Former FERC Chairman, Jon Wellinghoff spoke in an interview about the need to harden the electric grid from security threats by expanding the use of microgrids and distributed generation.

“People are beginning to understand that they need their own onsite capabilities to island themselves from the grid. That’s because the grid’s external vulnerabilities will continue to be a problem until we do have substantial amounts of distributed generation.” – Former FERC Chairman, Jon Wellinghoff

The electric power grid is based on an outdated hub-and-spoke architecture of centralized power production and distribution through transmission wires. This system is highly vulnerable to attacks at multiple points, and failures at critical nodes could create cascading failures and widespread power outages.

Threats to the electric grid include:

Cyber attacks where hackers infiltrate computerized control networks for the purpose of sabotage.

Physical attacks such as, on April 2013 when gunmen attacked a transmission substation in San Jose, California and did extensive damage in what authorities called a sophisticated terrorist attack.

A more esoteric threat, one that is low-probability but potentially high-impact, is an electromagnetic pulse or EMP caused by a nuclear weapon. It has been long understood that a simple nuclear device detonated in the upper atmosphere would create an EMP that could knock out electrical devices for hundreds of miles to catastrophic effect. Natural solar flares can also create an EMP with the same effects as a nuclear weapon.

Mother nature and heavy weather causes the vast majority of damage to electric distribution. Snow, storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, ice all put extensive wear on the grid causing thousands of hours of outages every year costing billions of dollars in maintenance and repair.

Wellinghoff believes, as do many other power system experts, that the best way to harden the grid against attacks is to reimagine and re-architect the grid into a national system of distributed grids, or microgrids. Each microgrid has its own generating capacity through the use of both natural gas and renewables, and the grids are able to share power with each other, eliminating the vulnerable centralized nodes and potential cascading failures.