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The leaders of the Baltic states and Poland will sign a long-awaited deal on Thursday to connect their power grids to the European Union grid by 2025 and break their energy relationship with Russia, a Soviet legacy. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, once ruled by Moscow, view being plugged into Russia's power network as a threat to their national security. "We worked nine years for the agreement," President Dalia Grybauskaite told Lithuanian LRT television on Thursday. "This is the last millstone tied to our feet, keeping us from real energy independence," she said. "That tool of blackmail, which was used (by...

Representatives from the electrical industry sharply criticized on Tuesday a proposal in the House to extend federal regulation to include local power plants in major cities to protect them and the national power grid from cyberattacks. Under the 1935 Federal Power Act, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission enforces security standards for most of the nation's power plants, including facilities and control networks -- known as bulk power systems -- that connect power systems. But the commission does not have regulatory jurisdiction over electrical systems outside the continental United States and to local distribution facilities, which include some in large cities...

"Project Grey Goose and University at Albany SUNY to investigate major Power Grid blackouts caused by hackers" SNIPPET: "This is an open call for volunteers who wish to participate in a joint Project Grey Goose / University at Albany SUNY open source intelligence investigation into power grid blackouts caused by hacker attacks. The scope is global and includes the U.S. Interested parties should contact me from their work email address with an expression of interest, a brief bio, and your experience, if any, in SCADA systems in general or the power grid in particular. All respondents will be kept confidential....

WASHINGTON -- Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials. The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

MY PAL Marty says he's seen the official reports so far of the power out that affected swathes of North America on the 14th of August last and it's not a happy story. The Joint US/Canada Task Force investigating the power down has so far isolated the time line of the cascade in the electrical grid on that day. Marty assures me that Adamson Rust's attempt to pin the blame on Chicken Little and Foxy Woxy is up to his usual lame standards. [Can't you get over this guy, Eva? Ed.] The time line is pretty much OK, though the...

NEW YORK, Sept. 11 — Since last month’s widespread blackout, utilities have accelerated plans to automate the electric grid, replacing aging monitoring systems with digital switches and other high-tech gear. But those very improvements are making the electricity supply vulnerable to a different kind of peril: computer viruses and hackers who could black out substations, cities or entire states. Researches working for the U.S., Canadian and British governments have already found “back doors” — ways into the digital relays and control room technology that increasingly direct electricity flow in North America.

Intelligence sources see power grids vulnerable, recall bin Laden threat International intelligence sources are skeptical that the major unexplained power outages in the United Kingdom and United States occurred within weeks of each other by mere coincidence. New York and much of the rest of the Eastern U.S. were hit first with a blackout. Then, last week, London was the center of the latest outage. New York and London are the West's major economic centers. The UK and U.S. are the two principal nations leading the war against Islamic terrorism on a global scale. London's blackout was unprecedented. The U.S....

COLUMBIA - South Carolina's two largest electric utilities say they shouldn't have to pay for upgrading power transmission systems in the Northeast that failed in the nation's largest blackout. The Electric Power Research Institute, a California group that represents much of the utility industry, issued a report this week that said $100 billion is needed to overhaul the U.S. energy system. The report comes in the wake of the blackout two weeks ago. But regulators and utilities say South Carolina's power transmission system is sound as long as it doesn't face the burden of becoming part of a national energy...

NEW DELHI: What does the world's one and only super power do when it faces power blackouts? It comes to the expert, of course! And what if that expert happens to be a Third World country? Well, exactly such a situation arose when the US approached India on Friday seeking advice on how to tackle power blackouts, reports the Financial Times.But this is nothing to be shocked about. After the total blackout in north-east America earlier this month, the US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson had rightly remarked: "We're the world's greatest superpower but we have a third world electricity...

<p>Investigators uncovered fresh mysteries Monday about the way the electricity transmission grid operated in the eastern half of the United States last Thursday in the hours before the nation's largest power blackout occurred.</p> <p>Meanwhile, businesses forced to shut down by the blackout returned to near normalcy Monday. Automakers began turning out cars again and Wall Street trading resumed on time. New York City officials estimated that businesses in the city lost about $1 billion in the blackout. Tallying the economic impact in Ohio and Michigan will take longer because power was slower to return in those areas.</p>

2003-08-15) -- U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NYArk, said today that the electrical power grid in America "suddenly became antiquated early last year, and George Bush hasn't done a thing about it." "When my husband was in office, the power grid was like new," said Sen. Clinton. "But right after he left, the grid got all rusty and decayed...like some form of mechanical progeria. But President Bush was so distracted by the war on Iraq that he has tragically inconvenienced 50 million people." The Senator said she will introduce a bill today nationalizing the electricity industry, and putting it under the...

