I was on duty as security for a.. semi secret substation designated as critical infrastructure that night. In the Bay Area, we just had to divert power a little bit. It basically didn’t affect the grid at all.
Everyone was all a little more worried as to if this was isolated, if we were next, etc etc.
Transformers that are small are often on hand and easy to swap out. But some of the bigger ones have months long lead times. The facility we were at had transformers that had a 6 month lead time from Germany to replace them and they had to be sent via boat as they wouldn’t fit in planes.
The average person isn’t going to know that about transformers. Which leads more credence to the fact it’s an inside job.
> The average person isn’t going to know that about transformers. Which leads more credence to the fact it’s an inside job.
The long replacement time for transformers would be known to anyone spending 15 minutes googling what parts of the electrical infrastructure are vulnerable to a sniper attack. It's been discussed on HN before [0] so you better believe it shows up on forums for linemen or preppers or wannabe terrorists. Maybe it diminishes the chance it was a random act of vandalism, but it doesn't speak in favour of the attack being an inside job.
If it's terrorism, they're going to want to have an effect that is large. That is the nature of terrorism. Small events that are insignificant are not the goal of terrorism.
If a person wanted to cause harm and damage the electrical infrastructure. They would have spent time planning and figuring out how to cause the most damage, with the least detection, with having the most PR and effect. Shooting a bunch of neighborhood transformers isn't the way. In their research they would have found so many other high-reward low-risk targets.
OR this was a "vulnerability scanning", and not the actual attack. Perhaps they were a group of friends that wanted to shoot and see if sparks will fly (literally), like we see in the movies.
OR assuming it is a group of sleepers/terrorists doing a pen-test (not the actual penetration/assault). They now (back then) answered the following critical questions: How long does it take to incapacitate such an installation? Will readily available guns do to work? How many people/guns/bullets do we need to pull this through? What monetary value damage can we do? Who/where is the back of this place? What do we need to shoot in there to make more damage (time, money, both)?
So know "they" know that smaller boxes were replaced in a few minutes and larger boxes cost more and take 6 months (so large boxes it is!!!)
Exactly like a vulnerability scanning/penetration test. "They" now so much more on the target, it's vulnerability, it's protection, how to disable.
This said, they know that taking down one of these things is but a scratch. How about 3? 5? 10? Can a group of 50, broken down in teams.of 4, with 1 rifle and 20 bullets each, take down a station like that and be our of there in 5 minutes?
These are questions that anyone with security, military, project background will be asking (and I am not CIA, KGB, etc)(so imagine how these 'departments'(?)) must have thought of it further...
Unless.. this post was all about trying to identify criminal minds.. in which case.. guys.. I am in the good side on this!! The good hat!! (no more white-black hats)
The idea of a strategic reserve of large power transformers has been discussed at length to help ameliorate the impact of something like this from an order of literally 6-24 months, compounded into multiple years, down to... perhaps a couple of weeks/lower order of months.
It seems completely insane that we're not prioritizing this sort of reserve. We could basically order 50 or so LPTs for < $2B which is a goddamn steal for the peace of mind and short-ish turnaround time we'd have for replacing critical infrastructure. There are some issues in that many are bespoke for their specific implementation, but the report discusses that as well.
I believe that those who make the choices think with their wallets, not their mind (and it's thereof peace). Imagine you got a $2bn worth of stock, that you need to maintain (even if it's just removing the dust from the box). Then an upgrade comes up on component ABZXYZ1B so now you need to fly someone from Germany, fly in the component, replace the thing, test the think, repack the thing. That extra cost and effort is considered. Do all stations use the same make/type/version of the thing? Or we need to stockpile 20 categories of them $500m-$2bn of each type?
A good and expensive side-gain would be repairing and/or upgrading some infrastructure (roads/bridges for the transportation, which is extra cost).
> A good and expensive side-gain would be repairing and/or upgrading some infrastructure (roads/bridges for the transportation, which is extra cost).
Without electricity I find it difficult to see how anything gets done
+ No mobile phones (handsets rapidly run out, base stations (is this the right term?) are fried, and if they weren't they'd be without power
+ No landline phones
+ No internet - how are you going to co-ordinate anything including crop gathering, packing, distribution, and sales? How are people going to buy anything without money, or a job to earn money if that money hadn't disappeared in a puff of no-bank-account-because the banks... see below.
+ Pumps for fuel are electric aren't they. Cash registers are electric. Banks are effectively electric these days - no electricity no action so no movement of money.
Plus if we keep using fossil fuels and don't transfer to electrical power throughout, what w ill climate change throw at us.
