My workstation had no functional CD drive or USB connections. Made it interesting when it needed software installed. (Other people actually had a working CD drive.)

I don’t know how secure their control systems are, but I do know that access to most stuff at that company is on a need-to-have basis.

@Rayne: I don’t disagree at all.

But it says something about how far around the bend US conservatives have gone, when German conservatives can propose something like this as a good solution to perverse incentives in the market.

The only real pressure that US utilities face is from the commissions that regulate the rates they can charge.

Nebraska’s power grid is state owned and its the most reliably Republican state in the country. We need to think bigger about D/R coalitions around fundamental issues that matter to the future of the country. Basically, ways to work around the Southeast.

The most profound thing I saw on the video was near the end, about how stupid it is to invest heavily in digital meters. Not on privacy/paranoia grounds, but on needless complexity grounds. Simple spinning meters do the job fine and employ people to walk around and check them. Moving to digital is needless anti-labor cost cutting and good business for GE, but not good for the country as a whole.

@fnook:
It really depends on local conditions. It’s certainly not cost-effective to have people spending eight hours a day, five days a week, reading meters by hand in either urban or rural areas. That’s why they’re going to electronic metering: it can be done by someone with a drive-by transceiver, without them having to get out and walk; it’s safer, too, since they don’t have to deal with dogs (that’s not a small matter: dog bites are a major cause of injuries for meter readers).
I doubt that most people ever even look at their meters.

@Sojourner:
It took two or three go-rounds before we got reliable access to some of the output of our own department – maps that had been scanned to PDFs. Not current, but if you wanted to know what had been there twenty or more years ago – it happened fairly often – you needed that access. It was a matter of getting the ‘ownership’ issue settled.

Daaarrk stuff going around in the cyberworld after Aaron Swartz’s ‘suicide’. One scenario is “hacking” shutdown of power grid false flag to allow USG to take over internet.

From shortly after the infamous northeast blackout of 1965 until I finally stepped off the long ramp into full retirement in the late naughts I worked for suppliers of and consultants about SCADA and energy management systems for electric utilities. After-the-fact analyses thereof identified the utilities’ internal organizational walls and their resultant cumbersome processes as one of several root causes of the blackout. Most of the vertically integrated companies subsequently combined their Generation and Transmission Departments, which previously had in most cases reported through separate channels all the way to the CEO, into Bulk Power Departments reporting to a VP. In related moves, the usually-separate 24/7 power plant dispatch and transmission control offices were combined into unified power system operations control centers with the operators of all functions within conversational range of each other the same room, and all under a single manager.

To complicate matters, these organizational changes were taking place against a background of radical technological change. The electro-mechanical supervisory control systems (predecessors of SCADA systems) that had been in use since the 1920s were beginning to be replaced by solid-state digital technology, and computers were starting to take on the closed-loop control function then called “load frequency control” (later “automatic generation control” and now known as “balance control” IIRC) previously accomplished with analog systems.

Over the subsequent quarter-century these early efforts evolved into energy management systems (EMS – not to be confused with the same three words associated with the control of building environments) that performed the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and automatic generation control (AGC) functions, as well as a variety of power system modeling for optimization, stability and planning purposes. All the while these EMS systems remained isolated from other computing systems within the utility organization. The corporate data processing departments, which were then still 8/5operations except for late shift computer operators, wanted nothing to do with having to support the 24/7 availability requirements in the control center.

It is significant that the so-called “deregulation” movement in the industry coincided with the emergence and growth of the internet, because it was the changes required by the former that drove the need to connect the EMS electronically in real time not only with other entities within the company that previously only required periodic reports, if anything, but also in real time with an expanding universe of outside entities as well, such as newly formed power marketing companies. The Internet was the path of least resistance with which to do this. Before deregulation, control centers’ connections to the outside world were limited to the power plants they controlled, the substations through which they connected to a neighboring utility companies, and point-to-point 24/7 data channels to the control centers of the adjacent utilities, and to whatever regional reliability or power pool organization they were affiliated with. One ironic result of deregulation is that it led to removal of part of the next-day-and-beyond bulk power planning function from the control centers in two separate locations. That is, it undid some of the changes deliberately made in the wake of the 1965 blackout. This was done to supposedly assure that there was a “level playing field” for the purchase and sale of bulk power.

Many of us who had been around the block a few times expressed our concerns about the direction things were taking, but Wall Street was driving the bus and more than a few power system engineers and operators double their salaries by jumping the fence over to the power marketing companies. And many a power company executive now saw himself (they were almost all men at that point) as wheeler-dealers. We tried to write language into the contracts that would require the vendors to build strong walls around the EMSs, but that’s hard to do when you need to punch so many holes through them.

To summarize, I believe it would be very difficult at this late date to completely I could isolate the control centers from the Internet. That is, unless the resources were available to set up an entirely separate private Internet that connected not only all of the of operating utility companies, but all of the power marketing entities that have emerged as well as the large industrial purchases of bulk power.

Before California’s problems hit the headlines at the turn of the millennium there was a cartoon pinned up on the bulletin board in the offices of one of my clients. It showed a full-bearded man dressed in skins and carrying a club, together with a young boy similarly attired. The man is saying “No, son, we didn’t have a nuclear war. We deregulated the electric utilities.” It stayed there for the nearly full decade I worked with that company.

@Rayne: I have not looked at the DOE document yet but will do so. Thanks for the suggestion.