How a Man Can Shoot, and How to Succeed: Shooting Up Electrical Substations in Moore County, N.C.

NORTH CAROLINA — When Moore County, N.C., suddenly went dark last Saturday night, Mayor Carol Haney was perplexed. There’d been no storm, no warning, just darkness on what had been a festive holiday season evening. Tens of thousands of people were off the grid for a week due to a shooting attack on two electrical substations.

“This beautiful part of the world gets sabotaged,” said Haney. It could happen to anyone. And that’s probably the most frightening for everyone– that this could happen to anyone.”

Those individual vulnerabilities add up to one massive problem. Wellinghoff says a series of precisely targeted substation attacks could trigger a cascade of failures, taking down most of the US power grid.

“The electric grid is the Achilles heel of the United States,” says Mike Mabee, a self-described “grid-security gadfly” who pours over electric company data to highlight vulnerabilities.

Like many he’s worried about Russian or Chinese cyberattacks, but Mabee says the easiest way to hurt Americans is something a lot less exotic, shooting up substations with widely available assault rifles.

Sub stations are soft targets because of the main components in them being huge voltage transformers. High-powered rifle rounds can easily pierce transformers, spring leaks, make them overheat and shut down. The transformer size is larger than railroad boxcars. M.Granger Morgan says it’s hard to replace them.

North Carolina Attacks on Power Grids: After 13 Years of Attacking, the State’s Security Commissioner Received and Protected

The backlogs can stretch to 18 months, with price tags that can run into the millions of dollars. Replacing equipment costs less than taking down the grid.

In 2013 shooters attacked a substation just outside San Jose California. Jon Wellinghoff, the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at that time, immediately recognized it to be a case of more sinister than the reports had indicated.

“So, I had a team out there the very next day to do an investigation,” says Wellinghoff. “We actually found firing positions they had marked on the ground. Two shooters, maybe more. We don’t know the number of people in the team that did the action. But it was extremely sophisticated.”

The saboteurs pumped rounds through a chain link fence after they cut fiberoptic lines to the substation. They hit vulnerable parts of the transformer and fled before police arrived. The bullet holes drained more than 50,000 gallons of cooling oil and knocked out 17 of 21 transformers. Wellinghoff says the attackers came close to taking Silicon Valley off the grid, in an outage that he says could have lasted several weeks.

It was an amazing attack. Wellinghoff thought it would force a reckoning on the way the government regulates grid security. Currently, no one agency has that authority because the duties are split between federal and state regulators.

It’s up to congress to make someone in charge. We went to Congress and asked for additional authority, but didn’t get it,” says Wellinghoff. The standards are written by industry and submitted for approval. And that’s what happened here.”

There are more than 3000 power companies and cooperative in the United States who decided how much security to give to their substations. They built concrete walls around some substations to stop bullets but Wellinghoff says security upgrades didn’t reach many of them.

Most of the people don’t seem to be very well protected. “Many of them still have chain link fences, like the one in North Carolina.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/09/1141937948/north-carolina-attacks-highlight-the-vulnerability-of-power-grids

The Rocky Mountain Cold Front of February 2021 Did Not Break Down and the State of Emergency Emerge on Thursday Night in Cheyenne, Wyoming

State and local authorities are investigating with the FBI. They’ve collected dozens of spent shell casings at the site. State police are reportedly seeking search warrants, while the FBI is asking for cell phone records.

Many of the nation’s 330 million people were on winter alert on Thursday because of a range of winter weather maladies, including snow squalls, high winds, wind chill and hard freezes.

The president spoke to reporters in front of a map of wind chill forecasts. “This is not like a snow day when you were a kid. This is serious.

The cold front has moved so swiftly that temperatures across the Rocky Mountains plunged at record paces. On Wednesday night in Cheyenne, Wyo., the temperature dropped more than 30 degrees in just nine minutes.

Governors in Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wyoming declared states of emergency. Governors in Indiana, Colorado and Missouri activated the National Guard.

Still, there was no repeat of the catastrophe that hit Texas in 2021, with prolonged emergency blackouts causing deaths and widespread property damage. Many grid operators were able to avoid grids being blacked out.

“The grid is ready and reliable,” said Peter Lake, chairman of the state’s Public Utility Commission, in a Wednesday news conference. “We expect to have sufficient generation to meet demand throughout this entire winter weather event.”

Highway Traffic Visibility Without Visibility on Highways and Highways: Weather-Sleep Saturday Travel at Denver International Airport and Midway Airports

On roads and highways from Wyoming to Missouri, wind and snow combined to lower visibility, making it was dangerous to drive. Drivers were urged to avoid travel in several states, including Colorado and Illinois.

