Weathering the Storm: Impact of Space Weather

Everyone talks about the weather, but NDU is doing something about it. Not terrestrial weather, but storms in space. Dr. Rich Andres brought this to my attention. This Wednesday, 5 October, the Energy & Environmental Security Policy Program and the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at National Defense University (NDU), in conjunction with US Congressional EMP Caucus, and InfraGard National Members Alliance (INMA) will gather to discuss recent war games on the impact of space weather on the electric grid.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, these good folks will talk about “how to better prepare for widespread and long term power outages as outlined in a number of studies from the National Academies of Science, the US Congressional EMP Commission, the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission (FERC), and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)”. We know what happens when a tree limb falls in Ohio or STUXNET gets into the firmware. Now we have to worry about what happens when the solar wind blows. As a former nuclear targeteer, I have studied the effects of massive electromagnetic pulses on electronics. We don’t get thrown back to the 19^th Century….more like the 16^th. That those effects could be created by solar activity is indeed frightening.

Registration is required so go here to sign up. If anyone attends, please send in a report. Dan Nolan

2011 Energy Security Book List

There are two new books out in the last few months I want you to know about. Whether you have time to read them, even if I am successful in getting you worked up about them, well, that's another story. So again, it's only two books, which is probably one or two more than you'll be able to get to given your current workload. But here's why you should give them a shot.

The first one is by former Austin Energy CIO Andres Carvallo, called The Advanced Smart Grid: Edge Power Driving Sustainability. Co-authored with frequent technology writer John Cooper, this book is relatively short at ~200 well illustrated pages, and is a pleasure to read. I'm going to re-use some of the laudatory words I recently posted in an Amazon review.

Before they invite you to travel with them into the future, Carvallo and Cooper do a solid job of orienting the reader with concise summaries of where the grid came from, how it's evolved over time, and as accurately as possible, how it's doing in its current state. For the many immigrants who've recently moved to energy from other sectors (like me), this is a great grounding.

The authors then look past the current climate of activity, much of it initially fueled with government grants, to a phase where business drivers alone dictate what gets deployed next. Ultimately, they begin to unveil for us a blurry but emerging vision of "the advanced Smart Grid", that's predicated on pervasive IP networking, tons and tons of data, microgrids, EVs, virtual power plants, new business models and more. For me, it was well worth the time, and depending on your background and/or day job, it might be for you too.

Book number two is from one of the (if not, THE) true giants of global energy thinking over the past decades, Daniel Yergin. Best known (to me, anyway) for his biblical telling of the history and future of the oil industry in The Prize, his new book, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, expands in scope to consider all energy sources. Recently reviewed in the NYT, this excerpt seems apropos:

When it comes to assessing the world’s energy future Mr. Yergin is a Churchillian. He argues that we should consider all possible energy sources, the way Winston Churchill considered oil when he spoke to the British Parliament  in 1913. “On no one quality, on no one process, on no one country, on no one route, and on no one field must we be dependent,” Churchill said. “Safety and security in oil lie in variety and variety alone.”

... and one more thing, for which the a smarter grid is the essential precursor:

One of Mr. Yergin’s closing arguments focuses on the importance of thinking seriously about one energy source that “has the potential to have the biggest impact of all.” That source is efficiency. It’s a simple idea, he points out, but one that is oddly “the hardest to wrap one’s mind around.” More efficient buildings, cars, airplanes, computers and other products have the potential to change our world.

Sounds great, right? Well, the bad news for you travelers is that, from a weight perspective, is that it tops 800 pages, though if you get the ebook version it's as light as can be. Now reading it, or the majority of it, that's another story. If it's too much for you to consider, maybe you can wait and hope for a movie version. But I wouldn't count on it.

Happy reading!

Photo credit: Miamism on Flickr.com
(Cross-posted from the Smart Grid Security Blog)

Imagining Smart Grid Adversaries, or "The Cascade Charade"

As most readers of the DOD Energy Blog can attest from direct experience, sometimes we manufacture enemies as placeholders for potential future enemies. Such was the case recently when a smart and well-intentioned student of Chinese origin, Wang Jianwei, published what he thought would be helpful findings for all students of complex, networked systems.

However, not long after its publication, in certain circles his work became known as a blueprint for Chinese attacks on the US power grid. How'd that happen? In order to understand who scrambled the info, you have to follow the path of the information to detect when and by whom it got altered.

It begins with the paper trail from Wang's article published in Safety Science: "Cascade based attack vulnerability on the US Power Grid" (which you can purchase in full for $31.50). The paper was found by a group called the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission and was presented as a threat brief to Congress where things start to simmer with certain congressmen. Ultimately, news of this reaches the New York Times in the form of this article  published on 20 March 2010. My co-blogger on the Smart Grid Security blog, Jack Danahy bought the original paper and read it in its entirety, before writing this post about the whole affair with a focus on the grid.

Of course there are plenty of reasons to keep our eyes open and our guard up. Threats to our electrical insfrastructure can take many shapes, including, as RMI's Amory Lovins points out, squirrels. However, back to the paper that started this tempest. According to Wang and others:

We usually say ‘attack’ so you can see what would happen,” he said. “My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.” And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.

