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US electrical grid 'vulnerable to terrorism'

WASHINGTON - A growing number of security experts in and out of the US government are worried that potentially hostile states and even a rebuilt Al-Qaeda could wreak havoc through simultaneous and coordinated assaults on sensitive points on the electrical grid.

In an extraordinary manuscript translated by the CIA, two young colonels in China's People's Liberation Army wrote in 1999 that the United States had become so powerful militarily that waging conventional war against the superpower would be suicidal.
Prime target -- EPA

Instead, they argued in their book, Unrestricted Warfare, that in the event of war, China should take the battle to the US home front and assault its critical infrastructure and economy.

'If you're charged with imagining that you are in the crosshairs of the United States and your job is to prepare some war plan, the logic these guys came up with is pretty compelling,' said Mr Steven Flynn, a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations who directed its independent task force on homeland security.

'They say, categorically, no way can we marshal resources or technology to conduct conventional warfare. We have to adapt, take it to the enemy, target their critical infrastructure.'

The Pentagon has conducted secret simulations which concluded that foreign powers or technologically sophisticated terrorist organisations could, with a few keystrokes on a computer, shut down the entire electrical grid.

Industry officials said that during the second half of last year, 60 per cent of the country's power and energy companies experienced hacking attacks. None was successful.

The Sept 11, 2001 attacks have also driven the industry to beef up conventional security by hiring more guards, building better fences and installing more sensors.

And during the past several years, cyber security has improved significantly. Passwords at power plants are changed routinely, anti-virus software is often upgraded and firewalls are getting better.

Counter-terrorism experts said the dissipated Al-Qaeda and associated terrorist organisations are unlikely to marshal the time and resources to launch a sophisticated attack on America's infrastructure.

But if allowed to reconstitute, these groups could be a threat, said Mr Flynn and others.

The authorities discovered an Al-Qaeda safe house in Pakistan last year that was devoted to training terrorists for computer hacking and cyber warfare.

The former director of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre, Mr Vincent Cannistraro, said on Saturday that a number of Al-Qaeda terrorists captured in the past two years were 'very advanced...computer specialists'.

The grid has many other vulnerabilities, Mr Flynn said.

If the electrical transformer for the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach in California were blown up, for instance, it could take months, even under a crash programme, to bring electricity back to the vital port facility, which handles more than 30 per cent of the nation's imports in terms of dollar value.

There are no spare transformers, he said, and it normally takes two years from order to delivery for a new one. Most are built in South Korea.

Similarly, he said, if the turbines in the western provinces of Canada that feed gas through pipelines to numerous electric power plants in the American West were destroyed, several of the plants would shut down.

This would overload the system and result in brownouts, 'for a long, long time as you try to find replacement capacity', Mr Flynn said. -- LAT-WP

This paper is probably over your head, but, I'll post it anyway.

The grid, it's reliablity, why they 'go down'

To the un-initiated, Electrical System design (power grid/generation design) with an eye towards 'reliability' falls in the category of 'moving target'; correct one aspect of 'system failure' and, given time, another un-addressed facet will rear it's ugly head ...

Why is this so the layman asks?

We continue to build larger systems and more interconnected systems as well as experience different circumstances thrown at us from mother nature's direction, both in terms of events (like ice storms, electrical storms, ion storms) but also from the unpredictability of how materials/equipment react sometimes in adverse and severe environment as when stressed during unforseen circumstances

From: http://eetd.lbl.gov/certs/pdf/Dobson_4.pdf

Blackout Mitigation Assessment in Power Transmission Systems Electric power transmission systems are a key infra- structure and blackouts of these systems have major direct and indirect consequences on the economy and national security.

Analysis of North American Electrical Reliability Council blackout data suggests the existence of blackout size distributions [are proportional or related with] with power tails [system size or complexity]. This is an indication that blackout dynamics behave as a complex dynamical system. Here, we investigate how these complex system dynamics impact the assessment and mitigation of blackout risk.
The mitigation of failures in complex systems needs to be approached with care. The mitigation efforts can move the system to a new dynamic equilibrium while remaining near criticality and preserving the power tails.
Thus, while the absolute frequency of disruptions of all sizes may be reduced, the underlying forces can still cause the relative frequency of large disruptions to small disruptions to remain the same.
Moreover, in some cases, efforts to mitigate small disruptions can even increase the frequency of large disruptions. This occurs because the large and small disruptions are not independent but are strongly coupled by the dynamics.
...
In this paper, we focus on the intrinsic dynamics of blackouts and how complex system dynamics affect both blackout risk assessment and the impact of mitigation techniques on blackout risk. It is found, perhaps counterintuitively, that apparently sensible attempts to mitigate failures in complex systems can have adverse effects and therefore must be approached with care.