Another power substation attack; Dec 25 2022; Pierce County, Washington 6

[FacEngrPE]

Four substations attacked in Washington state, leaving thousands without power Location: Pierce County, Washington

Over 7,000 left without power after three Pierce County substation facilities attacked; KTVB

Vandals hit fourth Pierce County substation in Christmas Day attacks; Dec. 26, 2022 at 10:14 am Updated Dec. 26, 2022 at 12:11 pm

 

[TugboatEng]

The power grid itself shouldn't be critical. It's a grid, it's supposed to have redundancy. However, certain lines such as those in Alaska where population isn't dense enough to support a grid system may be more critical.

 

[dik]

Sorry, Tug... up in Canada, the population is sparce in areas and power is critical. Maybe due to the cold winters. Some communities are strictly on hydro.

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[CWB1]

Nonsense hyperbole. If power goes out death isnt imminent for those reliant on grid power, its an inconvenience at best. Alaska and northern Canada actually deal with these inconveniences very well, the environment up north necessitates a higher level of emergency preparedness and an enjoyment of the outdoors...which comes with a lack of modern conveniences. Many small towns arent connected to the grid so local maintenance outages are a regular occurrence.

 

[TugboatEng]

A 2MW generator set fits in a 40ft shipping container so it's easy to temporarily apply power to single line outages.

 

[1503-44]

If only there was one available in the surrounding 250 miles and the roads were not closed and we had a truck to carry it and a driver...

Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."

 

[ATSE]

"...our power grid is not critical infrastructure"
Maybe not for John J Rambo or Jeremiah Johnson, but your definition of critical is a bit narrow. If reliable commercial power isn't critical for urban and suburban areas of a developed nation, not sure what is.
Hospitals, fire stations, pumping plants, water treatment plants, and communications don't have unlimited backup power, usually just short term (like 48 hours).
I agree with the principle and practice of grid redundancy, but we do not have perfect redundancy - at least not where I live. When 100,000 residential and commercial users can loose power because of a rodent activity (not kidding), redundancy is still theoretical.

 

[dik]

...maybe at very least.

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[1503-44]

If its not critical, WTF is?
Everything needs electricity.
Comms, water pumps, aviation, police, gas pumps, cash registers, credit cards, hospitals, fire stations, traffic control, electric trains, elevators, alarm systems, ... Can't reroute the power and everything goes down. These crooks know that. How come some engineers don't. Inconvenience is standing in line at the grocery store too long.

Tenerife's power went down a couple of years ago for 12h. Everything came to a complete halt within a few hours. Massive loss to the economy. Power company was fined 40M €. With 3 years lead time on this equipment, that makes it critical sooner or later.

Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."

 

[TugboatEng]

A large portion of your list, the things that are considered critical, have on-site diesel generator sets. In those cases power is not a critical item.

As for the economy, if you treat electricity as a critical commodity, astronomically increasing it's cost, wouldn't that have much greater negative consequences than a power outage here and there?

These crooks know that.

That's not true. So far in the two cases where the crooks were caught it was sheer stupidity that was driving them, not special knowledge.

 

[1503-44]

Well yes. This is not a one size fits all solution. There are obvious levels of criticality. Scale and depth of any damage also has consequences. Sure there is backup power in some cases, but only the highest levels generally have them. Each user would supposedly have considered their specific case and provided backup power according to the reliability of their specific supply, their mission criticality and their company economic limitations. Not every 747 carries the A-F1 kit. When I evaluate alternative power requirements, I use historic records of local power reliability. Its usually up there at 0.998 = 17.5h down per year. That does not consider intentional power outages. That does not consider any implications of a widespread outage. That does not consider implications of extremely long lead times that others may need to restore services. It's thought that there are still residual effects of the hackers shutdown of Colonial Pipeline working its way through the diesel supply of the NE and that attack didn't even cut one wire, or damage any capital equipment.

