Hi, and welcome to Power of the Network.
I'm your host, Tim Locker, vice president of Broadband here at CBM.
You know, today I'm excited we're going to have our first repeating guest on the podcast, mister Chris Kurtz.
We're going to throw a little bit of controversy his way and talk about security of the power grid.
Let's jump right in and see what he's got to say.
Chris, thanks again for joining us today.
It's great to have you back, great to be here.
You should be proud to know you're the most frequented guest on the podcast already.
So we need to work on the podcast second second visit, but you know, I really enjoyed our last visit and I'm looking forward to this one.
So we're going to stir the pod a little bit today.
Okay, all right, So I read an article here that was titled why ninety percent of the people would die if the grid failed?
What's your response?
I disagree with that completely.
I think they'd be more.
No, I think it would be less.
Would there be an impact, definitely?
Would Would some people die more than likely?
But I think humans have proven themselves to be pretty resilient over the past several thousand years, and so it would have an impact, and it would in a short run, be a large impact.
But I think people would find ways around that.
There are multiple ways to produce electricity, And long before the grid was anywhere close to what it is now, people still had electricity in their towns and in their businesses, and it was just more localized in many ways than it is now.
So I think people would find a way to survive.
So that localization is that better or worse so from or the value of either.
So from an economic perspective, it's worse.
Right if you can build larger power plants that produce the electricity, share it and share that, it's going to cost less that if everybody has to build their own power plant in their town or in their region.
Yeah, so you know, and i'll uh, I'll admit, you know, the source of the article was actually from ah it was a preppers organization.
You know, the title is a little clickbaity, but it does bring to mind the topic of of of security.
Uh.
You know, and I know that the topic of security with within the power grid has been something that's been taken very seriously here in the last several years.
So I wanted to bring you on and talk a little bit about that.
Uh.
You know, most recently, we had the big ice storm in Texas.
Uh, you know, close to two hundred billion dollars in damage.
There was you know, actually several hundred people that that died during that event.
You know, I don't remember exactly, but what was the time frame it took them to bring that back up and run.
And so again that was more than a Texas event.
That was a Midwest event.
Actually in the region we're in here, we had rolling brown outs for the first time in history during that same story due to that story, Due to that storm as well, Texas has a hit very hard because they had a nuclear plant that was off for maintenance.
There, there were some of the power at the time of the storm, some of the power that they were getting from renewables, you know, when mainly was not coming in.
Solar wasn't helping in any significant way simply because the weather and the sun wasn't out much.
And and so just kind of a trifecta of events led to the outages that occurred in Texas and the impacts of that, but it was felt all through the Midwest at that time, and I think what it brought probably showed us was our country started down a path probably three administrations ago of this dramatically quick move to renewables and away from coal and coal is coal provides the what you do to make electricity and what you have for as long as it's been made in large quantities is you bring coalon, you burn it in basically a gigantic stove, and you boil water with it.
It creates the heat that boils the water, The water becomes very high pressurized water.
It flows through big pipes, and it goes through what they call turbines that turn as the steam goes into their fins, that turns a generator and makes electricity.
So steam turbin, right, steam turbine, and those are the most outside of hydro, those are the most economical way to produce electricity.
That's why there's so many of them around the world, not just the United States.
And so we started this move to wind and to solar and away from carbon, and that makes sense, and I think most utilities would agree with you completely that that makes sense.
That's a good long term plan.
But the technology wasn't there then, and still to a large degree, isn't here today to do that efficiently, to move away from coal fire power plants, certainly in any quick fashion.
And so because we had started down that road, wind turbines were being built all over the country have been for the last few decades, and there was a lot of emphasis put on having them provide power as opposed to coal.
What happened during that winter vortex I think it was called during that period of time was that it just wasn't as windy as you'd like it to be in the middle part of the country, and so wind wasn't producing the power that it needed to produce, and then because of outages for maintenance and other things.
Now are the wind turbines also obviously in an ice storm they're affected dramatically too well that they can be although these things are massive, right, I mean, the arms on these things can be one hundred foot long, you know, and so the blades I mean on these things, and so they actually can blow off when and at the same time they can be directed so that the impact of an ice storm is minimized, okay, right, but yeah, to some degree they would be impacted.
