POWER January 2013 - 51

ASSET MANAGEMENT
down. It's not just a matter of light and
comfort in our homes. Without electricity,
citizens may have no access to potable water,
sewage treatment, safe food, fuel supplies,
traffic control, or health care.
A large swath of the U.S. got a taste of
what happens when the grid goes down at
the end of June, when a heat wave led to a
" super derecho " that blacked out millions
of electric customers over a 10-state swath
from Illinois to the Atlantic and killed at
least 20 people. The outage began June 29
and lasted past the U.S. Independence Day
holiday for hundreds of thousands. By July
5, FirstEnergy was estimating that 250,000
customers (probably some 500,000 people)
in just its West Virginia service territory
were still without electricity (Figure 1).
As meteorologist Kristina Pydynowski
explains, a derecho is " a widespread and
long-lived wind storm that accompanies
rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms.
The most severe derechos are given the adjective
'super.' " Winds measured 91 mph
in eastern Illinois on Friday afternoon,
June 29, and 81 mph on the southern New
Jersey coast early Saturday morning as the
derecho screamed across the country.
Unlike typical summer thunderstorms
that take down distribution lines and local
transformers, the super derecho clobbered
high-voltage lines and major substations. The
windstorm took down 50 major transmission
lines and more than 70 substations in Ohio and
West Virginia. In the Washington, D.C., area,
the derecho shorted out the substation serving
the water treatment facilities of the Washington
Suburban Sanitary Commission, depriving
much of the area of drinking water for more
than a day. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell
proclaimed the event the worst non-hurricane
outage in the Old Dominion's history.
What Is the NIC?
The National Intelligence Council (NIC)
is a little-known, but increasingly important,
Washington think tank that reports
directly to the director of national intelligence,
who on the federal government's
organizational chart sits between the
president and the intelligence agencies,
including the Central Intelligence Agency,
the Department of Homeland Security,
and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It describes itself as the intelligence
community's " center for midterm and
long-term strategic thinking. " Originally
formed under the 1947 National Security
Act as the " Board of National Estimates, "
January 2013 | POWER
the organization was transformed into
the NIC in the 2004 Intelligence Reform
and Terrorism Prevention Act.
The NIC is the lead agency in producing
the National Intelligence Estimates. The
NIC says its " goal is to provide policymakers
with the best, unvarnished, and unbiased
information-regardless of whether
analytic judgments conform to US policy. "
The organization produces some reports
that are classified and some that are public,
including a series on the implications
of climate change for a number of foreign
countries. The group also supports research
into long-term trends and challenges.
www.powermag.com
Not only is the electrical grid central
to modern life, but the grid also has multiple
vulnerabilities that make keeping it
safe a very difficult task. Weather outages
are common, although some, such as an
ice storm, can do enormous damage. A
January 1998 ice storm destroyed much
of Hydro-Québec's massive 765-kV transmission
system, blacking out more than 3
erate its system with appropriate voltage
criteria and remedial measures. "
The 2003 blackout also highlighted another
chilling aspect of grid failure: the
propensity of the system to suffer from a
cascading failure. Because of the grid's interconnectedness,
grid failures can spread
quickly, concatenating across the system.
This same effect occurred during the 1965
Not only is the electrical grid central to
modern life, but the grid also has multiple
vulnerabilities that make keeping it safe a
very difficult task.
million Canadians, causing 30 fatalities,
and leaving many customers in the dark
for weeks. Tropical storms, such as 2005's
Hurricane Katrina, can also cause longterm
and widespread destruction.
Human error can also take down the
grid in a hurry, as was the case with the
massive August 2003 blackout that turned
off power for 55 million people in the
Northeast, Midwest, and Canada. According
to the official inquiry, the prime
mover in that event was a series of errors
by operators and managers at Ohio-based
FirstEnergy (FE). The DOE report on that
event concluded that the utility and the
reliability region staff " failed to assess
and understand the inadequacies of FE's
system, particularly with respect to voltage
instability and the vulnerability of the
Cleveland-Akron area, and FE did not opblackout
that slammed most of the eastern
U.S., an event that began with a simple
hardware failure in Canada.
Human Interference
In addition to human error, the electric grid
is also quite vulnerable to intentional human
intervention, from a mad person with
a charge of dynamite at a crucial transmission
tower to a surreptitious cyber-attack
such as the U.S. and Israel created with
the Stuxnet virus, to a deliberate stateordered
explosion of a nuclear weapon
to create an electrical and magnetic pulse
that brings down the grid. Following the
late-June Mid-Atlantic super derecho,
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
tweeted that the event was a " mild taste
of what an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse)
attack would do. "
Cyber attacks have gained the most
attention recently, partly as a result of
publicity arising from the Stuxnet attack
on Iran's nuclear program. As the grid
becomes more complex, sophisticated,
and computer-assisted- " smart " if you
will-it becomes more vulnerable to code
hacking. Recent POWER articles (see the
archives at www.powermag.com) discuss
the growing areas of cyber vulnerabilities
( " Guidance on Cybersecurity for the Electricity
Sector, " June 2012) and threats to
utility supervisory control and data acquisition
(SCADA) systems (see " Ensuring
the Cybersecurity of Plant Industrial Control
Systems, " June 2012).
But there also is a positive side to the
increasing interconnectivity and intelligence
in the grid. Identifying specific
outages, down to the individual meter, becomes
easier, as does measuring success
51
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POWER January 2013

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