I have a degree in Engineering with a focus on Electrical Engineering or EE and while I have ended up being a farmer and part time or hobbie Tech I still try to keep up with all things electrical.
Well before I had my degree starting back in the 1980's I had started to worry about the United States power grid and it's lack of redundancy.
Since finally gaining my degree I have seen little to change my worry, but in the past 7 or 8 years I have seen decision made that have greately increased my worry about the electrical grid.
The power grid is a critical non redundant life support system for roughly 90% of the people in the US and much of Canada.(In other words without it you have a roughly 90% chance of being dead a few months after the national power grid fails.)
The vulnerabilities that I am seeing hinted at or openly mentioned in engineering magazines, email news letters and in private conversations now place this well beyond being a minor worry.
First probably the most important thing you need to do is look around your home right now and think about how much water you have and how long it will last if there is no more water being supplied to you by the electric pumps.
After you have filled several bottles or jugs with water and set them aside please continue reading.
Have you filled those water bottles yet?
In the mid 80's and early 90's when I was working part time on an Engineering degree the electrical grid was sometiimes compared to a set of dominoes arranged in a circle all it took was one failing to start a cascade that had the potential to topple everything.
At the time causing a failure to cascade through the entire national network was relatively hard to cause, because their were controls that would cut off or cut out sections and that usually stopped the cascade of failures so only one or two of the dominoes would go down.
That's not to say putting roughly 90% of our life support on the 1980's electrical grid was safe, sane or anywhere near prudent back then, but that power grid was nowhere near as fragile as it is today in 2016.
Back in the 1980's the electrical grid was distributed over a wide area in terms of control and power generation and it had an army of techs and engineers maintaining it making for relatively good security and defense. The grid of the 1980's, barring "exotic" attacks would have mostly required an attack on the scale of traditional war to take all of it down.
Two so called "exotics" are a nuclear device detonated over the center of the 48 states, perhaps that new North Korean satellite tumbling through a unstable LEO and regularly passing over the 48 states has a small(just a few kilotons) atomic bomb, just enough to blackout half the US or maybe we get a corona mass ejection striking earth's magnetic field like the one that almost hit the earth in 2012 or the one that did hit the Earth in 1859, both of these exotics would have dropped all or nearly all the dominoes in a moment and taken the army of engineers, line men and techs years to rebuild.
Sadly that was the 1980's today the level of safety and redundancy in the electrical grid has become terrifyingly low, it's so bad I think you should worry about water each time the power flickers, because the odds are getting very good it will be the last power failure that a large percentage of the people in the United States would live to see.(remember the 90% casualties above, it's worse today!)
Once our electrical grid is shut down on a national scale it is likely going to take a minimum of 3 years and more likely at least 7 or more before the US will have an electrical grid again. (Nearly every model says a very large number of people in America won't live to see it's return.)
Today roughly 30 years after the mid 1980's the CEOs of private or government run electrical grids like to talk about how much they have "improved" the power grid, how cheap, how reliable it is and how rare power failures are statistically, but what they don't tell you is that the "improvements" almost never addressed the life threatening problem of losing the power grid and in many cases has actually greatly increased the danger of the entire national grid being shutdown or destroyed.
In my personal opinion in the past 30 years they have "improved" the power grid into a a topology that looks more like a upside down pyramid of stacked blocks carefully balanced on a very sharp point made of glass.
It no longer is a ring of dominoes with an army of engineers, linemen and tech supporting it.
Don't believe it's been turned into a upside down pyramid? Read on.
Instead of increased redundancy, the power companies (private and state owned) have reduced or removed any redundancy especially in the critical control network for the power grid and employees that control and maintain it.
Near as I can tell there are far fewer supporting a larger structure that is now controlled by an array of inflexable computers all linked together on a network that is available to the world.
The power grid control network today in 2016 instead of using high security and physically isolated phone lines with backup instead has been moved to the internet.
Yes the communication lines controling the power grid have been put by the power companies on the internet, mostly in the name of saving money and ease of control.