The problem is there is none, or very few, have any actual blanket requirement. Most were probably determined by project management's budget, or as an afterthought of their first blackout. Those hardened sites continued to function in Tenerife. No airplanes crashed on landing and the rest of the flights were cancelled or diverted. Aircraft handling worked, but still the airport failed. No comms. Ticketing and reservations failed. Airlines, Customs and immigration could not communicate with Madrid. Parking gates did not open. Traffic jams outside. No trains. Credit systems went down. Restaurants and shops closed services. Some water tanks emptied. Surface traffic control to/from the airport failed. Same happened at the cruise ship and ferry docks. One component failed resulting in chaos for the entire island. Commerce of 1 million residents and sometimes up to another 500,000 tourists was shut down entirely for a day. What's that cost? 100-200M immediately and maybe another 5x that in recirculating effects afterwards. Fortunately it only lasted 12h. If it lasted for longer time, we would start running out of fuel, food within a week. It takes 2.5 days to get from the mainland by ship. If there is nothing within 1000 miles in any direction, that was a widespread outage. But even if that system servives, it still does no good, if the distribution system crashed. That outage was not intentional. All the traditionally "critical services" were matained, but still chaos resulted. That means we missed protecting something critical. Something that ties everything together. I think that proves electricity is an extremely critical service.

Considering true total cost, the choice is protection or providing redundancy, including lead time of supply chain logistics. The economics will never give you the answer in a complex system where our limited modeling techniques have to deal with multiple black swan events. It's going to take a wholeistic approach. What exists now is an unreliable hodgepoge of connections to potential chaos ready to be exploited by whatever bad actor that cares to. Im not saying everything has to be built like Fort Know, but the game play rules today has upped the stakes. Plenty of money has been spent on security for black swan events, especially since 9/11, a lot of it where it never was needed. Its easier to break into the Capital Building in midday with gov in session than my local atm machine. I have to insert my card before the door opens. That's certainly a cheap solution for a transformer building, but they don't even have that. A lock, often on just a chain link fence gate that anybody can get past with only determination, is all you usually see.

Pipelines in insecure regions of the world have parallel patrol roads run daily, some with fibre optical footfall sensors, security cameras at all entries, armed guards, sometimes even a special layer of military security inside company security perimeters. Its not unknown to build a special military base adjacent to oil fields and export terminals. US Coast Guard now is monitoring LNG terminals. Sure costs go up, but the alternatives are not pretty either. Perhaps we have simply taken our peaceful society norms too much for granted in the past and its beginning to clash with all the "freedoms" that people think they can exploit in any manner they choose today. Read one story about some guy jamming security cameras around his delivery truck with a small transmitter he bought on Amazon for $20, complaining the FCC fined him $32,000 when he made some delivery to a work zone at an airport and jammed all their secirity cameras. Fortunately it's usually not terrorists, just freedom from surveillance cucoos messing up stuff, but maybe that modus operandi is changing now.



Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."

 

[FacEngrPE]

It is not always bad actors that are the problem.

https://www.oe.netl.doe.gov/hurricanes_emer/isabel.aspx[/URL]]On September 18, 2003, Hurricane Isabel made landfall near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, as a Category 2 storm with winds near 100 mph. Despite this fairly modest storm classification, over the next 24 hours Isabel caused unprecedented power outages (6.5 million customers) throughout the Mid-Atlantic region.

The bulk power system was off line in southeastern Virginia for 3 days, and restoration to most users was closer to 5 days. The backup power to traffic lights consisted of portable generators chained to utility poles. At the time grocery stores generally did not have backup power for their refrigeration or checkout systems. Many do now.

I am OK with a risk evaluation approach, but coverage for black swans usually does not extend to 5 day power outages.

One of the mitigations is the addition of a significant amount of additional bulk power infrastructure, also required for load growth reasons. Reference Skiffs Creek Power Line

https://www.dominionenergy.com/proj...jects/power-line-projects/skiffes-creek/maps.

The biggest part of getting power system resiliency is making sure the regulatory environment provides incentives that promote reliability.

 

[1503-44]

