IATC - Energy Poverty and Potential Impacts to Other Critical Infrastructures

all right good morning and welcome to bides Las Vegas uh sorry Cavalry welcome to this track uh this is electric grid Plus+ given by uh Emma and David a few announcements before we begin sponsors we'd like to thank our sponsors especially our Diamond sponsor Adobe and our gold sponsor uh gold sponsors prism Cloud surab blue cat and some others it's their support along with other sponsors donors and volunteers that make this event possible these talks are being streamed live and as a courtesy to our speakers and audience we ask that you check to make sure your cell phones are set to silent as a reminder the bides LV photo policy prohibits taking pictures without the explicit permission of everyone in frame these talks are all being recorded and will be available on YouTube in the future all right I'm going to pass this off now one more word all right I'm GNA since David's goingon to be our MC I'm going to slightly MC this one at least um plus I'm just a loud mouth so um these are two of our newest and favorite new collaborators um so no pressure uh but not only is am I going to outline some energy specific things but try to remember the things she's saying because they're going to touch on water on food supply on anything small medium oral Co-op or Target cyberport and thank David as well who's co-presenting because he helped make sure this track happened again for the second year and we'll help MC today and tomorrow so welcome some of the newest change [Applause] agents hi there and that was quite the introduction thank you um today I'm actually going to talk about some of the work I've been doing with electric co-ops for the last few years but I was going to start with an introduction to me that explains why I actually care so much about the electric sector cuz usually people look at you like why do you care about electrons so much so this is me um the picture on the bottom is my first ever job working for an electric utility it's me wearing PP that's far too big for me because I was 18 years old and it was in Scotland and they didn't actually have any women ever on the field crew so I turned up with uh gloves that were too big a giant yellow jacket that my dad probably could have worn and nothing fit me I did that for a little bit decided it was too cold and wet in Scotland for me to continue doing this I just didn't want to um went to University worked in electrical mechanical and electrochemical engineering so I like to spread between different topics um and then I decided I was kind of done with Scotland not going to lie it was cold again I moved to California um worked for four of the National Labs currently working at Idaho National Lab um moved around quite a bit because every time I wanted to learn something new I ended up going to a different National Lab to do something different so Sandia worked in hydrogen barle worked in renewable energy and distribution grid Livermore worked in other stuff and and now Idaho um where I'm the chief parag grid scientist um for various things my more recent past before that was also working for a national Rural Electric Cooperative Association which is one of the big trade associations in DC that essentially uh looks after the 900 electric co-ops in the country so my entire career has been in the electric industry since I was probably 18 years old at this point which is quite long ago I'm not going to lie um so I'm deeply passionate about how our electricity is delivered in multiple countries and that's somewhat how we got to hear in talking about all of this but I also have David here good morning so uh my name is David botz I work for the Edison Electric Institute um uh I started in computer science uh my first I I say my first real job after being an intern was for a utility company so I work for a utility company in the Midwest of the United States for like 20 years uh before having an opportunity to move to Edison Electric Institute if you're not familiar with the electric industry you might say uh what is Edison Electric Institute and why does it matter why do I care so Edison Electric Institute is the trade Association for investor owned Electric utilities in un United States at a holding company level we've got approximately 63 members at a holding company level those 63 members are responsible for a little over 70% of the electricity that flows in the United States of America generation transmission and distribution the energy Market or the electricity Market in the United States is wild why because there are 3,000 Electric utilities in the United States Emma just mentioned 900 of them that are that are uh called co-ops and then in addition there are about uh two almost 2,000 Public Power Municipal power companies most of them are teeny tiny um most of them are distribution only some of them are huge so let's talk about a huge one lwp they have uh on the order of 5 million customers so they're super big but most of them are not big most of them are small and we're going to talk about uh bigs and Smalls resourced and underresourced electric companies for the next 42 minutes Dr Emma so the other thing I wanted to add in here was a little bit of history of how we got here as well because 3,000 utilities is a kind of ridiculous number um we did form there is a long history of how we actually got to having that starting in the 30s but I'll talk about that in a minute but the big thing that's going on just now with all of these Electric utilities is we are going through an energy transition also at the same time um if you've missed them talking about the energy transition the renewable energy uh climate change that is all happening just now and exactly the same time so what we're really been faced with just now in the electric sector is how do we do everything absolutely all together all at once we've got to make it clean reliable Equitable resilient and secure all at the same time when we're not really there yet so interesting challenge but I like to tell stories um this actually happen summer 2020 again it's not really got a cyber angle but it's an interesting piece for how do we look at interdependent infrastructure and why everything actually matters um summer 2020 great time of the year went out for a run uh there was this giant lightning storm kicked off in Livermore California where I lived um huge dry lightning storm that eventually became known uh eventually caused what was known as the lightning complex fire um I was out running went back to my house I was like I am putting my stuff in the car this is how it ends so put everything