And so you know, what happened during that period of time was we were moving too quickly.
And so what you've seen a lot of electric utilities do since that winter vortex is not scale back or move away from coal, but slow it down and with the idea of letting technology catch up to effectively either capture carbon which is a big, big thing that's being pushed today, so that you don't have to necessarily move away from it.
You find a way to deal with it within those power plants.
And then ultimately, you know, solar is becoming more efficient.
It's nowhere near where it needs to be, but it's becoming more efficient, and there's more wind that's going up all of the time.
And how those things interact with each other because they're all sources of power, and so when you're trying to provide power to large cities and to you know, customers big and small, you have to determin and what's at this moment in time, what is the best source of power?
Should I use a coal fire power plant?
There's gas fire power plants, there's hydro power plants power from them.
Should I use it from wind turbines turning?
Should I use it from solar?
You have to make real time decisions about all that because again, the one thing that we really don't have in this country, really in the world, is any effective way to store electricity.
You know, when you flip a switch in your house and you expect that light to come on, there is power at that same instance that has to be produced at a power plant of some kind.
There's no way to store it.
Now.
Battery storage, you're hearing more and more about the batteries are still still fairly inefficient at that it's coming.
It's there.
It's just around the corner, as a matter of fact, on battery technology, and that'll be a game changer for electric vehicles, for everything when those technologies get to the next level from where they're at.
We're just not there yet.
It's not there, right, So my understanding, there's actually three power grids.
You've got the East, the West, and then Texas Texas right right, and really the way sorry to interrupt the way those breakups, just say, you know, the Rocky Mountains separate the East from the West, and there are more and more transmission lines that are going across the Rockies, so the interconnection is getting stronger between the East and the West, but it is still not a solid connection.
And then Texas.
They're not totally isolated there.
Oh no, they are not totally isolated at all.
But you could not power one with the other completely if if one and if the entire Western grid went down or the etern entire Eastern grid went down, you couldn't power one with the other and across.
So and then Texas is just always like to be its own entity in regard to a lot of things.
And so they do have ties, they just don't have ties of sufficiency to power all this nearly redundant.
Right, So, you know, there's really a few different threats right to the network.
You've got you know, physical threats, whether it's somebody actually shooting something or taking something out, or whether it's weather, et cetera.
But you know, cybersecurity is also, uh, you know one that that we see on the news a lot today.
I read a stat the other day something like thirty eight percent of actual threats to the substations were physical threats in some way.
What what kind of things can the utility do?
Not only what kind of things, but like what are we what do we need to protect?
What's the critical equipment you know that we that we've got to take care of and what can we do to Okay, uh, well, maybe let me back up post a little bit and back up to the grid because we were talking about those and you know, there's been a lot of talk over time about an entire grid going down, the entire eastern grid going down, or western grid, or all of them going down at the same time.
Yeah, and it's not that they're there's not some justification for that kind of discussion because I don't know if you're called.
In nineteen ninety four we had the Northeast outage blackout which affected New York about a third of the East coast, went back went up into Canada and back over to Ohio actually, and that was that was a massive thing.
But you know, when we talk about survival, if the grid goes down, right, all the power was back up within four days in those areas.
Now it had to be brought back up piece by piece, you know, that's the way it works.
But utilities have been aware of vulnerabilities forever, right, and they've they've been working on that.
I would say that the time and our history where that really got you know, a boost and went into overdrive about ways to protect our grids and to protect you know, our substations and all the parts of the grid.
Really occurred after nine to eleven, and the federal government was involved, but got involved in a much bigger way dictating what has to happen in electric utilities.
And again I want to be clear, it's also gas utilities that could be impacted by this.
They have their grid if you want to talk about it, and so, but for electric utilities, after nine to eleven there was a big emphasis put on it, and utilities started to come together, not that they hadn't, but in much bigger ways to work together to not only build a more reliable grid, but then find better ways to protect it and to protect all the equipment that's therein And so when you look at where we are today with that utilities, we have plans in place.
