By Rich Heidorn Jr.

WASHINGTON — NERC CEO Jim Robb blinked in seeming disbelief when he walked into a press conference at his organization’s offices here Wednesday and was confronted by 10 reporters — more than twice as many as had shown up when he had his first press briefing almost nine months ago. “I didn’t think I was that interesting,” he joked.

Robb, who took the top job at NERC in April 2018, is not someone who hungers for attention. But the spotlight on NERC has grown nonetheless as it has been drawn into the fuel-wars debate over whether the grid can remain resilient as the resource mix changes. NERC also has drawn attention because of the growing cyber threats and China’s role in technology supply chains.

Just two weeks ago, security firm Dragos reported that XENOTIME, the group behind the 2017 TRISIS malware attack on a Saudi Arabian oil and gas facility, “began probing the networks of electric utility organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere” in late 2018.

A day after the Dragos warning, The New York Times reported that the U.S. has increased its cyber incursions into Russia’s electric power grid, a move that it noted “carries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.” Last week, the Times and others also reported that the U.S. Cyber Command had conducted attacks against computer systems that control Iranian missile launches.

Asked whether he was concerned that moves against Russia could make the U.S. grid more of a target, Robb demurred.

“As the CEO of NERC, no [comment],” he said. “These are issues of national defense and military strategy and not electric reliability. So, I have my own opinions that I will talk about over a cocktail sometime, but I think I’ll pass on [commenting in] this forum.”

“That is a very good question,” said NERC Chief Security Officer Bill Lawrence, director of the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, when he was asked later during a tour of the E-ISAC.

He did not answer either.

“All I can say is we’ve got some really smart people; they’ve got some really smart people,” he said. “And cyber is recognized as another domain by the Department of Defense.”

Outside the ‘Four Walls’

Robb said that although the electric industry’s mandatory standards give it “a very good security posture … when you get beyond the four walls of the electric industry, things get very murky very quickly.” That is illustrated, he said, by the supply chain.

In May, NERC’s Board of Trustees accepted staff’s “Cyber Security Supply Chain Risks” report, which recommended revising the supply chain standards to address electronic access control or monitoring systems (EACMS) and physical access control systems (PACS) connected to high- and medium-impact bulk electric system cyber systems. NERC is planning to send a data request in early July on whether low-impact systems with external routable connectivity should also be covered. (See “Supply Chain Report Recommends Expanding Standards,” NERC Standards News Briefs: May 8-9, 2019.)

Robb said NERC is now developing a Level 2 alert to ask industry about their use of Chinese vendors, a follow-up to the “all-points bulletin” the E-ISAC issued in March regarding Chinese equipment suppliers, including Huawei and ZTE.

Anecdotally, Robb said, NERC has heard examples of Huawei technology in utility push-to-talk communication systems and some security cameras. Huawei also has been found in a small share of rooftop solar inverters in California. “We don’t expect we’re going to find many in the bulk power system,” he said.

Impact of Politics

NERC also is being looked to for reassurance that the grid can remain reliable as natural gas and renewables increasingly replace baseload coal and nuclear generation. The issue will become more acute as some policymakers pursue goals of 100% renewable power.

Robb said the impact of public policy debates on the industry “makes our world that much more complicated.”

“There’s a lot of understandably strong views that may not always be extraordinarily founded by the science,” he said, citing as an example those who confuse geomagnetic disturbances with electromagnetic pulses.

“Resource decisions are heavily driven by public policy, as they should be,” he added. “Public policy tends to be promulgated by people with a relatively short time horizon. And one of the challenges you have in the electric industry is we build assets that last 30, 50, 100 years.”

Robb said reaching a 100% renewable power system will take a new form of battery technology to replace lithium-ion “and probably some other investments that need to be made for things like voltage support and frequency response.”

But Robb is confident the West can survive its “tectonic shift.”

“The West was built around Rocky Mountain coal and Northwest hydro going into Los Angeles. It’s now being reversed. It’s solar out of L.A. going elsewhere. As long as there’s enough time to understand the issues and make sure that the transmission system is reinforced [so] you have the adequate voltage … to make the system operate stably, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

It will take deployable batteries “at extraordinary scale — I think people sometimes miss the scale of the electric industry,” he said.

“Twenty-four hundred megawatts of storage, which I think is what Southern California Edison is pushing for, [is just a start],” Robb said. “It’s a 12-GW peak load. And if you’re going to go for an entirely renewable system, at some point you’ve got to deal with the fact that you’ve got the Marine Layer [which can inhibit solar power] for several days; it may not always be windy. You’ve got to have the whole suite of technologies to get you through those [days], and that requires batteries.

“It’s easy to set great goals, and I think great goals are very important because they’ll galvanize a lot of important technology development. But some of the time frames that some of the [presidential] candidates have talked about, I personally don’t think they’re realistic. But will they spur a lot of great innovation along the way? Absolutely.”