Think about it this way, at best the entire world is roughly one 4 or 5 digit hard wired number and one hopefully random 16 digit number(picked by a CEO or an assistent) away from accessing the controls of most any power station, dam control valve and electrical sub station in the United States.
Internet control of America's power grid now extends from the internet aware smart meter at the customer and continues all the way through the substations to the dams and conventional gas and coal fired power plants.
I am hopeful, but don't really hold out much, given what I've been reading that maybe they have at least kept the nuclear power plants isolated from the internet.
Now read this nice short article about a 2013 attack
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35151492
Here is someone from the CIA talking about smart meters back in 2011, just like what is almost certainly on your home or business today..
Most of the information I've seen on smart meters seems to indicate most come from the factory with the same default password and most companies never bother to change that password or at best they change the default to a single password that is used in every internet aware smart meter purchased by that company.
As a Engineer and hobbist programer I can easily imagine what say a North Korean or Iranian hacker could do if he has found the single password used by a power companies internet controlled smart meter. Perhaps the hacker is part of a large group working for a nation and they have obtained the password for 10 or more power company's smart meters.
It would be trivial to write a program that addresses each of these individual company smart meters using their single standard password and then change this password to something random once that is done order the "smart" meter to turn the power off.
Doesn't sound so bad? Multiply that one smart meter by lets say only 10000 then multiply those 10000 powerless customers(say gas stations, medical and pumping stations) by say an average of 10 minutes minimum time per smart meter needed for a tech to reach an individual meter and "repair" it.
Those 10000 smart meters are going to take just under 70 days to be turned back on.
Sounds like an I'm wildly overstating how much damage the hacker has done? Remember 10000 smart meters and 10 minutes is just the critical infrastructure that has been turned off and giving a time of just under 70 days for full restore is a big simplification that is easy to calculate.
In any realistic hack attack using all of a power company's "smart" meter's we will actually be talking about hundreds of thousands of customers having their power turned off at the pole.
If the hackers have done thier programming there will be no ability to command a turn on over the internet and the only way the power company will have to turn power back on is to send out line crew ordered to bypass meters, techs with every lock smith the power company can grab and the few dozen techs that happen to have one of the non-standard hard to copy keys needed to open the meter and manually reset it.
(The power company probably won't buy many reset override keys because those keys are a security risk and are designed to be hard to copy making them relatively expensive.)
Also remember once that tech gets to the smart meter and he probably can't simply factory reset the "smart" meter because that is probably the password that the attacking hacker used to turn it off in the first place.
If the Hacker happens to be or have access to a EE then changing the password and turning off the power is one of the least destructive types of attacks.(Think positive feedback or resonance, lets turn it into a question "Have you ever deafened yourself and/or broke a stereo speaker with a badly set microphone?")
Think the above internet based power grid attack is only a theory?
Russian hackers or possible hackers with Russian sympathies have shut down part of a nation's power grid. http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/06/hack ... n-ukraine/
This internet attack was at the substation level and still took quite a bit of time repair because it required techs to travel to every shutdown substation and manually repair it.
I'll also say that while the news media and electrical companies publically call it the "first" successful hacker based attack, most Engineers or programmers would at least reluctantly admitt that it probably wasn't.
This attack was simply the first one where the hackers wanted to be clear what and why they did it or possibly they didn't have access to a EE.
I've been focusing on the power companies, but that is my own bias toward electronics showing.
It's not just the power companies decisions and actions it is also pretty much all companies along with the city, county, state and federal government that have taken steps that have effectively removed all redundancy from our nation's LIFE SUPPORT systems.
In the early 1980's and even into the late 1980's you commonly had 3 to 5 days of stored food in most cities if the power grid failed with several cities and even entire counties being capable of returning as "Islands" of power within 2 to 5 days due to the privately or city owned power plants and trained crews hired to run them.
That is no longer true, most of these smaller coal or gas fired power plants are gone today with the employees retired or fired and even in the cases where their is still a power plant producing power most of the employees that knew how to run it are retired or moved to other jobs and all the controls are now passed through the internet to a central control station quite a distance away.