We do drills oril.
Electric utilities do drills on an annual basis for terished events and for natural weather events tornadoes or large events like ice storms and things, and those events are all around mutual aid with each other.
So for example, some of the big equipment that you'll use in electric utilities can take four years to get once you're order it.
I mean, it's just it's and that's gotten a lot worse since the pandemic, but it's still a long time.
But now there are sharing programs in place and agreements in place so that if I'm an electric utility and I have a terrorist attack and takes out some of my large equipment, I already have contracts in place with other utilities that can provide spares that they have into my area to get the power back up as quickly as possible.
That's true across the country.
And so if big events will happen, and you know we're seeing whether it's global warming or whatever you want to call it, there are bigger weather events that are happening all the time, there are plans in place.
For example, when hurricanes hit the East Coast, utilities from here in the Midwest will send resources, people, trucks, equipments, spare parts out there to help them and in many cases you will triple and quadruple the size of that utilities workforce in a small period of time to address that.
If we have major tornadoes in the Midwest, we have people that have come in from Minnesota, from Arkansas, Oklahoma, even the East coast to help get the power back on in a much quicker fashion than it would have been done thirty years ago.
So I wanted to say that about you know, just the sin.
They're still able to do that on a say there is you know, God forbid a national scale right outage, right, they'd still be able to do that, no doubt.
There is actually a platform in place again through the federal government, through FURK and NRK, those federal agencies that oversee electric utilities, that has criteria in place, that has a command structure in place if there was a larger event in order to get the power back on.
The thing with power is again it's instantaneous, so you can't just put power back onto everybody at the same time if it's all out, because the power plant has to start back up if it's down, and it has to start producing electricity, and that has to come out.
So there's plans in place are called blacks start plans.
So if the power goes out for this entire region or even for this individual utility that serves the area that we're in, they have a black start plan that will start with a diesel generator starting up and that will start a small power plant, get it up and running.
That'll get a bigger one up and running.
That'll get a bigger one, so on and so forth, and then they'll start bringing customers back on a little bit at a time around that area.
All those plans are already a place should those events occur.
And so you know, my opinion is we are in much better shape than we were even thirty years ago in regard to natural or terist that yeah, in the area.
So you disagree with the article.
I would disagree with the article.
There would be impacts, but I don't see those being long term impacts.
So, you know, we see what's going on in the Ukraine with Russia, and you know, I've heard that that Russia is affecting the power plants in the Ukraine.
You know, with cyber attacks and et cetera.
What are we doing to protect from those kinds of threats.
Well, first of all, you know, one thing that Russia is doing is that they are not Before we get to cyber, let's go back to physical.
What Russia has been doing is bombing their power plants and trying to take down that grid infrastructure because they know what will weaken their economies and their ability to do business on a day to day basis.
In the Ukraine.
So if that kind of thing happened here, if we had a terrorist come in and try to blow up a power plant in our area, or even two or three power plants, the way the grid is so heavily internected today more than it's ever been.
The transmission grid.
And again, power plants produce electricity, that's where it starts.
They connect to what we call transmission lines that are just big, heavy wires that run across the countryside that take that power out to what we call substations that then take that power and reduce it down to a level that can go up and down our streets in our neighborhoods and ultimately into our houses and businesses.
And so the grid, which is that transmission part of that, is so heavily interconnected that if I can't get power from my own power plants because they're down for whatever reason, I can get power from another power plant at another company.
For example, we're here in the Midwest, and on a routine basis, the Midwest Utility will sell power to Texas because it's actually cheaper to get power from the Midwest at that point in time than it is for them to produce it themselves for all sorts of reasons.
And we can buy power in the Midwest utilities here from the east coast, or not so much the West coast, but certainly up north and over to the Rockies, and so there are a lot of sources of power.
It's not we talked about localization.
In the days of localization with electricity, if my power plant went down, I was out of luck, My people were, my customers were down until I could get that power plant back up.
Not so anymore.
It's interconnected across that and every it's really everybody's power.
From that perspective, there's just contracts in place, and you pay.
