Free Republic

For many people in the U.S., me included, this winter has been miserable. The polar vortex, which I'm fairly certain was a term only meteorologists had heard before this winter, has wreaked havoc in much of the country. ... This type of weather affects few, if any, industries more than electricity providers. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which is responsible for balancing the state's electricity supply and demand, reported an all-time high winter peak demand Jan. 7 and was required to issue an alert the day before when some 13,000 MW of generation--3,700 MW of forced outages caused...

The Texas electric grid operator extended its call for residents and businesses to conserve power until Tuesday morning as a late arctic cold front that barreled as far as South Texas boosted the state's electricity consumption to a monthly record on Monday. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state's primary grid, had issued a public call for conservation on Sunday evening, citing freezing temperatures that would strain available generation capacity. "With the continued cold weather, we expect conditions to remain tight, especially during the early evening tonight and early morning hours tomorrow," said Dan Woodfin, director of system...

Sometime before April 16, 2013, one or more people scouted the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s high-voltage Metcalf substation off Highway 101 near San Jose, California. They went around the unmanned power station at a range of 40-60 yards, marking places from which the transformers’ cooling fins were clearly visible through the chain-link fence with piles of stones. According to a Wall Street Journal report last week, at about 1 a.m. on that April 16, someone cut the telephone lines going to the substation’s location in a manner calculated to be hard to repair. Within about another thirty minutes, shooters...

Damage to South Bay substation triggers power alert About 10,000 gallons of oil began leaking Tuesday morning from a transformer at a San Jose PG&E substation, which authorities said was vandalized, possibly damaged by gunfire. The damage prompted the California Independent Service Operator to issue a "Flex Alert" Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. for Silicon Valley because of the heavy damage at the substation on Metcalf Road. The agency asked everyone in Northern California, but especially in Silicon Valley, to conserve energy as crews are working to fix the substation's damaged equipment. Power is being rerouted as the work is being...

Although the fact that the still-unsolved attack on a power station near San Jose occurred just a handful of hours after the Boston Marathon bombing — and apparently raised a few eyebrows initially — its ride in the public eye has been decidedly under the radar to date.[snip]Here’s what went down: Around 1 a.m. on April 16, two manholes were entered and fiber cables cut around the PG&E Metcalf substation, which killed some local 911 services, landline service to the substation, and cell phone service in the area, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Foreign Policy. More from Foreign Policy:...

War On Terror: New information about a sniper assault on Silicon Valley's phone lines and power grid has raised fears that the nation's power grid is vulnerable to terrorism. The prospect that the unsolved attack on an electrical substation near San Jose just hours after the Boston Marathon bombing in April could have been a terrorist act was raised anew last week by Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. "This is the most sophisticated and extensive attack that's ever occurred on the grid to my knowledge," he told the Associated Press, contradicting FBI denials that terrorism...

If you think that our multi-billion dollar electrical power grids are secure and capable of withstanding a coordinated attack, think again. According to one group of engineers, the grid is so vulnerable that it wouldn’t even require a skilled hacker to compromise. In fact, when Adam Crain and Chris Sistrunk decided to test some new software they were developing they identified a vulnerability so serious that it could literally blind operational controllers to such an extent that they would be locked out of monitoring systems and unable to maintain grid integrity. The consequences, according to the engineers who note they...

Over the past few months, the discoveries of two engineers have led to a steady trickle of alarms from the Department of Homeland Security concerning a threat to the nation’s power grid. Yet hardly anyone has noticed. The advisories concern vulnerabilities in the communication protocol used by power and water utilities to remotely monitor control stations around the country. Using those vulnerabilities, an attacker at a single, unmanned power substation could inflict a widespread power outage. Still, the two engineers who discovered the vulnerability say little is being done. Adam Crain and Chris Sistrunk do not specialize in security. The...

More than 10,000 people in Arkansas were dumped into a blackout Sunday following an attack on that state’s electric grid, the FBI said today, the third such attack in recent weeks. In August, a major transmission line in the region, around Cabot, Ark., was deliberately cut. The FBI said that two power poles had been intentionally cut in Lonoke County on Sunday, resulting in the outage. According to the FBI: In the early morning hours of September 29, 2013, officials with Entergy Arkansas reported a fire at its Keo substation located on Arkansas Highway 165 between Scott and England in...

The fall-out from a grid-down scenario would be absolutely devastating, as noted by a spokesman for the Center for Security Policy who recently responded to the potential for EMP capable weapons being deployed over the United States: And experts forecast if such an attack were a success, it effectively could throw the U.S. back into an age of agriculture. “Within a year of that attack, nine out of 10 Americans would be dead, because we can’t support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity,” said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security...