That 3 to 5 days of emergency life support was the 1980's, but today in our highly advanced modern world of 2016 most cities have much less than 12 hours of food, nearly zero hours of water and effectively only what ever fuel is in the vehicle's fuel tanks when the power fails.
I've seen suggestions and read of anecdotal incidents that say less than 4 hours of food is a more accurate model and as for fuel, well without the power grid the fuel you have in your vehicle's tank or possibly in a "jerry can" for your lawn mower is all the fuel you will ever have, at least from the point of view of your greatly shortened lifespan.
You would think gas stations would have emergency generators wouldn't you.
(Glance over this Link.)http://www.cga.ct.gov/2012/rpt/2012-R-0539.htm
Did these proposals do much? I'm down south so I missed the recent snow storm and associated power failures did any of your local gas stations start up generators?
What my light reading seems to indicate is disheartening, very few stations are actually being set up with emergency generators and I don't think I've seen any town or city actually buying equipment and the training needed to set up a town or city level microgrid capable of keeping the water flowing and gas stations pumping.
I do know a few years back there were laws or policies in some states that forbid the installation of a generator at gas stations and when you factor in the anti-theft design most gas stations have built into their designs it becomes a lot harder than simply wheeling in a portable generator up and splicing it into the pumps circuit breakers and start pumping gas.
Perhaps the idea of just opening the gas stations often underground gas tank's filling spout and "snaking" a jury rigged hose in that way and connecting it to some type of jury rigged pump.
Then you need to think about this (fairly sensible) policy I run across at at least one gas station chain. The chain has a policy of not keeping the keys for the filling spout at the gas station itself.(Presumably the deliver driver has a key or a person arrives with the key when the deliver driver brings fuel.)
Now ask yourself if you want to be anywhere near a gas station when someone is using a drill on the fuel tank's filling spout, especially a gas station with a fuel tank holding an unknown mixture of liquid gas and gas fumes right near the hot drill and it's air cooled motor.(ever watched a electric drill's motor spark through the cooling vents?)
Also the gas stations owner is going to have a significant level of anti-theft protection on their gas locks so they probably won't be using a lock that can be quickly defeated by the power stored in a few battery packs for a electric drill.
You might be better off knowing which gas stations have their fuel tanks above ground, but even there getting past the anti-theft measures on the tank and putting a SAFE hole in the fuel lines without a key is probably going to be about as dangerous.
Now lets look at another industry most every one relies on.
Tell me have you noticed the empty spots or thinly "fronted" sections on modern grocery store shelves?
It occurs fairly often today in 2016, but it was a relatively rare occurance back in the early 80's because every store was forced to keep a small warehouse behind or near the store front holding what they sell to keep from running out and having to wait several days or even a few weeks until the next shipment.
This was the 3 to 5 days of food and gave most any city or town several days worth of food and other products already prepositioned within the city limits if the shipments stopped.
Sadly that is no longer true today, instead take a look at that often thin row of cans or other packages "fronting" the large empty shelves in most grocery stores, that thin layer is all the food you and your city or town will have if the national power grid fails.
If you want to blame something for that tiny layer between us and food riots a lot of blame can be laid at the feet of the concept of JIT or Just In Time deliver, which uses past purchases and economic models created from past records on computers to predict consumption and a stores future needs so the store doesn't have to pay the expense of having a ware house behind every store.
You can't really fully blame the Grocery stores or the other stores, much of what has made the "Just In Time economy" such a desired method of doing business is the passing of countless laws at the town, city, county, state and federal levels that seem almost taylor made to discourage a grocery store and most any type of business or company from having local stockpile of anything.
The Just In Time concept is also applied to the electrical companies as well and again like the grocery stores you can't really blame them because most are heavily encouraged by state and federal taxes to keep only the bare minimum of spare parts in local storage.
---------------------------
Why did I post this here?
First I wanted to warn this site's members about something that in my opinion has become very very likely to happen in the near future.
During my university days I was told many times to always write with the targeted audience in mind.
So to help me order my thoughts and try to keep it down from a EE level I used this site's members as my targeted audience.
Did I succeed?
Why is it in the political and other fun section?
