Government Security News July 2016 Digital Edition

The Need for a National Energy
Grid Strategy
by J. Michael Barrett
U.S. energy consumers have been
able to count on reliable, alwayson
and relatively resilient electrical
power for so many decades that for
most people the availability of electrical
power is essentially taken as a
given. And yet there is a looming
sense among many experts of a rise
in systemic risks that have begun to
come into the light, ranging from
threats of physical and cyber attack
to space weather and other natural
phenomenon. Indeed, just last year
the Department of Defense released
a request for proposals involving
resilient electrical power that led to
a recent commentary noting, “The
declaration of DOD is clear:
military bases and the civilian
institutions that they depend
on are overwhelmingly vulnerable
to their own near complete
reliance on unprepared
civilian power grids. The DOD
has already started the process
of changing by developing distributed
energy systems under
their own control.”
And yet the U.S. electric
power grid remains indispensable
for continued American prosperity
and well-being, even as the
grid’s infrastructure is aging and
increasingly outdated. The massive
capital needs of this enormous
system require constant investment
and occasional system-wide overhauls.
These represent a particular
concern for the investor-owned
electric utilities, for whom making
the business case for higher rates
to enable investments just to tread
water is hard enough, much less investments
meant to innovate and
implement large-scale modernization
programs.
At the same time, the grid is a very
large system, with a long list of items
that need to be replaced for a variety
10
of reasons including: physical wear
and tear, technical obsolescence,
and the critical importance of meeting
the security and power surety
needs of Americans in the 21st century.
This includes everything from
integration of environmentally
friendly alternative means of power
generation to replacing the beyondexpected-service-life
equipment
such as the large power transformers,
as well as the two-way communications
built into smart meters
and making the move towards interchangeable
parts and other standardizations
that increase efficiency
of ‘spares and repairs.’
While the concerns over a truly
resilient and “disaster-proof ” electrical
power system are on the
rise, however, there is no central
effort to develop a smart
roadmap to get the nation from
where we are to where we need
to be. Part of the problem is
bureaucratic – there are multiple
competing equities among
the Departments of Energy,
Homeland Security, and Defense,
and that is just on the
federal side. The power grid is
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