Blackout postmortems have noted that America's electricity system consists of just three regions—the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection. Why does the Lone Star State have its own power grid? Partly because of a historical desire for self-sufficiency and partly because of that famous "Don't Mess With Texas!" attitude. The majority of the state's residents live within the region regulated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, an "island" that generates and supplies all its own electricity—unlike, say, New York City or Detroit, whose residents found out the hard way that lots of their power comes from...

SANTA FE— Gov. Bill Richardson on Sunday said the Bush administration and Congress must move quickly to pass an energy plan to upgrade the nation's electrical grid. "The president has to make it a major priority to get the Congress off the dime to pass mandatory reliability standards," Richardson said on "Face the Nation" on CBS. "The Bush administration and the Congress should strip out those provisions (in the energy bill) that are controversial, nuclear and coal subsidies, the drilling in Alaska." In calling for passage of a stripped down energy bill, Richardson, who served as Energy secretary under former...

Back in 2001, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney mapped out their vision for America's energy future in the National Energy Policy Report (NEPR). At the time, Vice President Cheney said: Transmission grids stand in need of repair, upgrading, and expansion. If we put these connections in place, we'll go a long way toward avoiding blackouts. We all know what happened last week, so there's no point in rehashing the details. The NEPR is destined to become another "hindsight" publication, like the Hart-Rudman report in early 2001 on the threat of terrorism that said: The combination of unconventional weapons...

It was a blip on the screen that turned into a monster, leaving 50 million Americans powerless. The inside story of a sleepless night. In fact, federal investigators ruled terrorism out within the first 45 minutes—perhaps prematurely. True, there was no detectable physical intrusion; nor had terrorist hackers left the usual cyber footprints. But despite the initial reassuring signals to the public, during an emergency conference call with senior officials at 5:30 p.m., the CIA “put on the radar” the possibility that there might have been some terrorist tampering. Informants and interrogations of terror suspects have led the CIA to...

US consumers were warned on Sunday they would bear the brunt of the cost of updating the nation's power grid - put by some observers at up to $50bn - following the biggest power failure ever to hit North America. As investigators struggled to establish the chain of events that led to the power cut that affected 50m people in the US and Canada, there were calls for the US to increase investment. Spencer Abraham, US energy secretary, said utility companies would pay some of the cost of improving the system, but much of it would have to be passed...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Ohio utility under intense scrutiny in the biggest blackout in the nation's history said Sunday there were problems, including strange voltage fluctuations, in the Midwest power grid hours before its transmission lines failed. "What happened ... is much more complex than a few tripped power lines in our system," said Todd Schneider, a spokesman for FirstEnergy Corp., which went on the offensive Sunday after being targeted by investigators. He said that some of the unusual power conditions occurred "as early as noon" - more than three hours before FirstEnergy's high-voltage lines, which have been the focus...

ASHINGTON, Aug. 17 — With electric service restored today to nearly all the broad eastern region of the United States and Canada blacked out on Thursday and Friday, officials cautioned that Monday could bring new problems as millions of workers return to their jobs and renew normal demands on the power grid."We're not out of the woods," the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Pat Wood, said on NBC television.The authorities were still urging residents in the affected region — which included nearly 50 million people, though not all had lost electric power — to conserve energy and, in...

Richard Drouin - Chairman Richard Drouin is currently Chairman of Abitibi-Consolidated, the largest newsprint manufacturer in the world. He is also a counsel in the law firm of McCarthy Tetrault. Earlier, he was the Chairman and CEO of Hydro-Québec. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Montreal and his law degree from l'Université Laval in Québec City. Mr. Drouin sits on the boards of Acres International, American Superconductor Corporation, Gesca (French daily newspapers), Provigo, nStein Technologies, Stelco, President's Choice Financial and the Sustainable Technologies Foundation of Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He...

<p>The Bush administration supports a three-year delay in a controversial proposal that its supporters claim would make it easier to run the nation's electrical system, the president's top energy adviser said Sunday.</p> <p>Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the proposal would "force down the throats" a federal policy of deregulation that states with cheap power oppose.</p>