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How Smart Can A Grid Be?
by Paul McGoldrick
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the US electrical grid has been hacked into by operatives of the Chinese and Russian governments, in particular, and by other unnamed countries in general. The whole tale, by anonymous intelligence sources, suggested that foreign interests might have planted software that could be used, in hostile times, to take down the grid.
Since the WSJ came under the control of Murdoch’s News Corporation, its content has become increasingly dubious; and, when I read a story like this, I have to doubt that it is true – and it is certainly not verifiable. Is it a coincidence that the in-depth review of security in cyberspace, ordered by President Barack Obama, is due to report by the week of April 20, 2009?
The suggestions that some alien government is tracking the grid’s structure, perhaps even threatening to take over nuclear power stations, sewer systems, and other public services seems right at the outset to be a ridiculous notion. How connected do people think all these services are today?
This is positively silly. It shows that there is simply no understanding by the gullible public of how the grid, power stations, sewage, and all the other elements of US infrastructure exist in their present format. The reason why the electrical grid is so fragile, but not vulnerable to external attack, in its present form, is the total lack of communications between all its elements. Losing a power plant is always a huge surprise to the load end of the system, probably overloading another power source feeding the system; and then the domino effect of collapse comes into play. Without communications between these prime sectors, what is there to hack?
What kind of upsets me about this WSJ piece is the number of other really smart outlets that picked it up as fact and ran with the story. At my last check, on Google News, five hundred and thirty-seven sites had run the story in various quasi-edited versions. Unquestionable fact… A story from admittedly anonymous sources in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal… God, even Rachel Maddow picked the story up as fact!
When the transition to a Smart Grid happens I am sure that vulnerability to hacking will be dramatically increased. But can anybody tell me what a Smart Grid actually is? Yes, I’ve read stories about two-way communications (full duplex, if we want to be engineers) between power sources, switches, and loads. But I don’t understand what that actually means. What data can be transmitted fast enough to make decisions about switching out particular loads, or shutting down a particular power generator, or fending off an attack from a bored teenager in Shanghai?
I guess I need a nice tidy block diagram of what a Smart Grid looks like. After all I am a simple type of engineer-sort-of-person who even gags when anybody talks of ac power in kW, instead of kVA! When I last said that to somebody, he looked at me all strange and I realized that, despite an engineering degree from a respectable US college, he really did not know the difference.
My father used to tell me, jokingly (I have always hoped), that I was named after Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for Hitler’s Third Reich. Goebbels made Hitler a human figure for the German people, much like a contemporary for us, Karl Rove, made George W. Bush an acceptable human to fool nearly enough United States voters.
But Murdoch never fooled my father. The day the brash Australian bought the London Times my father’s subscription was cancelled. My father loved the crossword puzzle; he hated the fraud who was now printing it. And he also would have designed one hell of a Smart Grid.
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