Because almost any time I mention any part of the above it seems to generate very strong reactions.
HDM
Well before I had my degree starting back in the 1980's I had started to worry about the United States power grid and it's lack of redundancy.
Since finally gaining my degree I have seen little to change my worry, but in the past 7 or 8 years I have seen decision made that have greately increased my worry about the electrical grid.
The power grid is a critical non redundant life support system for roughly 90% of the people in the US and much of Canada.(In other words without it you have a roughly 90% chance of being dead a few months after the national power grid fails.)
The vulnerabilities that I am seeing hinted at or openly mentioned in engineering magazines, email news letters and in private conversations now place this well beyond being a minor worry.
First probably the most important thing you need to do is look around your home right now and think about how much water you have and how long it will last if there is no more water being supplied to you by the electric pumps.
After you have filled several bottles or jugs with water and set them aside please continue reading.
Have you filled those water bottles yet?
In the mid 80's and early 90's when I was working part time on an Engineering degree the electrical grid was sometiimes compared to a set of dominoes arranged in a circle all it took was one failing to start a cascade that had the potential to topple everything.
At the time causing a failure to cascade through the entire national network was relatively hard to cause, because their were controls that would cut off or cut out sections and that usually stopped the cascade of failures so only one or two of the dominoes would go down.
That's not to say putting roughly 90% of our life support on the 1980's electrical grid was safe, sane or anywhere near prudent back then, but that power grid was nowhere near as fragile as it is today in 2016.
Back in the 1980's the electrical grid was distributed over a wide area in terms of control and power generation and it had an army of techs and engineers maintaining it making for relatively good security and defense. The grid of the 1980's, barring "exotic" attacks would have mostly required an attack on the scale of traditional war to take all of it down.
Two so called "exotics" are a nuclear device detonated over the center of the 48 states, perhaps that new North Korean satellite tumbling through a unstable LEO and regularly passing over the 48 states has a small(just a few kilotons) atomic bomb, just enough to blackout half the US or maybe we get a corona mass ejection striking earth's magnetic field like the one that almost hit the earth in 2012 or the one that did hit the Earth in 1859, both of these exotics would have dropped all or nearly all the dominoes in a moment and taken the army of engineers, line men and techs years to rebuild.
Sadly that was the 1980's today the level of safety and redundancy in the electrical grid has become terrifyingly low, it's so bad I think you should worry about water each time the power flickers, because the odds are getting very good it will be the last power failure that a large percentage of the people in the United States would live to see.(remember the 90% casualties above, it's worse today!)
Once our electrical grid is shut down on a national scale it is likely going to take a minimum of 3 years and more likely at least 7 or more before the US will have an electrical grid again. (Nearly every model says a very large number of people in America won't live to see it's return.)
Today roughly 30 years after the mid 1980's the CEOs of private or government run electrical grids like to talk about how much they have "improved" the power grid, how cheap, how reliable it is and how rare power failures are statistically, but what they don't tell you is that the "improvements" almost never addressed the life threatening problem of losing the power grid and in many cases has actually greatly increased the danger of the entire national grid being shutdown or destroyed.
In my personal opinion in the past 30 years they have "improved" the power grid into a a topology that looks more like a upside down pyramid of stacked blocks carefully balanced on a very sharp point made of glass.
It no longer is a ring of dominoes with an army of engineers, linemen and tech supporting it.
Don't believe it's been turned into a upside down pyramid? Read on.
Instead of increased redundancy, the power companies (private and state owned) have reduced or removed any redundancy especially in the critical control network for the power grid and employees that control and maintain it.
Near as I can tell there are far fewer supporting a larger structure that is now controlled by an array of inflexable computers all linked together on a network that is available to the world.
The power grid control network today in 2016 instead of using high security and physically isolated phone lines with backup instead has been moved to the internet.
Yes the communication lines controling the power grid have been put by the power companies on the internet, mostly in the name of saving money and ease of control.
Think about it this way, at best the entire world is roughly one 4 or 5 digit hard wired number and one hopefully random 16 digit number(picked by a CEO or an assistent) away from accessing the controls of most any power station, dam control valve and electrical sub station in the United States.