in my car was ready to go it was also 100° in Livermore at the time Cal ISO the independent system operator had called rolling blackouts for the area because the system was overloaded the grid was in trouble at that point also along with three giant fires that covered the majority of the bay area which is kind of insane um Livermore was having problems we were struggling the lightning also hit and massive power transformer there was two big Power Transformers sitting in limore it hit one of them as it turns out if you want to talk about cyber protections most of Northern California doesn't have lightning protection on their substations because we didn't have lightning until you know within the last 10 years lightning suddenly became more common thanks to climate change so they didn't have lightning protection on this giant large power transformer worth millions of dollars the Transformer died half of lmore didn't have power cuz they were trying to roll power through lmore as well um at that point the Wastewater Plant also failed because they hadn't tested their failover which we told them they needed to do and they didn't do it Wastewater goes down as well at the same time at that point in this series of things happening the fire had turned around um the one on the bottom right of the red blobs essentially turned around and started heading for the city of Livermore rather than the rural area so city of Livermore if you don't know already it also has a massive National Lab in it um which does a allow for confusion research for example um L the National Lab basically called that we were going to have to evacuate at that point most of us weren't even there at that point so we're trying to work out what we were going to evacuate from the lab at the same time um but evacuation orders all happened at the same time right along that time talking about politics and all of this intersecting Gavin n decided to announce that all of California was going to go for uh phase out gasoline powered cars by 2035 just announced this in the middle of there being a massive emergency taking up half of California now we hadn't had power for 3 days at this point in various places and we're like so we're not going to have gas vehicles but we're evacuating a massive City just now that hasn't had electricity for 3 days what do you think would have happened so it's a really good example to me of how things aren't connected just now people are saying we need more electric vehicles on our network but they're not talking about the fact we need electrons um these small utilities are generally burdened with trying to with doing these things like electric vehicles renewable energy without us saying oh by the way it turned out you actually needed bigger wires or you needed more cyber protections or you needed more Engineers even working on your system they get all of this put on them and that's what we're really talking about today so so a little bit of history repeating in a rather threatening picture um it's coming electricity for you this was actually an advert in the 30s that came out um I actually liken this to a lot of the threats we hear about cyber as well like cyber's coming for you this is the same thing they did telling everyone electricity was coming but it was mostly to the rural areas at that point so in the 1930s uh I believe only one in 10 rural Americans actually had power we were going through a revolution at that point electricity was coming to all the big cities people were changing their lives based on this but we still hadn't actually got power out to the rural areas in America which cover the majority of the land mass of the country um in 1936 uh they brought in the rural electrification act which essentially allowed lowcost loans to go to Farmer lowcost Federal loans to go to Farmers so that they could form electrical co-ops and work with larger utilities to actually get the lines run through contracts essentially to say hey we will serve everyone in the US power at this point so these social contracts came into play for electric power these sorry electric Co electric co-ops were formed they were all not for profit but they were essentially the local community were all members of the Electric Co-op up and that's gone on to this day so this happened in 1936 and since then this has continued we ended up with the rural El electrification Administration which later I think evolved into USDA and the rural utility service um again when we talk about electric service we all think of Department of energy turns out USDA actually has a huge play in how the rural electric co-ops work as well most of their loans and financing actually come from the our us program instead of doe so when we're talking about these small small rural utilities that's who we're talking about these electric co-ops not that there wasn't controversy about this this I'm looking at David just now with the holding companies um there was seven major holding companies in the US at this point um as part of this deal they were trying to break those up because they held monopolies over most of the electric service in the country um they created these fancy cartoons they were calling it the death sentence uh to the the electric service and So eventually the this is where the r electrification act came from and no okay so how did the grid actually evolve for my eyes like how did we get into this mess it's a very simple picture so talking about 1936 we've got this nice dumb grid it works there's no fancy Electronics there it's working the electrons flow in a certain way it was remarkably reliable for what it was um so we created the Dum grid fantastic roll on 2008 we've decided to do the American reinvest act the smart grid program comes into play this is where we started getting all those devices that could talk onto the grid primarily Smart Meters ended up being one of the big things and solar energy those Smart Meters actually weren't as smart as everyone thought as it turns out because most of the customers actually rejected their being mostly Smart Meters connected to their house so we ended up with very fancy Smart Meters that couldn't do anything which was great um then we had the clean grid I think this was around 2008 as well the sunshop program started for doe which had had a goal of uh a dollar per watt essentially we were meant a dollar per watt of solar um they actually achieved that goal in 2015 but S Note what that also meant was a lot of the solar industry moved their manufacturer offshore at this point and roll on to 2023 where we have certain problems with supply chain so decisions we make now generally for