A few months before the assault on Metcalf, Jon Wellinghoff of FERC commissioned a study to see if a physical attack on critical transformers could trigger cascading blackouts. That's what set off the great Northeast Blackout in 2003, leaving 45 million Americans without power. But if several sections of the grid go down at the same time, the shutdowns can cascade like dominoes. Should a transformer explode, like this one in Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy, the system is designed to trigger a localized, grid-preserving blackout. Inside these massive metal boxes, raw electricity is converted to higher or lower voltages. There are 55,000 across the country, each housing transformers, the workhorses of the grid. There are actually three in the U.S.: the eastern, western and Texas has its own. But it was somebody who did have competent people who could in fact plan out this kind of a very sophisticated attack. We don't know if they were domestic actors. We don't know if they were a nation state. That's correct.īill Whitaker: Who do you think this could have been? Security cameras captured bullets hitting the chain link fence.īill Whitaker: We're talking Google, Apple all these guys. On the night of April 16, 2013, a mysterious incident south of San Jose marked the most serious attack on our power grid in history.įor 20 minutes, gunmen methodically fired at high voltage transformers at the Metcalf Power substation. One attack, nine years ago, was a wake-up call for industry and government alike. As we first reported earlier this year, no government agency, not even the Department of Energy, is truly in charge of protecting it. What is surprising is the nature of the grid itself: a hodge-podge of public and privately-owned, half-century-old tech, that is increasingly vulnerable to severe weather, cyber-attacks, and even physical assaults. So it is no surprise the North American electric grid, which creates, moves and delivers our electricity, is considered the most critical part of our critical infrastructure. It provides heat and light, pumps water and fuel, refrigerates food, and breathes life into our TVs, computers and phones. tries to ensure that the world’s largest machine keeps running well into the future.If there's one thing we can't live without in our modern world, it's electricity. When all the pieces are in place in 2024, SuperLab 2.0 will be the biggest energy experiment yet-one that will likely be the first of many as the U.S. The Large Hadron Collider, for example, relies on ESnet for making sure experiments go smoothly and scientists have reliable access to data.Ī small demonstration of this ESnet integration in 2021, analyzing a microgrid model in the small town of Cordova, Alaska, showed only 24 milliseconds of round-trip latency between NREL and PPNL. SuperLab 2.0 will use a low-latency network called Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), a kind of high-speed network dedicated for large-scale science projects. In 2017, the Global RealTime SuperLab connected eight laboratories across two continents, but the experiment suffered from latency issues that made it difficult to pull off meaningful research, according NREL. The “2.0” moniker is there for a reason, as previous SuperLabs have tested aspects of the grid for years-though, not always successfully. It Would Cost $5 Trillion to Fix the Grid. Although a testament to past ingenuity, the grid is also a challenge to our present-day inventiveness as the world continues to warm and cyberattacks become an increasing possibility. That’s why the Department of Energy is launching “SuperLab 2.0,” a network of seven national labs, including National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PPNL) among others, that will conduct energy experiments with 10,000 interconnected devices to test against everything from tornadoes to terrorists.Ī patchwork two major interconnections-Eastern and Western-along with three smaller interconnections, including ERCOT (Texas), Alaska, and Quebec, form the largest machine ever created in human history. electrical grid is staring down many challenges-aging infrastructure, a warming climate, a revolutionary transition to clean energy, and the ever-present danger of cyber attacks, just to name a few. The Department of Energy is creating an energy experiment called SuperLab 2.0 to test the grid for pain points and figure out how to harden the system while also making it greener and more efficient.The grid faces many challenges, including climate change and cyberattacks, and is burdened with aging infrastructure and a lack of capacity.
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