How large of a boat would you need to really do damage though? I suspect that most undersea cables are tough enough to withstand your average sub-1000HP fishing/water skiing boat, and would need something a bit harder to come by to be easily damaged.
I'm not going to speak to specifics. Let's just say, you'd be surprised. It's more about the cutting force than it is say about the mass. Yes, a large boat will make even the dullest anchor a strong knife via force. But a small anchor that is sharpened could do the trick.
You don't need to split the wire in half. You merely need to expose it enough to cause it to go to ground with a significant enough amount.
The facility in question could see any boat on the water, and if a boat stayed over the lines too long. Authorities would have to be notified. After I left this exact thing happened by accident, and it was in an area where large boats did not enter due to the water being too shallow.
The [Trans Bay Cable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Bay_Cable) is a 53mi-long cable carrying 400MW at 200kV DC (so that's 2000A). It's capable of supplying 40% of San Francisco's electricity needs.
So dragging an anchor probably would do more damage to your boat and the anchor than the cable itself - but I imagine a diamond-tipped cutting blade could probably make its way through the armor layer eventually - perhaps some carefully placed underwater explosives would help weaken it too. Just hope you have protection against the extreme current going through the cable travelling up your anchor...
So yes, it's within the realm of possibility for an individual to sabotage the SF Bay Area's electrical power system.
...that's scary.
But the thing about disrupting public utility infrastructure is that it doesn't fill people with fear - it just inconveniences them. If there was a news headline about some incel/qanon idiot dropping underwater explosives into the bay around this cable from a rowboat to shut-down SF's power supply it just seems... underwhelming and non-threatening: quite the opposite of a macho-masculine power-fantasy - and they'd probably get laughed out of the communities they claim to represent.
Explosives could easily cut right through it. You can cut cleanly through reinforced concrete bridge pillars with just high yield detonation cord or c4 collar charges.
The world of infrastructure security is quite terrifying once you start digging into it. I believe at some point in the 1970s, the CIA started doing red team operations on domestic terrorism infrastructure vulnerabilities. They eventually stopped or slowed significantly because they had so many simulated breaches that they couldn't possibly contain them all. They had to significantly refocus their attention on prevention by identifying who/what/where/why instead of how (their traditional cold war methodology that many thought was outdated), because there were practically infinite ways identified that infrastructure could be crippled.
No need for explosives even. The technology for quickly cutting through reinforced concrete has been available since the end of the nineteenth century, and has been an industrial thing since at least the middle of the twentieth century.
For underwater cables I wouldn't say non-expert: the trade that has the expertise generally pays around USD 60k per annum.
Being around 2 kA discharges underwater is probably not a great idea, however. Automation would be one possibility, raising required expertise and lower required headcount. A little searching indicates that if one is willing to acquire a ROV, there are at least two other commercially available cutting technologies, both of which are normally used for much larger cuts than a 20 cm cable bundle.
Much modern infrastructure relies on people not being jerks, but then again, modern society also relies on people not running around shooting each other, which seems to work.
(except when it doesn't: this is why I am looking into Yugoslavia now. How does one get from socialist brotherhood to shooting each other? I have colleagues, yugo refugees, whose conspiracy theory is that the conflict was externally stoked, but I currently find people being stupid to be a more parsimonious explanation.)
To me this whole thread reads like an ad for solar + local storage. There should be tremendous resilience advantages compared to grid power. I’m surprised security/defence authorities aren’t pushing for that?
It really seems like it would depend on the topology and capacity of the various routes. Just having more of them isn't necessarily the same as having more flexibility in routing.
> There should be tremendous resilience advantages compared to grid power
Perhaps in California, but in northern latitudes (e.g. central Europe) solar does not generate sufficient power during winters. It would be necessary to have either massive south-north power lines (so less resilience), or some storage.
Such storage would need to be massive (orders of magnitude bigger than just for day-night ballancing) and unlikely to be battery-based. Chemical storage is a possibility - plants converting excess electricity to hydrogen/methane and storing it in underground reservoirs (like ones currently used for strategic reservers of natural gas). But such facilities would be subjects to economy of scale, and therefore likely big and centralized, like current grid facilities.
If it's the "instant delivery" you propose to replace by local storage, what is the link with solar? You could as well store energy received from the grid.
Solar is particularly inefficient, both because of the volume it requires per unit of energy produced, and because storing energy incurs a huge loss (also, since this post discusses security risks, I guess storing large amounts of energy at home is definitely not the safest of options)
"Solar is particularly inefficient, both because of the volume it requires per unit of energy produced, and because storing energy incurs a huge loss "
When your goal is to be at least temporarily energy autark (in case of a power loss for some days) it does not really matter, how much energy was needed to produce the panels. What matters is, that you have that powersource in that moment.