Black swans are far more frequent than most realize. Complex systems don't lead themselves to reliable numerical analysis due to lack of understanding and limited data. Limited data makes it hard to distinguish between very rare and extremely rare events. Since their effects, while rare, are extremely significant, they must be considered, at least to some extent. What can be cost effectively mitigated should be. The real problem is that we often don't know in what form they will come. When two hit at the same time, total disasters happen. They are also what drive most change. We have to understand that at least some degree of resilience is warranted, no matter what the probability is. Earthquakes and tsunamis are often directly coupled, but Fukishima still missed that combination, maybe just because somebody's design guide said that they don't have to be considered together. I can't think of one design guide or engineering specification that I've ever seen says they must. But then why should they, when their primary purpose is cost effective sizing of a structural member, not in protecting society from the chaos that would happen if winds and earthquakes ever came simultaneously. Shouldn't they say something like 50% of the combined maximums. They don't. It's always 100% of one and 0% of the other. And there is never a level of criticality mentioned. Whatever the method is, its always assumed adequate for purpose, no matter what the mission of the item might be. We all know that the engineer seldom stands a chance arguing with shareholders about that. Populations are increasing, becoming more concentrated and depending on resources often coming from farther distances, requiring more and more infrastructure, making everything that much more vulnerable, yet we continue along the same design standards we've used since a hundred years ago. Shouldn't somebody be ensuring the resulting hodgepodge is still going to work as intended. Those considerations are not the main goal of capitalism, so we probably can't Count on "the market" to save us. In fact, that usually goes in the opposite direction. The increasing complexity of society is unlikely to be accommodated by decreasing costs. If you want decreased costs, stop with the 5G, while there's still a chance. We might be able to keep the fridges running, but only if they can communicate with their home office, isn't going in the right direction. Electric chainsaws don't cut firewood when the powers down. When the cell tower goes down here, I couldn't call anybody to even let them know. I guess somebody somewhere sees a black spot on a map, but only if they have backup power. Can we count on that? Guess so, but frankly I don't know for a fact. I only know that when Colonial's Pipeline system goes down, we get very close to the edge. Who's in charge of all of that? I don't particularly like the idea of crossing my fingers and leaving it up to the collective, with nobody actually running the show. We have to be able to function better than a big ant nest hoping that the worker ant aphid division found enough aphids to stroke today.

Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."

 

[CWB1]

There are obvious levels of criticality.

Depends who you ask. "Critical infrastructure" commonly denotes systems whose loss pose immediate risk to life, hence why its heavily regulated. IME most professionals avoid "critical" for that reason and speak in terms of frequency and severity of risk.

Its easy to multiplicatively assign an unrealistic value to costs to justify anything, hence the jokes about MBAs, bean-counters, and lousy engineers. Realistically tho there are ~50k substations stateside. Most are open, exposed, privately-owned, and in suburban areas. Suggesting that owners should be legislatively forced to protect them is nonsense. If the business case makes sense then owners will do so, otherwise the suggested value of doing so is highly suspect. Most of my career has been based on designing what others deemed either impossible or impractical so I'll be the first to say that mistakes and misjudgments happens. That said, in most instances the answer to "why didnt we" questions is "bc it doesnt make sense."

Personally I'd worry more about ongoing political agendas limiting individual movement and the ability to meet basic human needs than bad actors damaging substations or other infrastructure.

 

[dik]

It's already political... I think the people are 'Friar Tucked'.

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

Just sticking none hard visual restricting screens will stop most of the bullets hitting important bits.

 

[1503-44]

Exactly. That would at least tend to randomizer impacts. Industry left alone does NOTHING. Not even the very minimum. That's even cheaper than insurance. If a protective device or measure costs less than 1%/yr (the average insurance cost) of whatever its protecting, that's a comparative value for the saying "that's cheap insurance". Just do it.
No effort whatsoever. That's not political. That's just I don't give a ^$&%#%#.

Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."

 

[IRstuff]

If the business case makes sense then owners will do so, otherwise the suggested value of doing so is highly suspect.

We've seen what companies do to justify not doing anything; Boeing 737 Max comes readily to mind, as does Ford Pinto fuel tanks. In the case of the 737 Max, Boeing has repeatedly done the absolute minimum until forced to do more for passenger safety, even though they are already responsible for hundreds of deaths for the two "accidents." And of course, that was already after Airbus' mishap with pitot tube sensors disagreeing with each other and other data.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[JohnRBaker]

This is becoming a trend...

Man faces terror charge for damaging power plant outside Las Vegas

https://www.8newsnow.com/investigat...e-for-damaging-power-plant-outside-las-vegas/

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

I suspected that it would, with all the in depth media coverage of the previous hits. This the public has a right to know everything nonsense is a baseball bat in a toddlers table tennis game.

Basically every nutter that gets pissed off with anyone local is going to go shoot a substation now. And they have been given the precise location to hit it to take it out. Get a huge electricity bill shoot a substation. Get pissed around with your solar install shoot a substation....

Want to stop everyone else seeing opposing politic views on the TV... shoot a substation.

At least its better than going and shooting the local school up.

 

[1503-44]

Or if you don't like the results of a vote, start an insurrection.

Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."