Building Resilience and Recoverability of Electric Grid Communications
or cooperative utilities , more often rely on leased circuits . When common carriers are used , the circuit reliability is designed for residential and commercial customers . That service level might not meet the needs of electric utilities during an emergency .
When generation reserves are switched in and ramped up during system recovery , it is important that the phase and frequency of the added power match the phase and frequency of the grid . Electric utilities have developed extensive communication networks to measure phase , frequency , voltage , current , and equipment temperature at points across the grid . Communication networks are vital to effectively synchronize the generation , transmission , and distribution of electricity with customer demand during normal operation and system recovery .
Electric grids and their telecommunications systems are interdependent . A long-term outage of the electric grid can cause a failure in the grid telecommunication subsystem because nearly all telecommunications ultimately depend on grid power . When communications from control rooms to substations fail , the lack of situational awareness and grid control can result in cascading grid collapse .
System Vulnerabilities and Failures
Because of the design of its protective equipment , the North American electric grid is susceptible to cascading collapse over wide geographic areas . A cascading collapse occurs when a disturbance propagates through the high voltage transmission lines of the grid , causing transformer protective devices called “ relays ” to interrupt the flow of energy between generation stations and consumers . Because high voltage transmission lines carry power hundreds or even thousands of miles , large geographic regions and millions of people can lose electricity when a cascading collapse occurs .
Causes for failure of electric grid communications include ordinary equipment malfunction ; damage from natural disasters , human error , cyberattack , or physical attack ; and loss of auxiliary electric power . A 2008 report from the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack ( EMP Commission ) noted an additional cause of long-term grid outage — an EMP from the detonation of a nuclear weapon in the upper atmosphere ( Congressional EMP Commission , 2008 ).
The telecommunications subsystem for the U . S . electric grid has been engineered for resilience against weather events , but not for resilience against EMP , severe solar storms , physical attack , and cyberattack . Of these events , atmospheric EMP detonation would likely have the highest consequence , because the effects would be continent-wide for a well-executed attack .
Adversaries can also launch ground based EMP attacks via radio frequency ( RF ) weapons activated from vehicles , drones , and even small suitcases . Un-
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