And it surely works very efficient, especially in california.
Even in rainy middle europe, I am able to go to a remote place with my tent, laptop, power bank and small solar panels - and can enjoy distraction free working time - without access to the grid.
> What matters is, that you have that powersource in that moment.
And if that moment is during the night, you don't have it. If power outage is a part of your threat model, you want something that you can reliably switch to in a very short time and that will reliably provide the power you need for as long as you need to get the primary power supply back up.
I could entirely scrape by without power at night for some time. Would it be inconvenient? Absolutely. Threatening? No. The little infrastructure I’d really need to run over night includes probably my fridge and my freezer and those could be powered by a battery backup for that time. There’s ready made modules for available for that (camping equipment level ready).
Stove, oven, kettle not being available would be seriously annoying, but not threatening either. Intermittent power would be a massive improvement over no power at all.
Right, but you're not running a data center or factory.
Individually, unless you're in very harsh climates, the safety margin for normal operations is huge. But that's not the case for complex systems. You can't simply shut down a data center for a week without turning it from a data center into some expensive building that currently provides zero value.
Society relies on reliability. By extension, so do you, because without reliability in factories, there won't be solar modules, batteries and all the fancy gadgets being produced. Individually, you can easily survive a few days without power, or without food for that matter. But on a society level, that's a very different story.
The risk here is that a terror attack on grid infra knocks out so much of society. No electricity => so much trouble.
My point is that with solar+storage you get a more resilient system that can continue to provide power even if central grid infra i knocked out.
You can have wind instead of solar, but you need some way of generating. Storage alone gets you through a night, not more.
What risk do you see with commercial battery storage? You do know there is gasoline in cars and many houses are heated using natural gas, right? Compare and evaluate risks between those please.
You say that solar is ”particularly inefficient. I do not agree
> The risk here is that a terror attack on grid infra knocks out so much of society. No electricity => so much trouble.
Seriously, your argument is a 5 sigma event? Sure, everything can be justified with overly extreme and improbable settings. I won't enter the debate on whether it actually make sense to protect yourself from that, I have the feeling it cannot end up being a constructive discussion.
> you do know there is gasoline in cars and many houses are heated using natural gas, right?
Sure, escalate the condescending tone, that will surely improve the quality of the debate.
> What risk do you see with commercial battery storage?
I don't think the consumers should be trusted to store and maintain meaningful quantities of energy.
Long time ago, where I lived in Europe, people used to be heated by either fuel or gas. Nobody had electrical heaters. That meant you would frequently find these gigantic gas tanks (sometimes burried, sometimes not) in people gardens. Now it is forbidden to have them, or they have to be totally underground. Why?
Because there were simply too many accidents, too many tanks left unattended for years, or forgotten.
You cannot trust people to reliably store and pay for maintenance of their installations forever. And keep in mind, I'm talking about gas tanks here, which have a lifespan of dozens of years, and are pretty sturdy.
Batteries? A few years at most, and that is if you have all the proper circuitry to cycle them periodically, regularly rebalance them, change them, etc.
I would be curious to compare the number of defects from consumer grade lithium ion batteries, versus a gas tank. My guess is that there is a higher rate of defect in batteries. Then factor in the number of batteries required to store a few days of your household energy, I guess the law of large numbers would quickly kick in.
> You say that solar is ”particularly inefficient. I do not agree
Alright, let this be my last answer is this thread because I have the feeling arguing more will just lead to feed the troll.
1) if you are trying to generate energy for storing, and your end result is charge, then you're doing it wrong.
There is not much you can do to efficienty store charge, you can transfer it to a battery, but this is not energy efficient, not to mention a battery is inherently short lived.
Efficient energy generating systems generate some kind of mechanical force: steam, heat, are good examples. It is much easier and efficient to store than charge.
Classically, pumping water up a hill is a popular mean of storing energy. That is what most solar plants are doing.
Batteries are used when consumers require very little energy storage, and they are small/easy to distribute.
2) solar is inherently inefficient because it requires storage.
Storage is always a loss because it requires to convert energy to something else. And conversion is never lossless.
Nuclear (and water dam up to a point) deliver real time energy at any time, thus eliminating the need of conversion that you have with solar.
But of course you need a grid system for that. And apparently your sole argument is based on a hypothetical shutdown of the grid.
3) The volume of panels per energy output ratio is ridiculous, making solar a totally impractical and environment unfriendly choice.
