Senate warned cyber threat to power grid “at an all time high”

[thackney]

Senate warned cyber threat to power grid “at an all time high”
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2017/04/04/senate-warned-cyber-threat-to-power-grid-at-an-all-time-high/

The potential for a major cyber attack against the nation’s power grid is “at an all time high,” Gerry Cauley, president of the grid operators group North American Electric Reliability Corporation, warned during a Senate hearing Tuesday.

While acknowledging hackers had yet to shut down power to U.S. power customers, Cauley pointed to a 2015 attack in Ukraine that resulted in 225,000 customers losing power for several hours.

“We will never be complacent. The risk is very real,” he said.

His comments came during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing Tuesday, part of a long-term push by the federal government to bolster security at the nation’s power plants and substations to prevent attacks like those that have recently struck Europe.

The Department of Energy continues to work on developing what Patricia Hoffman, acting assistant secretary at the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, called “an ecosystem of resilience,’ by developing security standards and improve information sharing between government officials and the companies that operate the grid.

“This is one of the secretary’s top priorities,” Hoffman said....

[thackney]

The purpose of the hearing is to examine efforts to protect U.S. energy delivery systems from cybersecurity threats.
https://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/hearings-and-business-meetings?ID=36559AB8-2C94-44DF-8A90-6F03C8393038

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Another reason to have Perry in Nat Security team

[Fishrrman]

Time to go back to low-tech non-computerized power control stations with hand-thrown switches like this:

[thackney]

Time to go back to low-tech non-computerized power control stations with hand-thrown switches like this:

A reminder from my college days.  We had to wire up 100 Hp Generators and motors using components like those shown.  First time, NOBODY wanted to grab the exposed 3 blade switch to turn it on.  The lab TA caught our group tying a string to the switch handle in order to not be so close when we closed it.

[Joe Wooten]

A reminder from my college days.  We had to wire up 100 Hp Generators and motors using components like those shown.  First time, NOBODY wanted to grab the exposed 3 blade switch to turn it on.  The lab TA caught our group tying a string to the switch handle in order to not be so close when we closed it.

I remember touring the old Texas Electric Northside plant in Ft. Worth back in 1979. The office had old photos of how everything was hand operated except for the flywheel governors on the turbine. Main steam admission to the HP turbine was done by hand operated valves with the man at the control board shouting instructions to the valve operator and another man at the generator control board watching rotational speed and grid frequency so he could synchronize it at the right time. pumps are started and stopped with either hand operated valves or with bare knife switches. Coal was shoveled into the furnace by a crew of laborers working in 4 hour shifts with a half hour break twice a 12 hour day. Other laborers shoveled coal from trains into a coal pile. The coal usually came from the mines at Thurber Tx, about 90 miles or so to the SW of Ft. Worth. It was mined in deep shaft mines that are still there with a large amount of coal still in them.