Internet control of America's power grid now extends from the internet aware smart meter at the customer and continues all the way through the substations to the dams and conventional gas and coal fired power plants.
I am hopeful, but don't really hold out much, given what I've been reading that maybe they have at least kept the nuclear power plants isolated from the internet.
Now read this nice short article about a 2013 attack
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35151492
Here is someone from the CIA talking about smart meters back in 2011, just like what is almost certainly on your home or business today..
Most of the information I've seen on smart meters seems to indicate most come from the factory with the same default password and most companies never bother to change that password or at best they change the default to a single password that is used in every internet aware smart meter purchased by that company.
As a Engineer and hobbist programer I can easily imagine what say a North Korean or Iranian hacker could do if he has found the single password used by a power companies internet controlled smart meter. Perhaps the hacker is part of a large group working for a nation and they have obtained the password for 10 or more power company's smart meters.
It would be trivial to write a program that addresses each of these individual company smart meters using their single standard password and then change this password to something random once that is done order the "smart" meter to turn the power off.
Doesn't sound so bad? Multiply that one smart meter by lets say only 10000 then multiply those 10000 powerless customers(say gas stations, medical and pumping stations) by say an average of 10 minutes minimum time per smart meter needed for a tech to reach an individual meter and "repair" it.
Those 10000 smart meters are going to take just under 70 days to be turned back on.
Sounds like an I'm wildly overstating how much damage the hacker has done? Remember 10000 smart meters and 10 minutes is just the critical infrastructure that has been turned off and giving a time of just under 70 days for full restore is a big simplification that is easy to calculate.
In any realistic hack attack using all of a power company's "smart" meter's we will actually be talking about hundreds of thousands of customers having their power turned off at the pole.
If the hackers have done thier programming there will be no ability to command a turn on over the internet and the only way the power company will have to turn power back on is to send out line crew ordered to bypass meters, techs with every lock smith the power company can grab and the few dozen techs that happen to have one of the non-standard hard to copy keys needed to open the meter and manually reset it.
(The power company probably won't buy many reset override keys because those keys are a security risk and are designed to be hard to copy making them relatively expensive.)
Also remember once that tech gets to the smart meter and he probably can't simply factory reset the "smart" meter because that is probably the password that the attacking hacker used to turn it off in the first place.
If the Hacker happens to be or have access to a EE then changing the password and turning off the power is one of the least destructive types of attacks.(Think positive feedback or resonance, lets turn it into a question "Have you ever deafened yourself and/or broke a stereo speaker with a badly set microphone?")
Think the above internet based power grid attack is only a theory?
Russian hackers or possible hackers with Russian sympathies have shut down part of a nation's power grid. http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/06/hack ... n-ukraine/
This internet attack was at the substation level and still took quite a bit of time repair because it required techs to travel to every shutdown substation and manually repair it.
I'll also say that while the news media and electrical companies publically call it the "first" successful hacker based attack, most Engineers or programmers would at least reluctantly admitt that it probably wasn't.
This attack was simply the first one where the hackers wanted to be clear what and why they did it or possibly they didn't have access to a EE.
I've been focusing on the power companies, but that is my own bias toward electronics showing.
It's not just the power companies decisions and actions it is also pretty much all companies along with the city, county, state and federal government that have taken steps that have effectively removed all redundancy from our nation's LIFE SUPPORT systems.
In the early 1980's and even into the late 1980's you commonly had 3 to 5 days of stored food in most cities if the power grid failed with several cities and even entire counties being capable of returning as "Islands" of power within 2 to 5 days due to the privately or city owned power plants and trained crews hired to run them.
That is no longer true, most of these smaller coal or gas fired power plants are gone today with the employees retired or fired and even in the cases where their is still a power plant producing power most of the employees that knew how to run it are retired or moved to other jobs and all the controls are now passed through the internet to a central control station quite a distance away.
That 3 to 5 days of emergency life support was the 1980's, but today in our highly advanced modern world of 2016 most cities have much less than 12 hours of food, nearly zero hours of water and effectively only what ever fuel is in the vehicle's fuel tanks when the power fails.