For those traveling by air, the prospects weren’t much better: By Thursday, more than 2,100 flights have been canceled and 6,000 more are delayed, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.

The temperature at Denver International Airport was minus 24 degrees, the lowest recorded since 1990. At DIA, well over 500 flights — more than a quarter of all flights in or out of the airport — had so far been canceled Thursday. Nearly 480 more were delayed.

In Chicago, up to 8 inches of snow was expected to fall over the course of the day on Thursday and Friday, and temperatures were expected to fall below zero overnight.

At O’Hare and Midway airports, the city’s major airports, crews worked around the clock to keep flights moving.

The city’s transportation department has more than 350,000 gallons of liquid deicer for runways and taxiways, as well as more than 5,000 tons of salt.

Hundreds of miles away in Kansas City, the winter weather brought only an inch or two of snow. The homeless services in the city were taking a hit from the cold temperatures expected for days.

Many area shelters were still at or close to capacity despite adding beds this week. The city’s streetcar was operating Thursday after crews had worked all day to clear the route and platforms.

The library is closed. So it’s only this or the bus, or you go into a parking garage, but you’ll probably get kicked out,” said Pete, who said he did not have a permanent place to live and declined to give his last name to KCUR. “There’s not much you can do.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1144970060/winter-storm-holiday-travel

The Loss of Power in Montana During the Snowy Season: Cattle Rancher Hank Willemsma and the Electric Grid

The sun was out in Montana as the snow moved towards the Midwest. But the frigid temperatures won’t thaw until the weekend, forecasts say.

It’s nothing new to Montana, even though this is a worse winter than the last few years. We’ve been running cattle for a long time, so we kind of know how to get through stuff like this,” Willemsma said.

Hank Willemsma, a rancher near Dillon, where Thursday’s high temperature was expected to reach minus 13 degrees, said he’d be working through the cold to keep hay out for his cattle.

Additional reporting by NPR’s David Schaper in Chicago, Montana Public Radio’s John Hooks in Butte, KCUR’s Savannah Hawley-Bates in Kansas City and NPR’s Ivy Winfrey in Washington, D.C.

The wind roared and the temperature dropped on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, causing the electric grid to come to a screeching halt.

utilities were so short on power that they could barely run the millions of houses that had heating. Electricity providers declared states of emergency. Some asked residents to turn down their thermostats, and a few had to resort to rolling blackouts.

It was alarming. For those who lost power, it was infuriating. The experts who study the nation’s power system think it was a success story.

“If you were one of those households that did face a significant period of time without power, it certainly didn’t feel fine to you,” says Bernadette Johnson, the general manager of power and renewables at the energy data firm Enverus. Overall, the grid performed well.

The grid couldn’t get an A grade since some customers had to deal with rolling power cuts, according to Morris Greenberg of S&P Global.

Intense Cold Strained but Didn’t Break the Electric Grid That Was Lucky: The Case of Tennessee and Texas During the 2021 Texas Winter Storm

“But under the circumstances, given given how broad and large the system was and how low the temperatures got…B would be would be a reasonable grade,” he says.

In Texas that same day, grid operators were startled by demand for power much higher than they thought and setting a new record. They had to go to an emergency level of pollution standards in case they needed to turn on plants to keep the grid up.

Meanwhile in Tennessee, another record for demand was being set. Residents were asked to wait to do laundry until the warmest part of the day. The utility first implemented rolling power cuts in its 90-year history.

Federal regulators are investigating how the power system was stressed by the storm, noting that this storm hit during a projected “mild” winter and revealed the need for better planning and preparation.

There was fortunate timing: The storm hit right before a holiday weekend when demand tends to be lower. And it hit early in the winter, instead of in February like the 2021 storm in Texas did, which means natural gas stockpiles were relatively high.

Greenberg states the storage infrastructure worked and gas was available where it was needed. If a gas power plant could operate, it could use the fuel it needed.

Johnson says that the weather was sunny and windy. That meant a lot of wind and solar power to help meet the surging demand. The middle of the country had more power to spare because of the cold front that moved towards the southeast.

As the cold front moved, plentiful wind and solar power along with plentiful natural gas kept the nation’s grid from collapsing.

The fact that multiple regions underestimated how much energy was needed should send alarm bells. As the country gets ready to fight climate change, it’s going to be hard for utilities to predict how demand for power will increase.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/30/1145988772/intense-cold-strained-but-didnt-break-the-u-s-electric-grid-that-was-lucky

Sunny, Rainy, and Non-Sleaky Periods in the Pregalactic Phase of the Cosmic Acceleration

Johnson says that we’ll likely see periods where it’s not sunny, or it’s high levels of precipitation. “Those will be some of the truest tests.”