Our Electric Grid – As Unsinkable as the Titanic?

A catastrophic failure compounded by a lack of failover strategies and an inability to think the unthinkable.  These are the main reasons for the sinking of the Titanic. Could these also be the post-mortem conclusions for the next large-scale electric grid failure?  Even as we note the 100 year anniversary of that maritime tragedy, we need to consider the fragility of another highly-regarded engineering marvel –our electrical grid, which is often called the most complex machine ever built.

It has worked remarkably well for the past 130 years, but if the grid was a ship sailing in the Atlantic now, it has to dodge dangerous icebergs ahead.   Here are three of the most dangerous risks that electric utilities, regulators, and citizens must prepare for:

Catastrophic failure.  The existing grid lacks sufficient security tools and practices to defend against disruptions caused by cyber attacks, since it was built on “security through obscurity”.  As the grid evolves into the Smart Grid, obscurity fades away.  Devices that are capable of remote communications may fall victim to remote cyber attacks by lone hackers, terrorist groups, or unfriendly foreign governments.  There are multiple efforts underway to help secure the grid, and these activities will help “harden” the grid against cyber attacks.  However, the Titanic disaster could have been avoided if the crew had not been lulled into a false sense of complacency in their advanced ship designs and if the captain had not put a priority on speed over safety in iceberg-laden waters.   Smart Grid initiatives need to embed secure technologies and practices into their plans.

Lack of failover strategies.   The Titanic didn’t carry enough lifeboats to hold all its passengers and crew, because an unsinkable ship didn’t need them.  Our current grid is structured in a pyramid shape with the fewest assets, relatively speaking, in generation, more in transmission, and most in distribution.  Remove a source of generation and large numbers of customers may be impacted.  For instance, the nuclear power plant at San Onofre in southern California is indefinitely sidelined for safety reasons.  Southern Californians are facing the prospect of a long, hot summer without this reliable energy source.  The future Smart Grid can support a highly distributed renewables generation structure that reduces the impacts of loss of centralized sources.  We need as many “lifeboats” as possible to ride out any catastrophic failures.

Inability to think the unthinkable.   Electric utilities have a fairly unique role to play in our modern society and economy that can be summed up in four words – keep the lights on.  They’ve done it well.  But the Smart Grid is changing the electricity ecosystem, and utilities have to create a number of new “what if” scenarios and test their responses to them.  Their scenarios have to include “what if a concerted cyber attack disables our main generation sources AND transmission facilities?”  This type of thinking exposes the unthinkable – the grid’s reliability is threatened by its lack of resiliency.  The US military has already asked this question, and we see their answer – microgrids.  They are building resiliency into their bases and operations through distributed generation with renewables, energy storage, and strategies to manage their electricity needs.  Smart utilities should adopt similarly aggressive microgrid plans and timelines for critical infrastructure such as hospitals, communications centers, industrial facilities, and government centers to ensure that a catastrophic event doesn’t wholly disable civil and economic operations.

For many security experts, it is not a question of if, but rather when the grid will be the victim of a major cyber attack.   Will our electric utilities and policy makers learn to avoid or minimize failures based on the lessons from past catastrophes, or are we doomed to sit in the dark because we failed to think the unthinkable?

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12 Comments on "Our Electric Grid – As Unsinkable as the Titanic?"

DC on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 2:28 am 



Smart-grid is dumbest idea yet. Almost as dumb as this article and its false anologies to the Titanic sinking. There is little evidence that Captain Smith put speed over safety, or that the crew was ‘complacent’ in a manner this poorly scribbed article suggests.

What there is, is plenty of actual evidence to show that both the dumb-grid operaters and there fragile, over complex, expensive and useless replacement, the ‘smart-grid’ are and have acted in a mannner exactly like his write accuses the crew of the Titanic were doing.

Also worth noteing, that perputal amerikan boogey-man the ‘terrorist’ is always ready to stike at the amerikan beast, UNLESS of course, you throw money and resources at our lastest techo-no-boondoggle, then I guess the idea is, the ‘terrorists’ will ‘win’.

In this were 2 decades ago, this guy would be saying..

‘We need a smart grid to protect amerikaland in case those godless heathen commie bastard Russians launch a sneak nuclear attack’. We can allready see ‘terrorism’ being used in the US, and other western countries tho to a lessor extent, to get people to agree to the DUMBEST set of non-fixes to come to down the pipe, bio-fools for cars, interenet monitoring, you name it.

BillT on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 4:07 am 



DC, you are correct. It will never evolve into what the planners expect. Why? Time is against it. Like anything else that cost money, it will be resisted all along the path by everyone who has to pay more for their electric.

