Federal regulators have ordered a review of security standards at the nation’s vast electricity transmission network, following shootings at two electric substations in North Carolina.
The order by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission directs officials to study the effectiveness of existing reliability standards for the physical security of the nation’s power grid and determine whether they need to be improved.“The security and reliability of the nation’s electric grid is one of FERC’s top priorities,” FERC Chairman Richard Glick said at a commission meeting Thursday.“In light of the increasing number of recent reports of physical attacks on our nation’s infrastructure, it is important that we fully and clearly review the effectiveness of our existing physical security standard to determine whether additional improvements are necessary to safeguard the bulk power system,” Glick said.
Over 45,000 North Carolina residents lost power as a result of the shooting incident. However, there have been numerous other security breaches across the country that have also caused alarm.
In addition to the North Carolina incident, Oregon Public Radio reported that at least six electric substations have been attacked in similar fashion in Oregon and Washington state since mid-November.”These are very lightly guarded,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an Oxford-educated economist and director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital about electric substations in the United States, especially in rural areas.You can drive past these things and anyone can not just shoot at a couple of things but launch something in it, and we really need to pay greater attention to this,” Furchtgott-Roth said, adding that “no one is really focusing on” the issue.Furchtgott-Roth, who served as deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the Department of Transportation under President Trump, explained that there are more than 79,000 substations in the United States, many of them understaffed, with hundreds of thousands of miles of high voltage transmission lines that need to have “better guards up” and be “better protected” from individuals both foreign and domestic seeking to disrupt the country’s electrical system.
The assessment by regulars is that threats to the power system, both from physical attacks or cyber activity, are becoming more serious and common.
In particular, threats to power grid infrastructure and elements of the electricity supply chain are increasing “not only in complexity, but in volume,” said Manny Cancel, CEO at the North American Electric Reliability Corp.’s Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center.“It’s the most complex threat landscape I’ve seen in my experience, and I’ve been in this industry for a long time,” Cancel said this week during a meeting with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on supply chain issues.As of Thursday, law enforcement officials had not confirmed motives in any of the recent attacks, nor have suspects been identified. While some of the incidents involved gunfire, it’s unclear if guns were involved in all of the events.The Wednesday incident at the South Carolina hydroelectric plant did not cause any reported outages or known property damage, said Duke Energy spokesperson Logan Kureczka.
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