the potential loss of shutting down the grid.
In 2013, a sniper attacked a substation outside of San Jose, California. Early media reports called it vandalism, but then-Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, John Wellinghoff, quickly recognized it as something more sinister.
“So we sent a team to investigate the next day,” says Wellinghoff. “We actually found a firing position they marked on the ground. I don’t know. But it was very sophisticated.”
Saboteurs cut a fiber optic line to the substation that is pumped over 100 times through the chain link fence that protects the substation. They attacked the vulnerable part of the transformer and fled seconds before the police arrived. Bullet holes caused him to spill over 50,000 gallons of cooling oil, and he knocked out 17 of the 21 transformers. Wellinghoff said the attackers had come to the point of cutting Silicon Valley off the grid, which he said could last for weeks.
It was a great attack. Wellinghoff thought the government should consider how to regulate grid security. No agency currently has that authority, as duties are divided between federal and state regulators.
“We need a responsible person. It is up to parliament to appoint a responsible person. “Industry creates standards and submits them for approval. And that’s what happened here.”
As such, approximately 3,000 utilities and cooperatives across the United States have independently determined which substations need protection and which are guaranteed additional security. Concrete walls were built around some substations to keep them out of bullets, but Wellinghoff said security upgrades fell short of many of them.
“And when you look at them, most of them don’t seem very well protected,” says Wellinghoff. “Many of them still have chain link fences like North Carolina.”
These individual vulnerabilities add up to one big problem. Wellinghoff said a series of precisely targeted substation attacks could cause a series of failures that could bring most of the U.S. power grid to a halt.
The power company said it was aware of the situation. A spokesperson for Duke Energy, which owns the attacked substation in North Carolina, said it is constantly working to improve security and respond to new threats. He says the entire industry will learn from the North Carolina attack.
The FBI is working with state and local authorities to investigate. They collected dozens of used cartridges at the scene. State police are reportedly seeking a search warrant and the FBI is seeking cell phone records.
Attacks continue. Wednesday’s shooting targeted another Duke substation in South Carolina but did not cause a power outage.
Meanwhile, some of the people who know best about the U.S. power grid are taking concrete steps to get by without it. installed a generator.
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