Security Issues
According to a chart ranking various smart grid projects in terms of importance, "upgrading security" comes in first and is closely followed by the deployment or upgrading of intelligent electronic devices (which can include sensors and other devices that provide transformer protection, line current monitoring, phasor measurement, and more—among them, the kinds of tools that can help grid managers prevent or more quickly respond to outages, sometimes without sending staff into the field).
Though the charts throughout the report are useful, the deeper value is in the anonymous verbatim comments. With regard to security, for example, I found it interesting that published comments were practically devoid of reference to deploying smart grid technologies to improve grid security (let alone comments about potential security challenges created by smart grid technology), despite the issue's high ranking in the quantitative portion of the survey. When I shared this observation with the survey designers (full disclosure—I worked for Platts for three-plus years when it owned POWER), they were kind enough to supply these additional comments on the topic:
The whole cyber security issue gets a little bit more challenging, perhaps, the more we know. It's got great potential. … Over the course of the next many decades, we are eventually going to get to a system that looks very different from what we have right now, that gives customers much more control, and probably optimizes the electric system in a way different than what we do today. But from within a very new technology, some of those initial decisions are going to be very important.
On the positive side, I think our up-kick in security has been phenomenal, given some of the threats to the infrastructure that we have faced and our ability to still face technology, whether it's electric or natural gas systems, or whether it's the information technology to support everything that we do, and it's incredibly secure in the face of just ubiquitous threats, and then the number of opportunities for things to go wrong. So our overall responsiveness to cyber security is another positive.
Notice that the first executive sees "many decades" passing before the grid joins the rest of the digital world while the second thinks the industry (or at least the respondent's company) has mostly solved the security problems.
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