NERC’s delayed and muted response to the sabotage of a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. substation April 16 has some electric industry officials concerned.
One or more gunmen breached a security fence and shot and damaged seven of eight transformers at PG&E’s Metcalf substation near San Jose about 2 a.m. The shooting prompted the California Independent System Operator to issue an alert asking residents in the region to cut their electricity use.
But the seriousness of the sabotage was slow to spread elsewhere in the electric industry. PJM didn’t receive an alert from the North American Electric Reliability Corp. until two days later, Mike Bryson, executive director of system operations, told the Operating Committee last week. The incident “was a lot worse than it appeared to be when we got the alert,” Bryson said.
Bryson said the NERC official who authored the alert believed “it went out later than he would like and didn’t get the reaction it should have.” An alert sent the following day by the SERC Reliability Corp. made clear the seriousness of the incident, Bryson said.
NERC and SERC told PJM Insider the alerts are confidential and would not be made public. The shooting occurred minutes after someone cut underground fiber optic cables a half mile from the substation, briefly knocking out phone and 911 service in the area. Law enforcement officials believe the two incidents are related.
Bryson said the industry gets more than 10 reports annually of shootings at transmission lines but most incidents are far less serious than the April 16 event.
The incident underscored a risk raised last year by Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Wellinghoff told Bloomberg News that he feared saboteurs with guns could target transformers. Transformers, which are usually protected only by chain-link fences, are often custom built and can take 18 to 36 months to replace, Wellinghoff said.
An attacker “could get 200 yards away with a .22 rifle and take the whole thing out,” Wellinghoff said. The physical security of the grid “is an equal if not greater issue” than cybersecurity, he added.
Cyber Threat Raised
Separately, the Department of Homeland Security warned last week of a heightened risk of a cyber attack on water and electric utilities.
DHS’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) reported “increasing hostility” against “U.S. critical infrastructure organizations,” The Washington Post reported, quoting from the alert. “Adversary intent extends beyond intellectual property theft to include the use of cyber to disrupt … control processes.”
The alert included indicators that companies can use to detect attacks and recommended countermeasures. Industry officials told the Post that the level of detail in the alert was evidence that President Obama’s February executive order — which directed the executive branch to increase information sharing with industry — was having an impact.
