The normally strong grid's self-inflicted wounds

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By Andy Bochman

So only a few days ago you saw a post here about grid lessons from Hurricane Irene. Now we're back with another major grid event and I'm not sure what to call it other than the recent Arizona, San Diego and Mexico outage ... SanMexiZona outage perhaps?

Investigations are still being conducted, but what do we know so far? Well, a transmission maintenance issue impacted a substation in Arizona, and then:

·         Cascading failure reached into California and Mexico, knocking out power to millions

·         And caused two nuclear facilities to shut down

·         Navy and Marine bases turned to back-up diesel generators and kept non-essential personnel home

·         And many other types of trouble you'd expect from a blackout in a large U.S. city ensued, driving cost estimates into the hundreds of millions.

It's weird. In some ways the grid is a beast, capable of absorbing the worst insults and continuing operations largely unaffected. It virtually scoffs at earthquakes, raging fires, hurricanes, tornadoes ... and across the Pacific, even Godzilla stomping out of Tokyo Bay once in a while. Sure, some outages occur in the areas where equipment is destroyed. But the grid is usually a master of defense and containment.

But then a little thing happens during routine maintenance and a big chunk of the grid unexpectedly swoons. Amory Lovins and others on the 2008 DoD Science Board (DSB) task force on Energy identified the U.S. grid as brittle and a threat to CONUS military readiness. Here's Lovins in 2010:

The U.S. electrical grid ... is very capital-intensive, complex, technologically unforgiving, usually reliable, but inherently brittle. It is responsible for 98–99% of U.S. power failures, and occasionally blacking out large areas within seconds — because the grid requires exact synchrony across subcontinental areas … and can be interrupted by a lightning bolt, rifle bullet, malicious computer program, untrimmed branch, or errant squirrel.

Seems like some of the worst behaviors we see in the grid are avoidable. In addition to the many other benefits we often describe to regulators and the general public with the smart grid build out, improvements to reliability have got to be high on the list, if not #1.

BTW – Try Googling "Errant Squirrel" – it's simply amazing how active (and errant) these critters have been!

Andy Bochman is author of the Smart Grid Security Blog and an Energy Security Lead for IBM's Rational division, where the focus is on securing the software that runs the smart grid. Andy is a contributor to industry and national security working groups on energy security and cyber security. He lives in Boston, is an active member of the MIT Energy Club, and is the founder of the Smart Grid Security and DOD Energy Blogs.  

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