If I'm going to use your power, I'm going to pay you for it, and you know all those sorts of things that allow that to occur.
So from a physical perspective, we're in better shape than we've ever been as electric utilities in the United States right now.
I saw a sixty minutes episode from somewhere around twenty ten timeframes, so, you know, almost fifteen years ago already.
But at that point they'd said you could take out, you know, less than twenty substations and take down the entire grid.
Would that still be accurate today.
No, I would not agree with that at all doubt.
You know, twenty thirty years ago and again that northeast outage started in Ohio, if you could believe it, with a tree that fell into a transmission line, and then because some power plants that were down for maintenance and some it again it was like a trifecta like we talked about with Texas.
All the chips fell, the dominoes felt it exactly the right way for that to cascade all the way back to the east coast.
And so can that happen today to some degree, yes, but to a much limited degree.
And part of that has to do with the way we operate that grid.
The grid is not operated by one central entity that you talk about cyber attacks that you could cyber attack or something.
It's broken up into regions in the country, and each one of those regions operates that part of the grid in that part of the country.
They determine which way power is going to flow.
They determine which devices are going to be opened and closed for maintenance or power plants or on the transmission grid.
It's all controlled by those entities.
For our area here in our part of the Midwest.
It's called the SPP, the Southwest Powerpool, And so these power pools exist around the country so that you don't have a central entity that could be hacked or that could be you know, even though that central entity may own the physical structure of well no.
So so when I say central entity, I mean central entity for the whole country that controls everything there.
I guess I'm talking about an individual power company, right, you know, they they may not own the grid, but they own the pole, and they own the wires, and they do and they own their power plants.
But they're they're they're part of their little local area or regional area depending upon the utility is interconnected with everything else, and really how that utility does business is mandated at two levels, one by their regional that Southwest Powerpool regional control authority, and then ultimately by FURK and ERK those federal agencies that determine how they do business.
And so that grid has broken up that way, so you might you might be able to take out substations in my area that take down my part of the grid, but those the the likelihood that that would then escalate out to anything bigger or certainly a national event are virtually nil.
The protections that are in place, the protective relaying that's in place, the you know, the just the way it's all put together these days, are there to minimize things like that Northeast power outage that occurred in nineteen ninety I think it was nineteen ninety four.
So yeah, you wouldn't see that.
I would, so I would disagree with that.
Well, that's why we bring the experts in.
I guess we're trying to No, I appreciate it.
So if you get anything out of this episode, you know, just remember that we work in several different markets.
We've got expertise in many areas, and if we don't, we've got the relationships to find the answers that are right for you.
We go really deep with our relationships and that's really what we value here at CBM.
If we can be of service to you, please reach out cbmrep dot com.
So what kind of things are we doing to physically protect the grid, to protect substation?
And I think that's important because the world that we're living in today has changed in some ways.
There are people out there that want to hurt us, right.
There are people that whether they're foreign agencies or whatever it is that want to do harm to the United States and to the power grid in that so we are protecting electrical infrastructure, whether that's power plants, substations, the poles, the wires, all of those things much more today than ever in our history.
And so we do that by several things.
One, when you design the electrical system, and this is nothing new, you try to put it out of site, out of site, out of mind, right, and so you try to put like, for example, substations in places where people are not living right and a little ways away from them, and then get the power over back to them where they need it.
The problem is that cities continue to grow and expand.
So yeah, and we're substations, we're all by themselves now.
They have people all around them today.
And you know, ninety percent of substations in this country have a have a fence around them, just a regular chain link fence with maybe some protection at the top to keep it from climbing over it.
But you can easily see the substation.
You can see those devices.
And the biggest thing you see in a substation or the transformers, they take the power and reduce it down to the level like we talked about that you that you send out to the customers, and without those things, bad things happen, right, Yeah, but we do have most electrical systems have backups, even at the customer level, so that if you lost this transformer, you would be able to make You may have a short outage or an outage for two or three hours, but they could switch it over to another source to get it.
So when you design the system, you design it for backup, so if something goes wrong over here, something happens over here.
That said, we're building concrete fences, where in the past you'd have a chain link fence.
