The utility industry went on high alert over the weekend after terrorists attacked downtown Paris, federal and industry officials said Thursday.
The alert was part of a highly orchestrated plan that industry and government have established in recent years to protect the nation’s electricity supply system, the life-blood of the economy, from physical attacks from shooters or cyber espionage targeting a power plant’s command-and-control systems. The industry and government have a number of hubs where they share information on threats and coordinate their response.
“I can assure you … [the threat information sharing hub] was turned on after Paris … and there has been coordination” throughout the weekend between the government and industry, said Tom Fanning, CEO of utility Southern Co. and co-chairman of a special group created by the Energy Department to protect the grid.
“The government was all over this,” Fanning said on a Wednesday call with reporters hosted by industry and government. “We were turned on, active and on task.”
Coincidentally, as the Paris attacks unfolded Friday, the federal government and the utility sector were gearing up for what could be called war games, in a series of exercises that involve shooters, cyber attacks and trucks ramming into grid facilities.
The simulations began Wednesday and will wrap up Thursday. A national threat simulation will be held Thursday afternoon that will include White House participation, said Gerry Cauley, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the congressionally designated quasi-governmental organization charged with creating mandatory standards for the industry to keep the lights on. It is overseen by the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the nation’s utility regulator.
“We are acutely aware of the recent events and heightened awareness” after Paris, said Cauley, who was joined on the call by senior officials from the departments of Homeland Security and Energy. Cauley said the exercises “have intentionally not built that into the exercise, but the events in Paris do present a heightened awareness” of the threat posed to the grid by “explosive devices and shootings.”
Cauley said the exercises purposefully keep the grid attackers anonymous in the simulations. There is no naming of the Islamic State or any state actor such as Iran or Russia waging a cyber or physical assault on U.S. power plants, sub-stations, transmission assets or the telecommunications hardware utilities rely on to understand what is happening on their systems.
This is the third exercise conducted in the last five years and is the largest, with a 50-75 percent increase in participants, including Canadian and Mexican agencies and utilities, Cauley said.
Cauley said the event Thursday will “bring the exercise to a climax today,” with a “very serious” national event. He would not say what that would entail, except to say “we break the system.”
He said the scenario is “very intense exercise.” Adding to the realism, “we are streaming simulated social media” updates as though it was really happening. As compared to past years, this week’s war games offer an “expanded level of difficulty in terms of level of interaction.”
It is “meant to be a severe attack covering multiple areas. It involves millions of customer outages” and hundreds of points on the grid, including large metro areas, Cauley said.
