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Energy Security Report
Thursday October 10, 2002
Notes from the Rapporteur
This group is guided by the overall goals of the symposium, to find practical
actions that can connect science and technology to security.
It was pointed out that the NIST labs in Maryland are interested in critical
infrastructure vulnerability, one of the topics of this breakout.
Definition of energy
Energy includes diverse sources, including electricity, natural gas, oil, renewables,
nuclear, and the generation, transmission, and distribution systems.
The breakout group decided to restrict its attention to the security problems
related to electricity, due to the limits of time and the composition of the
group.
Definition of security
In the longer term, there are security issues related to the importation of
oil. This group will focus only on the electric sector.
Security of electricity actually has two separate, though related, components;
protection of assets and the reliability of supply. The protection of assets
can be broken down into physical security and IT security.
One can think about security by going through the complete fuel and generation
chain.
- Fuel vulnerability. The major fuels are coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro,
and non-hydro renewables. Of these fuels, the most vulnerable by far is natural
gas. Gas pipelines can be fixed in 72 hours. However, the really weak link
is the compression stations. These can take 12-18 months to replace.
- Generating plants, non-nuclear. They are relatively easy to get into and
disable, though they are hard to destroy.
- Transmission vulnerabilities. The group concluded that this was probably
the most important vulnerability. The nation has 160,000 miles of high-voltage
transmission lines. The utilities can replace a tower that holds up the line
in 5 days, and there is some redundancy in transmission capabilities, though
that varies by region. Of greater importance are the transformers of 125kV
or larger. The utilities have less than 1% spares. In addition, these transformers
tend to be custom-made for each particular application. One cannot just swap
them in and out. New ones have to be special ordered. It could take 2 years
and cost $6 million to replace one of them. There are thousands of these transformers
in the United States.
The grid as a whole is not redundant. FERC requires sufficient redundancy
so that the grid stays up if it loses its largest plant. That may not be enough
redundancy in the event of an attack on the grid itself. In general, areas
that have the most threatening weather (tornados, hurricanes) have the most
redundant grids.
- Distribution vulnerability. The biggest distribution vulnerability would
be distribution to a key customer, such as DIA.
Opportunities for S&T to contribute to energy security.
- For fuel supply, put greater emphasis on renewable energy and energy efficiency.
This includes long-term R&D and regulatory reform that encourages greater
use of RE and EE. There are many possibilities here, including photovoltaic
panels, fuel cells, greater efficiency, and zero-energy buildings. This could
apply to buildings, ranging from homes to institutions.
- For generation, put a greater emphasis on the technologies of distributed
generation, including the greater efficiency that one gets from combined heat
and power systems. Policy should also promote research into more efficient
generation.
- For protecting transmission systems, distributed generation will again
make a major contribution to security. Also, need R&D into standardized
and cheaper high-voltage transformers. The transmission systems need more
redundancy and the threat assessment needs to switch from weather threat to
terrorism threat.
- For protecting the distribution system, need research on improved "smart"
control of the grid to manage distribution. It needs to be more self-reliant.
Policy should look into taking critical infrastructure off the centrally-controlled
grid.
Obstacles to these goals.
- Industry inertia. Policy needs to supply both carrots and sticks to the
electric industry. They need to be able to pass through the costs to their
customers.
- Inconsistent policy signals. At various times the administration and Congress
have sent inconsistent policy signals to the industry, which makes it very
difficult for the industry to make plans. A particular problem is flat or
declining funding for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy R&D programs.
- Lack of an comprehensive national energy policy plan that takes all these
considerations into account.
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