Now you're putting concrete concrete fences.
As a matter of fact, the fences today this wasn't true even ten years ago.
Fences today have to have a ballistic rating on them that you're going to put around an electrical infrastructure, power plant or whatever.
In the past, it was just a requirement.
It's it's not a requirement, but it will be.
But it's getting to be.
It's getting to be the standard.
And in the past, the walls were there to reduce the noise maybe from the equipment or just for aesthetics.
Now there as much for ballistic protection, which is you know how much they can resist a bullet being shot into them, and which is interesting because that is a big change that's occurred over the last ten years.
So we're doing things like that.
The equipment that's inside is being built tougher so that they can withstand more bad things that occur to it, and so we're doing things like that.
The transformers the little transformer.
So you go down your road and either you're going to have what we call pad mounts, a little box on the ground, or you're going to have a pole that has a gray or green thing on it that's a transformer.
They can right.
All of those things have been filled with oil.
Historically it's mineral oil.
It's not like motor oil or anything.
But and they use that for insulation and for just isolation of the equipment inside.
If that gets shot or if the pole gets hit and knocked down, a lot of times those things break open and that oil spills.
Now you're dealing with oil spills, and depending on the piece of equipment, that could be a really big deal.
Newer technology is creating those same devices with solid dielectric material, and what that means is no oil nothing to spill out, so if they get shot, go down to the ground.
Another great example is if you go down and you look cross country at the really big power poles that are sticking out and the wires that are going cross country.
Those are transmission lines, and you look up at that wire.
What's holding it up there is called an insulator, and those insulators just protected electrically but also keep it from falling to the ground.
Historically, they've all been made of porcelain, just like a porcelain bathtub or anything else.
You shoot it and it tends to crack and break.
But the newer technologies that you're seeing everywhere today on insulators is polymer, and you shoot a polymer insulator, the bullet will go right through the polymer and it will degrade its ability to operate, but it won't cause it to fail in any way, shape or form.
And so the equipment's just more resilient to attacks than it has been in the past.
And so I think equipment hardening and equipment impacts are being done by what I consider the second risk to electrical grid, which is people.
And you know, you hear lately over the last couple of years about these substations have been attacked by people right that are trying to do harm, and they try to link that to terrorists and stuff.
In my opinion thirty eight years of experience, nine d plus percent of that is is occurring by just people, good old boys that yeah, people that are ignorant.
Let me give you a couple examples.
You know, over my thirty eight years, the biggest impact of those insulators that we're talking about if there is not when not, Whether it's guys out hunting and seeing something shiny up there and they say, hey, man, let me take a shot at that and see what happens.
And the other example is I've seen this on multiple occasions, people that just don't know what a substation is or know what that equipment is back there.
They will go out, you know, for fun in their neighborhood and hey, let's take a pot shot in there, and they'll shoot that transformer and they'll go home and they'll wonder why their powers off because they just don't link the two together that they have anything to do with each other.
And so a lot of that could be education, a lot of that could be just you know, putting those kite of barriers around substations to protect them and other equipment.
I chuckle there because when Iowa finally pass the law for for dove hunting, you know, the company where I started, we had a ton of aerial fiber, and so some of the people that were still there, you know, one of my buddies in particular, you know, he sends a note out company wide says, you know, dove season starts tomorrow.
Everybody be ready for the phone calls.
And they're like, man, you're I mean, if you lost your mind and I forget the number, but it was you know, seven or eight, you know, fiber damage calls from people shooting doves off of right off of the fiber line.
So yeah, and they're not doing that trying to turn.
Yeah, they're just not aware of what impact that has that equipment that's up there.
So anyway, people are a big part of that, but terrorism is a very very minor part of any damage that occurs at at a electric utility substation or a power plant.
Gotcha.
But they are being protected much more today than even ten fifteen years ago.
Well that's good to know because you see the articles and you see the spin and then you know that's that's kind of what the media does.
But uh so the third part then would be cybersecurity.
Right, so how how is how is the grid then actually tied into you know, the telecommunication network or the internet for you know, how how is it even tied together?
