Last summer's blackout shows power grid's vulnerability to terrorists
St. Louis Post-Dispatch --Aug. 12
Aug. 12--Last year's massive blackout that left much of the Northeast United States without power did more than inconvenience millions of people and businesses. In a frightening way, it also highlighted a particularly vulnerable area for terrorists: the North American power grid.
For local, state and federal emergency officials, knowing the full scope of a
power outage largely has been guesswork. Even power companies have little feel
for the impact beyond the number of houses and businesses that lose power.
"We really don't look at it from a standpoint of if we lose a
transmission line, we will lose this (customer base)," said Mark Birk, vice
president at AmerenEnergy Inc., a subsidiary of Ameren Corp. of St. Louis.
"Our analysis is pretty much how to keep the system up and
running," he said.
But a group of engineers and computer experts gathered Wednesday at the Hyatt
Regency Hotel in downtown St. Louis to evaluate the early stages of a software
simulation program, designed to predict the effect of utility failures virtually
anywhere in the country.
Designers from General Electric Co., Los Alamos National Laboratory, Idaho
National Laboratory and the Department of Energy ran simulations showing the
effects of power outages on Ameren's system. Ameren is the first utility in the
nation to help on the design of the program.
Once refined, the simulation package is expected be used to determine
potential weak points, not only in the electrical grid, but in gas and
telecommunications lines, and transportation systems. Leon White, a consulting
engineer at Ameren who has worked on the simulation package, said it has
enormous potential.
"A lot of money is being committed to homeland security, but the people
who are doing homeland security don't have a good way to allocate that
money," White said. "They're looking at this tool to determine where
they are going to get the most bang for the buck."
The simulation program is a blend of two software packages: one from General
Electric that pinpoints utility lines and other infrastructure. The other,
developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, analyzes what could happen if they
are disabled by natural disasters or terrorist attacks.
The software is so powerful that a failure at a single point on an electrical
grid or an explosion at one spot in a natural gas pipeline can be simulated to
determine the effect. Ideally, users will uncover trouble spots before
terrorists do.
"If you have a transformer, where there is a weak spot, we don't want
(terrorists) to know, but we want to know," said Swenam Lee, the project
manager who works for the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology
Laboratories in Pittsburgh.
Once the simulation software is ready for release, GE hopes to sell it to
groups such as police and fire departments and state homeland security agencies.
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