Shawnee Fossil Plant, West Paducah, Kentucky

The very real danger facing America’s power grid

I am not a journalist. I am not a power plant engineer. I am not anti-coal nor am I anti-electricity. I am an American that is concerned about this nation: I see many things that need immediate attention and not enough people working the issues.

Similar to America in the days prior to 9/11, the focus of most Americans today is on anything but a terrorist attack: we spend endless hours debating the presidential chaos in Washington; we watch with bated breath the roller-coaster ride of the stock market; we are consumed with the Kardashians. As Americans, we have once again allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security about life in general; without thought, we turn on our smartphones and tune out the problems of the world around us.

In the days prior to 9/11, Americans knew little about al Qaeda. While our government was aware of the threat al Qaeda represented, it fell victim to “four kinds of failures: in imagination, in policy, in capabilities, and in management.”(1) Few voices in our government attempted to draw attention to the impending threat al Qaeda represented, but for the most part the arguments they made-even to the highest levels of our government-were ignored.

Richard Clarke, one of government’s foremost authorities on cyber terrorism, wrote in Your Government Failed You that our leadership at the time-George W. Bush and the self-named Vulcans (his inner-circle of Rice, Cheney and Rumsfeld)-looked right past the threat al Qaeda represented. The leadership at that time was all-too-consumed with their own plans regarding Russia, China and Iran. Clarke remembers how he wrote, spoke, and briefed that leadership religiously on the threat al Qaeda represented in the days leading up to 9/11, but to no avail. As the 9/11 Commission found, Clarke notes that our government leaders had an amazing lack of imagination-an inability to identify and relate to a new type of threat. “The human brain is designed to take disparate data and order them, make sense of them, place them into a context we can understand from past experience.” (2) Since no one had up-to-that time attacked our nation using planes as weapons, leadership could only see al Qaeda as a small band of Muslim misfits halfway around the world with no real capacity to bring harm to our nation. In other words, our leaders simply could not imagine al Qaeda posing any real threat. While Clarke was distressed greatly about what he viewed as a potential catastrophic threat to our nation, leadership failed to open their eyes and ears to his vision. During his many briefings prior to 9/11, at least one government defense leader told him, “Well, I just don’t understand why we are…talking about this one man bin Laden.” (3)

I’m not with the government. I’m not trying to help Richard Clarke sell books. And I don’t work for an electric company. I am trying to use my imagination, combined with some very hard existing facts, to predict what I think is a potential catastrophic threat to our nation.

And that threat involves our electric grid.

But my concern is not about the grid being brought down through hacking. My concern for the grid is the physical safety of coal-powered generation stations that provide the raw ingredient the grid needs: electricity.

In his book Lights Out, Ted Koppel describes in great detail what this nation might look like just days after the knockout of even one of our electric grids. “If, however, an adversary of this country has as its goal inflicting maximum damage and pain on the largest number of Americans, there may not be a more productive target than one of our electric power grids.” (4) Koppel’s book goes into great detail discussing the vulnerability of the electric grid to cyber attack; bringing down the grid by any means would be just as devastating. While this article is not focused on the vulnerability of the grid by cyber attack, hacking the grid remains a very real and present threat.

Koppel paints a grim picture, but our government, always vigilant, is on top of the cyber attack threat (right?). While I am not convinced anyone in our government is truly capable of managing all threats, it is the threat we can’t imagine that has allowed us to be attacked in the past.

So it’s not a cyber attack that I see as a threat in which our government is blind to: what is at risk is the physical coal power plant that generates the actual electricity that is used throughout the grid and ultimately throughout the nation.

Most Americans aren’t aware that “most of the electricity we use every day … comes from a coal-fired power plant.” (5) In his book Renewable, Jeremy Shere points out that “approximately 45% of [our] electricity is generated in coal power plants.” (6)

I’m not a security expert. I’m not an whistleblower, trying to get my former employer in trouble. I do think I have stumbled, quite simply, on to one of those unprotected, unforeseen, un-imagined weaknesses that leaves us vulnerable to a devastating attack.

I’m certain our nuclear plants have a great deal of security; I’m also certain that the grid itself has had many security upgrades to guard against hackers; what I’m not certain about is the level of security at our coal power plants. I am convinced that most-if not all-of our coal power plants are soft targets; that is, they have inadequate security in place to protect against a terrorist attack. And while coal power plants remain vulnerable to physical attack, the greater threat is that our government-responsible for ensuring our national security-may either be too consumed with other things or simply lack the imagination to find this threat credible.

Coal power plants are “incredibly complex…probably millions (maybe billions) of moving parts…” (7) which means they can’t be rebuilt overnight. These plants take years to build, at enormous costs, and that equates to a lot of suffering for many Americans for a very long time. Besides the loss of electricity, and the fear of not knowing whether another attack will occur, the impact to Americans will be catastrophic: so much of what we have come to take for granted would be gone. In addition to hospitals, airlines, and schools not operating, there will be no cell phones, no television, no Internet, no lights, no heat (or cooling) in our homes, no gas pumps to fill our cars, and on and on from there.

The question then that we must address is “Do we have adequate security around America’s coal powered plants?”

We have already witnessed attacks on physical parts of the grid: substations and other physical structures have come under ‘terrorist-like attacks.’ The government may have woken from its slumber, but is it using it’s imagination, the way a terrorist might?

A cyber attack could obviously take down the grid for some significant amount of time, but destroying one or more of America’s coal power plants would cause the loss of the grid for an indefinite amount of time.

I’m not an alarmist. I’m not a fear-mongering sensationalist. I am aware of how we have missed critical intelligence in the past that might have avoided disaster.

And that is the very real danger facing America’s power grid.

1. The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 339.
2. Your Government Failed You, Richard Clarke, pp. 168.
3. Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke, pp. 231.
4. Lights Out, Ted Koppel, pp. 8.
5. Renewable, Jeremy Shere, pp. 92.
6. Ibid, pp. 153.
7. Ibid, pp. 92, 93.

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©Timothy J. Sabo