I've seen suggestions and read of anecdotal incidents that say less than 4 hours of food is a more accurate model and as for fuel, well without the power grid the fuel you have in your vehicle's tank or possibly in a "jerry can" for your lawn mower is all the fuel you will ever have, at least from the point of view of your greatly shortened lifespan.
You would think gas stations would have emergency generators wouldn't you.
(Glance over this Link.)http://www.cga.ct.gov/2012/rpt/2012-R-0539.htm
Did these proposals do much? I'm down south so I missed the recent snow storm and associated power failures did any of your local gas stations start up generators?
What my light reading seems to indicate is disheartening, very few stations are actually being set up with emergency generators and I don't think I've seen any town or city actually buying equipment and the training needed to set up a town or city level microgrid capable of keeping the water flowing and gas stations pumping.
I do know a few years back there were laws or policies in some states that forbid the installation of a generator at gas stations and when you factor in the anti-theft design most gas stations have built into their designs it becomes a lot harder than simply wheeling in a portable generator up and splicing it into the pumps circuit breakers and start pumping gas.
Perhaps the idea of just opening the gas stations often underground gas tank's filling spout and "snaking" a jury rigged hose in that way and connecting it to some type of jury rigged pump.
Then you need to think about this (fairly sensible) policy I run across at at least one gas station chain. The chain has a policy of not keeping the keys for the filling spout at the gas station itself.(Presumably the deliver driver has a key or a person arrives with the key when the deliver driver brings fuel.)
Now ask yourself if you want to be anywhere near a gas station when someone is using a drill on the fuel tank's filling spout, especially a gas station with a fuel tank holding an unknown mixture of liquid gas and gas fumes right near the hot drill and it's air cooled motor.(ever watched a electric drill's motor spark through the cooling vents?)
Also the gas stations owner is going to have a significant level of anti-theft protection on their gas locks so they probably won't be using a lock that can be quickly defeated by the power stored in a few battery packs for a electric drill.
You might be better off knowing which gas stations have their fuel tanks above ground, but even there getting past the anti-theft measures on the tank and putting a SAFE hole in the fuel lines without a key is probably going to be about as dangerous.
Now lets look at another industry most every one relies on.
Tell me have you noticed the empty spots or thinly "fronted" sections on modern grocery store shelves?
It occurs fairly often today in 2016, but it was a relatively rare occurance back in the early 80's because every store was forced to keep a small warehouse behind or near the store front holding what they sell to keep from running out and having to wait several days or even a few weeks until the next shipment.
This was the 3 to 5 days of food and gave most any city or town several days worth of food and other products already prepositioned within the city limits if the shipments stopped.
Sadly that is no longer true today, instead take a look at that often thin row of cans or other packages "fronting" the large empty shelves in most grocery stores, that thin layer is all the food you and your city or town will have if the national power grid fails.
If you want to blame something for that tiny layer between us and food riots a lot of blame can be laid at the feet of the concept of JIT or Just In Time deliver, which uses past purchases and economic models created from past records on computers to predict consumption and a stores future needs so the store doesn't have to pay the expense of having a ware house behind every store.
You can't really fully blame the Grocery stores or the other stores, much of what has made the "Just In Time economy" such a desired method of doing business is the passing of countless laws at the town, city, county, state and federal levels that seem almost taylor made to discourage a grocery store and most any type of business or company from having local stockpile of anything.
The Just In Time concept is also applied to the electrical companies as well and again like the grocery stores you can't really blame them because most are heavily encouraged by state and federal taxes to keep only the bare minimum of spare parts in local storage.
---------------------------
Why did I post this here?
First I wanted to warn this site's members about something that in my opinion has become very very likely to happen in the near future.
During my university days I was told many times to always write with the targeted audience in mind.
So to help me order my thoughts and try to keep it down from a EE level I used this site's members as my targeted audience.
Did I succeed?
Why is it in the political and other fun section?
Because almost any time I mention any part of the above it seems to generate very strong reactions.
HDM