SYSTEM RELIABILITY
Cyber security and the grid
Too often, we think the consequences of cyber attacks are limited to disabled file servers, frantic damage control exercises by security personnel, and the loss of critical data. Although miscreants and thieves can cause all of these problems, we must add to our list hundreds of thousands of people stranded within cities, businesses shut down, phone systems disabled or taxed beyond their limits, and the eerie sight of miles of dark streets stretching between blocks of silent, uninhabitable buildings. It's not hard to conjure up this scenario; we only have to think back to August 14, 2003.
That outage affected an area containing about 50 million people and 61,800 MW of electrical load in the states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the Canadian province of Ontario. Estimates of its total costs in the U.S. range between $4 billion and $10 billion. In Canada, gross domestic product was down 0.7% in August, there was a net loss of 18.9 million work hours, and manufacturing shipments in Ontario fell C$2.3 billion.
Though the causes of the 2003 blackout were not the result of a cyber attack, similar damages and cascading events could result from coordinated cyber intrusions into the infrastructure that monitors and controls North America's interconnected transmission grids. Obviously, such events don't just take a heavy financial toll and endanger the public. They also represent significant breaches in national security.
Entering this field of interconnected-system security in the U.S. are the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) standards being promulgated by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC). The standards deal with sabotage reporting and identification of critical assets, securing critical cyber assets against intrusion, and physically securing access to the assets.
The deadlines for implementing NERC's cyber security measures are still being finalized. But given the severity of risks to electric systems from cyber intrusions, it looks likely that enforcement of the standards will be put on a fast track, to begin late this summer or early fall.
The key CIP standard is CIP-002, which mandates risk-based assessments of both physical and cyber assets to determine how critical they are to system reliability. At press time, NERC declined to comment on the exact nature of such assessments. Staffers at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) have noted that they need to be fleshed out. They wrote, "while CIP-002-1 requires use of a risk-based assessment methodology, it does not provide direction on the nature and scope of that methodology, its basic features, or the issues it should address. The absence of more direction can result in the Requirement being unevenly executed, which may result in inconsistency and inefficiency."
Many of the persons responsible for reliability at firms that own and operate power plants are looking to their regional transmission organization or transmission provider for help in making the risk-based assessment. NERC's "Security Guidelines for The Electricity Sector: Vulnerability and Risk Assessment" provides the following guidance: "A critical facility may be defined as any facility or combination of facilities that, if severely damaged or destroyed, would have a significant impact on the ability to serve large quantities of customers for an extended period of time, would have a detrimental impact to the reliability or operability of the energy grid, or would cause significant risk to public health and safety."
This type of identification implies an approach based on contingency analysis. However, unaffiliated generators do not have access to the transmission data that would allow them to run criticality studies for different scenarios for their plants. To gain a measure of control over the input and methodologies involved in the analysis, some independent gencos are considering hiring consultants to perform the studies. This would at least avoid leaving their designation in the hands of entities that may have a competitive interest in imposing costs on them.
—By Jim Stanton, POWER contributing editor and project manager at ICF International. He can be reached at 713-445-2000 or jstanton@icfi.com.
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