Washington (Platts)--12Sep2013/511 pm EDT/2111 GMT

The chairman of the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Thursday raised the possibility of isolating regions of the electric grid in the event of a serious cybersecurity event or natural disaster, calling attacks on key transmission substations one of the biggest risks the grid faces.

"[W]e do need to start thinking about having regional disconnects where we can isolate regions of the country" ... in the event of outages, Jon Wellinghoff said at an Environmental and Energy Study Institute forum in Washington.

He said that, in the event of a natural disaster or a physical attack against grid infrastructure, "we need to ensure that the grid can be stabilized."

Wellinghoff in particular noted that each of the three US interconnections -- Eastern, Western and Texas -- are vulnerable because their operations hinge on a number of high-voltage transmission substations.

"So we need to do what we can to minimize those vulnerabilities by ensuring that we can isolate portions of each one of those interconnects," he said, adding that "there are physical security issues that certainly have to be dealt with. I think the biggest risk is potentially attacks on the system at those critical nodes."

--Bobby McMahon, bobby.mcmahon@platts.com
--Edited by Jeff Barber, jeff.barber@platts.com

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