Maryland Energy Report

The NSA (“No Such Agency”), located “in the vicinity” of Fort Meade, Maryland, is reported to be BGE’s largest single customer — and getting larger.

Agency officials anticipated the problem nearly a decade ago as they looked ahead at the technology needs of the agency, sources said, but it was never made a priority, and now the agency’s ability to keep its operations going is threatened. The NSA is already unable to install some costly and sophisticated new equipment, including two new supercomputers, for fear of blowing out the electrical infrastructure, they said. (“NSA risking electrical overload,” Baltimore Sun, August 7, 2006)

Tracking what everybody (you never know!) is doing on (and off) the Internet requires tremendous amounts of computing power and huge amounts of electricity.  And — big problem coming up — you need to make sure that the power doesn’t go off at an inconvenient time.  And you certainly don’t want to be dependent on powerlines and substations that can be easily attacked by terrorists.

Stupid idea: Run an extension cord nearly 300 hundred miles to the John Amos Toxic Coal Power Plant in Putnam County, West Virginia.  Someone has actually proposed this “solution” — it’s called the PATH project.  Sounds like something the Cheney Administration dreamed up.

Here’s a smart idea: Build computing centers that are not connected to the grid.  Generate your own power for electricity, heating and cooling.  And use a lot less energy at the same time.  IBM and Syracuse University have teamed up to do just that:

Heat from the microturbines, meanwhile, will be captured and funnelled into a double-effect absorption chiller that will convert the heat into chilled water. That chilled water will then be utilized to cool down the computers. Air conditioning can take up half of the power delivered to a data center. Waste heat by contrast is arguably free energy. The turbines and chillers will allow the university to run the data center off the grid.

In fact, it’s already built and ready to go.  Take a video tour.  Can’t say the same for PATH!

EBay will install five natural gas fuel cells with a total capacity of 500 kilowatts at its facility in San Jose.  The city approved the permit in July.  The fuels cells are made by Bloom Energy:

CNN Money in 2007 placed Bloom on its list of 15 companies that will change the world, and it said Bloom’s fuel cell could disrupt the idea that power has to come from central power plants. Sridhar’s plan calls for making fuel cells that can run on any hydrocarbon fuel, including ethanol, biodiesel, methane or natural gas.

The fuel cells turn natural gas into electricity with much higher efficiency than large combustion generators.   These small fuel cells could power single homes, neighborhoods or commercial facilities and could feed power back to the grid.  The National Renewable Energy Laboratory published a study in 2003 explaining how widespread distributed generation could interact with the grid.

The U.S. military will be very interested.

Bloom was started by K.R. Sridhar who aims to bring the benefits of electricity to the billions of people not connected to any power grid — and likely never will be.

60 Minutes gave us a taste of current thinking about the vulnerability of the U.S. power grid to hostile action. It ain’t pretty: Cyber War: Sabotaging the System.

First, we learn that Internet attacks on private financial systems and secure government computer systems are now routine, significant and ongoing.

We also learn that the top concern of national-security officials is the power grid.  Here, the danger is that unauthorized access could be used not merely to monitor or steal data, but to take control of physical systems like large generators or transformers to make them malfunction and self-destruct.

The destruction of such hard-to-replace assets could leave parts of the country without power for long periods of time.  Building new, unneeded high-voltage transmission projects like the proposed PATH power line would leave us even more vulnerable to attack.

The 60 Minutes report concludes by highlighting the work of the House Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology which has been stymied by the “private sector” in its efforts to draw more attention to the problem.  In a statement, Representative Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, said:

Most of the electric industry had not completed the recommended mitigations, despite being advised to do so by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. This effectively left many utilities vulnerable to attacks. Furthermore, in spite of existing mandatory cybersecurity standards, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (“NERC”) recently reported that many utilities are underreporting their critical cyber assets, potentially to avoid compliance requirements.

How many remember the days before 9-11, when the airline industry stonewalled efforts to improve airport security?  And after 9-11, that same industry was bailed out by the federal government and protected from liability.  The power industry probably expects to get the same deal from Washington in the event of a cyber-attack or other hazard that takes out parts of the grid.

One key point was missing from the 60 Minutes story.  The impression was created that only foreign governments were capable of launching attacks on our critical infrastructure.  That’s comforting.  After all, the Chinese are pretty rational and probably won’t attack our grid so long as we don’t attack them.  (They like selling us televisions.)

A more insidious danger comes from non-state actors, including terrorist groups or criminal gangs.  The unpleasant truth is that these unpredictable non-state actors may also have the capability to inflict serious harm on our power grid.  The 60 Minutes story does mention cases of blackouts in Brazil that were probably caused by criminal gangs.  (The Brazilian government is disputing the report.)

No wonder the Pentagon is so anxious to get off the grid.