this sector roll on for the next 20 years um then we had the physical and cyber secure grid we're around 2012 2013 at this point where we're starting to worry about physical attacks we're starting to worry about things that happened in the Ukraine um never everything has to be physical and cyber secure we change direction every few years and what we're worrying about on the electric system apart from now we we're worrying about everything um then we had the smartest grid we decided we've done it everything super smart we're doing really well with the physical and uh the physical and cyber secure grid uh you mentioned 2013 a big event happened in 2013 metf metf happened uh I I'm sorry we've got a mandatory tie policy here in the uh the propa there's your chocolate chip cookie that's fair so far be it for me to uh defy dress code Mr Damon thank you um 2013 the metf substation attack occurred where unknown and they are as as to public record still unknown adversaries um they first uh physically attacked two underground communication vaults which which they're L literally underground the the covers are covered with dirt and leaves and branches and garbage they opened up the communication vaults they cut the fiber optics communication cables not in one one volt but in two volts one one right after another and then an unknown number of parties started to shoot um at Transformers that were in the metf substation so that is in 20 13 and we're going to talk in a little bit about how old is new again so moving on a little bit we got to this interdependent grid which I'm moving pretty fast at this point all the blocks after physical and cyber secure essentially happened in The Last 5 Years um we got to interdependent which is where we get to the Colonial Pipeline and various other things that happened there fun fact is when Colonial happened it wasn't just that we depended on gas and that was the biggest worry when they had to restart that pipeline we had to pull out plans that had happened during Hurricane Katrina on how to restart that pipeline because all of the pumps had gone offline the pumps are lowed starting a pump requires a whole bunch of power and affects your voltage pretty badly um at the time of Hurricane Katrina they Daisy chained diesel generators together to actually restart that pipeline because they didn't have the utilities working so to get the pipeline to start to get the utilities to work they were in a giant cycle so they Daisy chained these diesel generators together to get enough power and support the voltage to get the pipeline back on we were back there except this time at least we had electric power um so they got everything back online but again this was the circle of life that we had on the grid is when some big thing goes down we end up stuck in a circle of problems but daisy chaining diesel generators worked out um then so then we have the uh I spoke too soon it turns out everything's interdependent everything's not that secure and we have a big problem with physical security and as it turns out when we try to make everything super smart we also left oursel open to a whole bunch of problems uh moving on really quickly we got to Shields up uh 2021 22 I'm getting dirty looks but it's okay we got to Shields up which is when we just started yelling at small co-ops that they needed to put their Shields up but not necessarily telling them how or why or how to do it we did tell people there were certain instructions they could give that those were coming from DHS not necessarily from doe um and everyone was told this repeatedly and they got exhausted I'm not going to lie there was a number of small utilities calling me in my last position saying how are we meant to get our Shields up when we can't hold up our poles most of the time right now so then we got into climate impact um I think 2023 we had the most number ever of billion dooll weather events um causing damage to the Electric System including one that just happened about 12 hours ago in the uh Northeast where there was essentially a huge storm if you look at the news just now there's pictures of entire distribution lines just laying flat on the ground because a tornado went through them um then we get to more physical security also um again people were shooting up Transformers in November that was that was a wonderful terrible event that was going on again we directed everyone one away from Shields up now to looking at physical security so everyone got distracted Again by the squirrel uh and then now we have money we have $1.2 trillion everyone's trying to push into the electric grid for this energy transition but what we going to do with it is a big question so where we are now um this is the picture of the three big types of Utilities in this country there's investor owned that's his fault um there's publicly owned and then there's the Cooperative utilities but if you look at this map the large majority of the land mass is actually served by the smallest utilities where that's an issue the grid isn't interp the grid isn't independent little pieces of utility that all operate by themselves if you want to get from point A to point B most of the time you're going through five different utilities to get there and they could be three different types they could have three different regulations and three different styles of security that they're working on it's a large pathway of systems and we're having issues with how that's defined so that's where everyone gets a slightly sad face and feels bad that they're in Vegas um there's around 21 million people in the US that owe over $700 on their energy bills that's uh one in four houses that don't actually aren't able to pay for their power with around 12% of those reported keeping their houses at an unsafe temperature that's pretty bad um when hurricane Yuri happened not hurricane Yuri storm Yuri happened uh around 200 people died because they didn't have power so they didn't have heating uh at the time it was freezing so they didn't have heating they died for various reasons because they didn't have power some of those people now um 12% of people are keeping their houses too hot or too cold because they just can't afford the power why this is important our electric bills and what we do with security uh you pay for it we pay for everything that happens that the electric utility has to do there's no magic pot of money coming it's your rates that pay for it so whereas we might be okay there's around 25% of people in the country are not okay for paying for their power so how do we make this work how have we reached a point of no return um how do we actually