Electromagnetic pulse sends shock waves through Senate energy committee
Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a threat to national defense — that’s the one agreement everyone acknowledged during a recent U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.
Decisions beyond that statement would have been difficult for senators to make after they heard testimonies from several witnesses on various efforts to protect America’s power grid from EMP threats, both naturally occurring and man-made.
For instance, a former member of Congress called EMP capable of creating a cascading catastrophic event, while experts in the field denounced disinformation and alarmist thinking as masking the combined and ongoing efforts of the federal government and industry toward solving the problem.
Nevertheless, witnesses agreed that the EMP threat exists, a situation that puts the U.S. electric grid in a particularly vulnerable position. In fact, just this week it has been reported that North Korea may be plotting an EMP strike on the United States.
EMP is the abrupt pulse of electromagnetic radiation resulting from an explosion, most likely a nuclear rather than a chemical-based explosion. An EMP blast also may result from unusual solar activity. The resulting rapidly changing electric fields and magnetic fields may couple with electrical and/or electronic systems and produce damaging currents and voltage surges.
Specifically, during the committee’s May 4 hearing the senators examined the threat posed by EMP, as well as policy options to protect the nation’s energy infrastructure and to improve capabilities for restoring the system if it went down.
EMP attacks and weapons are an important issue, said committee chairwoman U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, (R-AK), due to everyone’s increasing use of electronics, as well as “the continued proliferation of nuclear technology.”
“Our efforts to understand a potential EMP burst aren’t new, but there’s a renewed focus on understanding the effects of such an attack, mitigating the effects and recovering from it,” Murkowski said.
Murkowski called on both the federal and state governments to share EMP knowledge and expertise with U.S. utilities and energy companies “on a timely basis” and to approve or help guide related reliability standards that could aid the industry in protecting “critical energy assets.”
Cascading consequences
“Just consider if one of these pulses were to be unleashed and disabled the power infrastructure on the East Coast. This isn’t simply about the lights going out,” said Newt Gingrich, former U.S. Speaker of the House.
The “catastrophic consequences” could include a grid failure that knocks out power, communications and transportation for a significant amount of time, in turn affecting hospitals, public safety agencies, first responders and millions of others, he said, adding that such a failure could be more damaging than the 9/11 terror attacks.
“There is no question that the U.S. should take action to develop a hardened, more resilient electrical system that could better withstand an EMP attack,” Gingrich said. “Frankly, it is a matter of national survival.”
Ambassador Henry F. Cooper, former director of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Strategic Defense Initiative, agreed and lambasted the federal government for “grossly inadequate” efforts to secure the grid against low-probability, high-risk EMP attacks.
“I am becoming so disillusioned with the dysfunctionality of the federal government that I am now spending most of my time working on this problem from the bottom up,” said Cooper, a Ph.D. engineer who said he’s working with Duke Energy on a related pilot study in North Carolina.
Cooper said that by engaging authorities at the local level, he hopes that Washington will be forced to look at and deal with the EMP threat issue.
Team work under way
Meanwhile, several witnesses said that the electric sector and the U.S. government are regularly working together and have been for many years on ways to thwart EMP attacks, though there are higher priority threats, they said.
“We have to have a strategy for all attacks,” testified Cheryl LaFleur, chairwoman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who ranked cyber attacks as the No. 1 national security priority for the grid.
“Taking a step back, the real solution is to build resiliency into the grid. And that’s increasingly where our efforts are going. Obviously, you can’t have a backup for everything,” LaFleur said.
Kevin Wailes, CEO of Lincoln Electric System, agreed that cybersecurity is a high priority. He said both redundancy and reliability have been built into the electric system and the electric sector conducts regular, real-world emergency exercises that specifically take catastrophic events into account. Then, everyone shares information on being more resilient. The industry also participates in many incident response exercises, he added, including five national-level exercises since November 2015, he said.
“The difficulty is that threats are changing. As threats have evolved, we have to get more understanding about what they can do,” said Wailes, who spoke on behalf of the American Public Power Association.
Any potential impacts of EMP are real, said Robin Manning, vice president of transmission and distribution for the Electric Power Research Institute. However, evaluating the effects on existing and future power grid infrastructure requires concrete, scientifically based analysis, he said.
For example, Manning explained that EMP attacks and geomagnetic disturbance (GMD) events are often discussed together when evaluating potential impacts on the bulk-power system and approaches for improving system resiliency.
While both situations are considered high-impact low-frequency events—along with physical attacks, severe storms, earthquakes and other similar events—there are differences to consider (such as EMP magnitude, resulting frequency and impacted size of geographical area) when evaluating resiliency improvement priorities and investment decisions, Manning said.
HEMP—or high-altitude EMP—events are a growing concern in the energy business, Manning testified. Though the industry has worked to develop effective responses to GMD, the same hasn’t been accomplished yet on the effects of a HEMP attack, he said.
“We lack sufficient information to understand the probability and severity of EMP. It’s becoming clearer. Once we have adequate information, then we can balance it with our information about cybersecurity,” Manning said.
Balancing the situation
“It is clear some of the witnesses are alarmed…and others are more circumspect,” said Sen. Al Franken, (D-MN), who wasn’t quite sure how to frame the discussion.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) assured his colleagues that the situation wasn’t “as bad as what everybody is saying,” though some of their comments weren’t over-stated.
Risch, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, explained that there isn’t a lot out there about what the government is doing regarding EMP because it’s considered top secret.
“I can tell you that these issues aren’t being ignored. Based on what we know and where we are … we need more research,” Risch said.
Risch also is convinced that “the next significant event in America will be a cyber event and certainly the grid will be connected to or be part of that. And we will continue to work on this.”
The threats on the United States come from many diverse, widespread places so lawmakers must devise solutions from a risk-management perspective, he said.
“There isn’t enough money in the world to protect us from everything,” Risch said.
