By Rich Heidorn Jr.

WILMINGTON, Del. — When Terry Boston began working for the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1972, its bunkered control room was believed to be one of the targets near the top of the Soviet Union’s nuclear hit list.

Last week, when the retired PJM CEO said his goodbyes at a General Session on “Resiliency and Security,” the concern was not the Cold War but “black sky” risks and the need for “critical low-density engineering assets” to recover from them.

Three speakers talked about their work protecting the grid from natural and manmade threats.

Jeff Dagle spoke about the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s work using parallel processing to aid modeling of extreme events. The technology can help system operators comply with a new NERC standard requiring them to ensure that “multiple outages” don’t cause system instability.

“When you try to model these extreme events, you’re going deeper than traditional N-1 [contingencies]. You’re doing N-K type of analysis,” said Dagle, the lab’s chief electrical engineer for electricity infrastructure resilience. “So there’s many more thousands of possible events you want to simulate and try to understand. Unless you throw that on a parallel computer, you’re going to be there for a while waiting for an answer.”

The lab’s work with PJM to apply Bayesian model aggregation — the combination of multiple prediction models — to reduce forecasting errors in network interchange schedules won an R&D magazine award. “This has the potential to save big money” — tens of millions, Dagle said.

David Andrejcak said FERC has become “much more agile” since it formed the Office of Energy Infrastructure Security following the 2013 sniper attack on Pacific Gas & Electric’s Metcalf substation.

Andrejcak is deputy director of the office, which combines the agency’s expertise in electric, natural gas and oil infrastructure. The office identifies threats and examines infrastructure for potential weaknesses but has no enforcement role, unlike the Office of Electric Reliability, which oversees the development of mandatory reliability and security standards.

“By addressing these with the private sector owners, we find that we’re getting a whole lot more success,” he said. “We’re not involved in the standards process. We’re the collaborative branch of FERC.”

Andrejcak noted a Department of Homeland Security analysis that found that almost one-third of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure in 2014 involved the energy industry. “We’re a big target. No doubt about it,” he said.

The session’s keynote speaker was Jonathon Monken, vice president of U.S. operations for the Electric Infrastructure Security Council. The non-governmental organization worries about “black sky” hazards such as cyberattacks or electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) capable of generating a “widespread, long duration” outage that could result in mass migration.

Monken said broadcaster Ted Koppel’s book, “Lights Out,” which highlighted threats that could knock out the Eastern Interconnection for weeks or months, was useful in publicizing the need for preparations, such as assembling critical low-density engineering assets — engineers with expertise in electrical relays.

“We have not yet experienced a power outage that … [results in a] widespread long duration outage. We’re talking about months in terms of the outage. We’re talking about tens of millions [of people] in terms of the footprint.

“We don’t have the capacity to evacuate New York City much less the Eastern Interconnection,” Monken continued. “There’s a wide deficit in terms of the capability required to respond and recover from something of that magnitude and duration.

“I’d rather have an EMP event than just about any of the other ‘black sky’ hazards that include things like earthquakes and cyber[attacks],” he added. “Cyber is difficult because it’s very unpredictable and it’s very deliberate, whereas EMP is a statistical event — it won’t necessarily hit everything everywhere. You’ll have sporadic outages based on percentages.

“Cyber is very deliberate. They’ll only hit where it hurts the most.”