From the top of my head, the volume/output ratio between nuclear and solar is >50. Not only does this mean 50x more space, but but also 50 times more unrecyclable equipment.
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Ton conclude, I just don't find any sense in trying to find alternatives to the grid system. Concentrating the means of energy production and distribution seems to be the most effective and climate friendly way.
In the case of parent post mention that he goes camping with solar panels to charge his laptops, that seems nonsensical to me.
From a quick paper computation, I would need 15 hours of a portable solar charger to fully chargey laptop battery. Based on an average of 5 hour/day (that's what most solar plant can achieve) that means 3 days for a 100% laptop charge. You're better up just taking a spare fully charged battery with you when hiking. It will be lighter than the solar panels, and most probably charged at home with nuclear energy, it will end up being more environmenta
friendly.
As for storing energy in case the grid goes down: environmental problems worries me way more than a terrorist attack on the energy grid. I would rather not spend time trying to purposefully inefficiently store energy "just in case", and use that time to try to convince people that clean energy with the current grid system is more important.
What makes it a power grid is that the stations and substations are connected in a mesh topology. Every major load center is going to have multiple possible paths for power flows from multiple generators. In most cities, even residential distribution will have multiple feeder paths.
In most cases these are controlled by switches at the substations that put circuits in and out of service, thus moving the path current must take. More modern options include phase shifting transformers and other reactive device, and even impedance reactors that will adjust flow across multiple live circuits.
Aside from that, changing where generation is happening also moves current to different circuit paths, so for example a "peaker" gas turbine plant that can ramp up quickly might be brought online in one location electrically closer to the load to balance flow away from an overloaded or to-be-disconnect circuit.
What that practically means is power that would have normally come through those substation would be delivered by some other source, and thus go through a different set of substations.
What most people don't understand is that it's important that the demand + the transmission losses = the production, not just as a whole, but also for each link. To help with that most places don't produce 100%, and a lot of higher power links are redundant. But that can only cover so much. If it's not a high demand day you can probably source power from other providers, but sometimes that's not enough.
EIL5 Answer. Power (mostly) follows the path of least resistance. Like water does.
To divert power certain stations or links in the grid can offer resistance via either terminating, or other means.
Another thing is, It’s a common understanding that power facilities can produce and modulate power. But they can also spin in reverse, thus using power.
The average person might not know about transformers, but the set of people who know about transformers isn’t exactly small. It’s plenty large enough for there to be miscreants who know about transformers but aren’t power company insiders.
Yeah it's pretty well known. For some larger transformers they used the world's largest plane, An 225, to transport them half way across the globe because otherwise it would be a months long delay.
Isn't transmission lines and substation information public by necessity?
My takeaway from this story is that a saboteur cell of as little as 10 people could take down multiple substations in sync, causing way more serious consequences.
Attacking substations is a hard way too, one could just mix up some thermite and bring down some 500kW transmission towers.
Not all of it. Some designated as critical infrastructure is protected, private business can also be protected information.
The trick here is, most of the grid can compensate for outages and entire sections being lost. It's build to handle that. You can't just run out and bring down substations and transmission lines and knock out a city.
There's only some that are absolutely critical. Take Diablo Valley for example. Because they're nuclear and critical, they have an entire SWAT Team on hand and folks with .50 Cal Rifles on the roofs.
I wont speak to the security of this facility. I'll just say this, If someone got within 10 feet of the facility. It would be immediately known and responded in kind. There is no way, even digging a tunnel, someone would not be noticed.
Presumably everything is more robust now that lessons have been learned and single-point failures shouldn't have that sort of effect. Coordinated multiple failures most certainly will take down huge swaths.
Since it is near a gun range, I had simply assumed it was some yahoos driving around with their AR's firing at it as though it were nothing more than another road sign on a remote rural stretch.
I can see (drunk and/or irresponsible) persons wanting to shoot at the insulators to make them spark and blow up - you get some pretty nice fireworks that way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCzdPFJ4tog
What? The kind of people who go to ranges are not the kind of people who would fire randomly at infrastructure. What would be the point of going to the range if you’re fine shooting in the open? Please don’t defame responsible gun owners like this.
Everyone was all a little more worried as to if this was isolated, if we were next, etc etc.
Transformers that are small are often on hand and easy to swap out. But some of the bigger ones have months long lead times. The facility we were at had transformers that had a 6 month lead time from Germany to replace them and they had to be sent via boat as they wouldn’t fit in planes.
The average person isn’t going to know that about transformers. Which leads more credence to the fact it’s an inside job.