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An interesting discussion in your video link.

The guest does talk about the grid, but doesn’t cover the entire story, nor the things that are continuously being done out in the electrical industry to “harden” against attack.

His mention of the 2003 blackout - well, yes, a tree branch contacting a wire was a trigger event but it wasn’t the ONLY trigger event for that blackout. It was a series of conditions and events that lead up to the blackout. As a co-worker used to say, it’s like the holes of the Swiss cheese lined up to create a vulnerability that, alone, none of those holes could have caused.

I’m very familiar with the blackout, having studied it and having worked at the very entity where it started (I left before the blackout, and was working elsewhere already). There was the attitude in the operations center that was very lax, very top-down management whereby the people in a position to be on top of the situation were not allowed to make decisions in fear of reprimand from management. There was the failed alarming system at that particular utility whereby the usual warnings were not being received by system operators.

There was also failure to react when given critical information from personnel in the field. Example, a plant operator calling to inform the system operator that he was operating his generating unit at its voltage limit, and needed some support from other sources. The operator ignored the cry, seemingly unable to comprehend what needed to be done on his part to lessen the risk to the generator that the situation caused (it tripped off line some 2 or 3 hours before the final cascading event, and was a significant factor in the blackout).

Anyway, lots of things are being done by the industry, outside of the financial influence of the federal government, to harden and improve the power system. Moving from a “reactive” posture of yesterday to a “proactive” posture has been a major goal, and it’s still hard to convince some that we need to take action “just in case” rather than in reaction to a situation.

All that said, a group of well-versed individuals that know their way around the power grid could manually cause quite a situation without any kind of cyber-attack, by simply damaging several key components simultaneously. No single event, no line, plant, or substation destruction will result in a large-area blackout, but bad guys have other plans.

As for the EMP, I hear a lot of stories but it’s very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff when trying to discern what can and can’t happen, and what is or isn’t vulnerable. Alarmists like to take the worst case scenario and claim that everything will be destroyed beyond usefulness, whereas apologists tend to think that nothing significant would be damaged. My guess is that something in between is the truth, and it IS on the industry’s radar. At this point, upgrades and “hardening” of the system is being paid for by ratepayers, which is as it should be IMHO.