Then there is the intrusion into personal privacy. What they envision is total control of appliances so that the electric company/government can turn off your A/C, washer, dryer, TV, refrigerator, etc. at the push of a button.

But the chance of a natural event taking out the power grid is much higher than a terrorist event. And, only in war would an enemy try to do it through the internet. I am sure we are working on doing it to China or Russia if we could.

No, the grid will fail, maybe in sections and maybe all at once and never come back again if the transformers are fried.

Arthur on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 9:03 am 



I respectfully disagree here with DC and Bill. Smart grids are not a dumb idea but instead could replicate the staggering succes of the internet, enabling people from Asia, America and Europe to communicate with a very low energy footprint. We are all peakers. We believe that with every passing year less kilowatts are going to be available for distribution. At the same time we are seeing the eruption of tens of thousands of small scale producers, in Europe first and foremost windenergy. The authorities need a means to distribute, read ration, the scarcity. The old comfortable reality of assured supply from mega plants is going to be replaced by haphazard distribution. The future could be that you plan to run your washing machine three days from now and that you are interested in buying 2 kwh and inform the grid administrators about electronically. For this you need a smart grid.

Tellingly Deutsche Telekom is moving into the market of small scale energy production and smart grids.

http://deepresource.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/telekom-moves-into-energy-market/

BillT on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 10:06 am 



Arthur, perhaps had we started this 20 -30 years ago, it would work, but not today. No one is going to invest trillions in a major upgrade for something that still works. No one. The existing grid will be patched and added to only as required to make a profit and keep it working. Nothing more. We are about to enter another depression and there will be no money for anything not necessary for “national security”.

dsula on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 11:08 am 



>> No one is going to invest trillions
They already do, slowly, one piece at a time.
I know, as a doomer you expected the world to end in 2008. You are disappointed that many more years of consumption and population growth will be squeezed out of this planet.

Arthur on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 11:22 am 



Maybe within the American context but in Europe, that keeps cutting on defense expenditure (but still spends more than Russia + China), active work has started on this grid:

http://deepresource.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/smart-grids/

We are not dead yet. We still have 1 trillion barrel of oil left after we consumed 1 trillion, although Bill could be right that in reality a lot of the proven reserves will be proven reserves for ever because the capital will lack for exploitation. A problem that could be solved btw if we all make 100$ per month, like the good Soviets of former fame did before the crash of the USSR. But we still have enough resources left to at least produce hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, solar plants, isolation programs, cogeneration, geothermal plants and what have you. The first objective however needs to be to kill the car. In order to achieve that the population needs to smashed against the wall to wake up. Now how do we do that?

dsula on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 12:01 pm 



>> although Bill could be right that in reality a lot of the proven reserves will be proven reserves for ever because the capital will lack for exploitation

No he’s not. Oil is a strategic resource of such value, that nations will make any effort to get to it. Forced labour, slavery, national projects etc. Extracting oil will stop when there’s a better energy source available, or if the EROEI becomes too small. It has nothing to do with banks and finances.

Kenz300 on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 4:53 pm 



Distributed energy production with small solar and wind can provide local energy production and distribution. We need to encourage more distributed energy production.

Gleb on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 10:26 pm 



If and when fossil fuels decline in supply then there will be a population corection of perhaps 5 billion or so, if for no other reason than lack of food.

Bob Owens on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 11:39 pm 



The grid we have now is quite OK if we cut back on our electric usage by, say, 20%, thus reducing the stress on our system and building in the resiliency we need. If one out of five power plants were held in reserve for emergencies and we aren’t melting our transmission grid with too much juice we would be fine. We don’t need a smart grid!

DC on Tue, 17th Apr 2012 11:50 pm 



Exactly, we dont need a ‘smart’ grid, the old dumb grid is just fine. We could achieve the same thing by makeing electricity to epensive to waste frivilously….OR…the TPTB can propoe a wireless, easily hackable, fragile, complex and stupidly expsensive non-fix like smart grid. I guess telling people to stop wasteing energy is too much trouble. Better to have a system so the utility can shut off your dryver remotely..

Makse perefect sense..

BillT on Wed, 18th Apr 2012 12:22 am 



+dsula, it does have to do with banking and finances. slaves will NOT make all of the equipment necessary to even drill one 4 mile well to get a few million barrels of tar. You are forgetting that we are still living on that legacy of cheap oil that disappeared only a few years ago. When all of those huge mining machines wear out, they will not be replaced. How do you move mountains with slave power? Answer, you do not. Oil is NOT that important. Food is what will replace oil as important in your life. Ask anyone living in Bangladesh or other crowded, poor area of the world what is important. You are spoiled if you think that oil is always going to be important in your life. It’s not. We lived thousands of years without it and will again, if we don’t destroy our world with a nuclear war first.