What kind of threats can they feasibly do there?
Right?
And it's a great point because electric utility infrastructure is getting more and more interconnected these days, just like everything else.
Is the relays that and relays protect devices, the big devices you know, on the transmission lines and other parts of the system.
Uh.
In the past, they were what we call electro mechanical.
They were moving parts, their little disk things that would you know, be impacted by magnetic fields and do things.
Today, their computers that are in those same locations, in those computers are becoming more and more all controlling in other words.
Uh, in the past, you would have a large building at a say a substation that would be full of these large panels with all of these relays to protect everything.
As we continue to go down the road, and we're not there yet, but my vision of maybe thirty years from now is there's a black box and it does everything that you need to do.
And maybe a backup black box that's in there, and what we call the touchless substation, which is the vision for the future.
And as that happens, you're getting more fiber that comes into substations, You're getting more interconnectivity through networks that are coming into substations, and so that has been a big issue.
You may have seen articles over the last ten fifteen years that have depicted I think sixty Minutes even did a piece on this where they were able to and this wasn't a foreign entity, this was our own federal government trying to test the system.
They were able to get into certain utilities, electric utilities and have control of their power plant effectively and allow that power plant to destroy itself or it would have ultimately a fadness stopped the test.
And so there's been a lot of work, a lot of federal government intervention into which is good from a standardization perspective, into the whole realm of cyber and what works and what doesn't work.
And so there are now protocols in place that are specific to electric utility communication that aren't available outside of electric utilities.
When you get to the key control systems, and a lot of those are called in utilities EMS or energy management systems.
Those are the systems that they can actually control devices in the field with.
They can control the power plants, they can control breakers, which are like breakers in your house that open to isolate paths, and various other pieces of equipment that get power from one place to another.
They're all controlled from a central location within an individual utility, and those devices can if you hacked in that somehow, you would have control of that system and you can play havoc with it.
So the way they build those systems are they are completely isolated island islanded is what they call it, from other network systems, both at that utility and outside that utility.
And what you're seeing many utilities do these days is they're building their own communication systems, so they're putting their own fiber in, they're putting their own communication paths from that central hub out to their equipment in the field and their substations, so that it's completely isolated from the rest of the world.
And I think as we go down the road, you're going to see more and more of that.
So the ability of foreign actors or you know, even people that want to want to do harm here in the United States to be able to get in and hack into those systems is actually going to go down as we go over time.
That said, just because they can get into one doesn't mean they can get into all of them.
Even if they could get into that one, they can't get in all of them because they're isolated.
But on any given day, man, this is this is true as true today as it was two or three years ago.
Each utility, there are many of these are foreign actors that are trying they get one hundred two hundred thousand attempts a day to try to hack into their systems through various various means to do that.
And again they have hardened systems, they have you know, software in place to overcome that.
But the level of in many cases it's the people you would think of and you know, the foreign foreign countries that are trying to get into our systems happens every day and it's been happening every day for years and years, and so utilities I think are on I don't think I know are on the forefront of technology to overcome those types of intrusions.
Well, that's great to know, that's great to know.
You know, I appreciate.
I appreciate the insight.
I appreciate the education, the honesty that you bring with it too.
You know, so when you see these clickbait type of articles, I guess keep this in mind, you know, uh so, but uh you know, thanks thanks for straightening straightened me out on this.
I knew you'd have something to say on the top of well, and I appreciate the opportunity.
I think people need to understand that security is a major issue and electric I'm sure it's the same and gas utilities and others, but in electric utilities, and they've been working on it long and hard to get to a place that I think we should all feel pretty comfortable.
Yep, well, awesome, Well, thanks Kim for joining us number one podcast guests most most appearances.
Won't put that out there again, but you know, we appreciate the education and the inside every time.
So well, thanks for asking being yep, thank you.
We're truly fortunate to have people like Chris on our team.
You know, Chris is super talented, very passionate about what he does, and we thank him again for being on with us today.
If you need expert advice on a project or looking for representation for your product.
Reach out to us here at CBM docbmrep dot com, and until next time, thanks for joining us on power the Network.