BRADY, Tex. — In October, the City Council of this Central Texas town voted unanimously to purchase advanced electric meters, known as smart meters, for the city-owned electric utility. But some residents resisted, and the smart meter vote played a large role in last weekend’s recall of the city’s mayor and the electoral defeat of two council members. Voters here passed a referendum last weekend to enshrine in the City Charter the right of residents to refuse the installation of smart meters on their property. Sheila Hemphill, an organizer of the effort, called the victory her “San Jacinto.” The reaction...

A non-profit clean energy group, Solar One, has been deploying solar generators to areas most affected by Hurricane Sandy. The group currently has several generators running in the Rockaways, and made a recent delivery to Midland Beach on Staten Island. The delivery went to a community-run center operating at St. Margaret Mary Roman Catholic Church. Adjacent to the church’s gymnasium is a building still without power. There, volunteers have set up services like a legal clinic, to help residents with their paperwork, and a free store, packed with donated goods like soap and canned foods. Outside is a small yard...

Four coal industry regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will likely cause electricity prices to rise and may “compromise” electric grid reliability — especially in the Midwest and South — according to the Government Accountability Office. “Several representatives from power companies and officials from federal and state regulatory agencies have expressed concerns that as companies incur additional costs in responding to these additional regulations, and as the electricity supply is affected by generating unit requirements, electricity prices could increase and reliability — the ability to meet consumers’ electricity demands — could be compromised,” the GAO

Some two weeks after Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta warned of a potential “cyber-Pearl Harbor” involving a possible attack on the electric grid, Mother Nature took the cue and hit the East Coast with a storm that left millions of us for days without electricity from the grid. Some said silent thanks for that old generator they’d thought to stick in the garage. Though it wasn’t a cyberattack, but Mother Nature gave parts of the grid a good lashing anyway. On my country road south of Annapolis, two transformers were blown down from their perches on telephone poles, and...

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators laid down principles on Thursday for planning and paying for new power lines, part of a long-term policy effort to help the nation’s electricity grid grow enough to meet the demands of renewable energy and a competitive electricity market. The rule, which has been in the works for several years, is intended to push the organizations that manage the grid into cooperating with one another, so that developers can build power lines across several states and multiple electrical jurisdictions. Such cross-jurisdictional transmission lines are becoming more important as states seek to reach their goals of integrating...

February 26, 2010 — 2:53 PM A massive solar storm could leave millions of people around the world without electricity, running water, or phone service, government officials say. That was their conclusion after participating in a tabletop exercise that looked at what might happen today if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859. Solar storms happen when an eruption or explosion on the surface of the sun sends radiation or electrically charged particles toward Earth. Minor storms are common and can light up the Earth's Northern skies...

Infrastructure: The stimulus plan to turn America's electrical infrastructure into a so-called "smart grid" is a potential target for unfriendly hackers. It's also the fulfillment of a campaign promise rooted in socialism.There is $4.5 billion in the stimulus package to modernize the nation's electricity system. The whole idea is to monitor where and when electricity is used and to direct it to where and when it is needed. It is thought this will help utilities to adjust their rates to immediate supply and demand for power. It would supposedly allow consumers to adjust their consumption to the times when they...

Clovis, New Mexico, might just be the cornerstone of a clean-energy revolution. It might also be the epicenter of a political battle over how America embraces green energy. Clovis is the site chosen for the Tres Amigas electricity-transmission project, as our colleague Rebecca Smith reports today in The Wall Street Journal. The idea is to build a powerful substation in New Mexico using advanced supercondctors that could physically connect the three otherwise isolated power grids—the Eastern, the Western, and Texas grids. The project, which could take five years to finish, seeks to remedy one of the problems with renewable energy:...

Security: An Iranian mullah once said "a world without America and Zionism" was a real possibility. Our sellout of Eastern Europe and missile defense brings that dream closer to reality. It would take only one warhead."Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?" Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked at a "World Without Zionism" conference in Tehran in 2005. "But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved." He added that Iran had a strategic "war preparation plan" for what it called "the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization." A...

Strategic Defense: A new report says the United States must develop robust missile and space defenses to counter China. If you think the current economic crisis is something, imagine the effects of a nuke over Iowa.Imagine a world in which you can't get money from your bank or can't get a loan. You can't get money from your ATM even if it's within walking distance. You can't drive to one because your car won't work. No, it's not what would happen if the Congress doesn't pass a bailout bill. This is a small snapshot of what would happen if a...