Assuming everything originating in China is a threat to the US ignores our current nearly inextricable economic inter-dependency. As it attempts to maintain its very rapid climb out of the third world, China's own energy challenges are staggering. And if climate change is one of your concerns, then the linkage goes even deeper. We have so much to work on; let's not  let our insecurities get in the way of really improving our nation's energy security.

QDR 2010 Directly Addresses DOD's Operational and Facilities Energy Issues

I admit it: back in June of 2009 I had my doubts. But the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is finally out, and energy got its due - approximately one page out of one hundred twenty eight. Not bad, when you consider previous QDRs never considered the topic. Starting on page 84 of the report, I've captured and reprinted the 4 energy specific paragraphs here and will break it down, with the points I consider most important / helpful highlighted in yellow.

First, I like that they take a stab at defining energy security, and when they do it's kept short and sweet:

Energy security for the Department means having assured access to reliable supplies of energy and the ability to protect and deliver sufficient energy to meet operational needs.

There's a lot they leave out that others try to cram in. I say: good job. Re: the definition - just want to make sure we don't spend so much time and energy on the protect and deliver parts that we significantly impair our ability to prosecute war ... or whatever else it is our troops are told to accomplish. The QDR addresses that concern in the next sentence:

Energy efficiency can serve as a force multiplier, because it increases the range and endurance of forces in the field and can reduce the number of combat forces diverted to protect energy supply lines, which are vulnerable to both asymmetric and conventional attacks and disruptions.

... and points out additional benefits to fielding a leaner, meaner force. So how's this goodness going to come about? By baking better energy thinking in right up front the way it's already been told to do by congress, and the way two Defense Science Boards and the GAO have already recommended:

DoD must incorporate geostrategic and operational energy considerations into force planning, requirements development, and acquisition processes. To address these challenges, DoD will fully implement the statutory requirement for the energy efficiency Key Performance Parameter and fully burdened cost of fuel set forth in the 2009 National Defense Authorization Act.

Who's going to make this happen? Why the DOD Energy Boss, of course. The QDR language makes it sound like a fait accompli:

The Department will also investigate alternative concepts for improving operational energy use, including the creation of an innovation fund administered by the new Director of Operational Energy to enable components to compete for funding on projects that advance integrated energy solutions.

Sounds good, but I've got the feeling they're being a little too optimistic on this one. See here.

I like everything in this next two paragraphs, but I'm going to let them ride without comment and just a few highlights:

The Department is increasing its use of renewable energy supplies and reducing energy demand to improve operational effectiveness, reduce greenhouse gas emissions in support of U.S. climate change initiatives, and protect the Department from energy price fluctuations. The Military Departments have invested in noncarbon power sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass energy at domestic installations and in vehicles powered by alternative fuels, including hybrid power, electricity, hydrogen, and compressed national gas. Solving military challenges—through such innovations as more efficient generators, better batteries, lighter materials, and tactically deployed energy sources—has the potential to yield spin-off technologies that benefit the civilian community as well. DoD will partner with academia, other U.S. agencies, and international partners to research, develop, test, and evaluate new sustainable energy technologies.

Indeed, the following examples demonstrate the broad range of Service energy innovations. By 2016, the Air Force will be postured to cost-competitively acquire 50 percent of its domestic aviation fuel via an alternative fuel blend that is greener than conventional petroleum fuel. Further, Air Force testing and standard-setting in this arena paves the way for the much larger commercial aviation sector to follow. The Army is in the midst of a significant transformation of its fleet of 70,000 non-tactical vehicles (NTVs), including the current deployment of more than 500 hybrids and the acquisition of 4,000 low-speed electric vehicles at domestic installations to help cut fossil fuel usage. The Army is also exploring ways to exploit the opportunities for renewable power generation to support operational needs: for instance, the Rucksack Enhanced Portable Power System (REPPS). The Navy commissioned the USS Makin Island, its first electric-drive surface combatant, and tested an F/A-18 engine on camelina-based biofuel in 2009—two key steps toward the vision of deploying a “green” carrier strike group using biofuel and nuclear power by 2016. The Marine Corps has created an Expeditionary Energy Office to address operational energy risk, and its Energy Assessment Team has identified ways to achieve efficiencies in today’s highly energy-intensive operations in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to reduce logistics and related force protection requirements.

Finally, the last paragraph brings it all home with the intent to address the brittle grid problem.

To address energy security while simultaneously enhancing mission assurance at domestic facilities, the Department is focusing on making them more resilient. U.S. forces at home and abroad rely on support from installations in the United States. DoD will conduct a coordinated energy assessment, prioritize critical assets, and promote investments in energy efficiency to ensure that critical installations are adequately prepared for prolonged outages caused by natural disasters, accidents, or attacks. At the same time, the Department will also take steps to balance energy production and transmission with the requirement to preserve the test and training ranges and the operating areas that are needed to maintain readiness.

They covered all the bases (no pun intended) as far as I'm concerned. There's another two-hundred or more pages of detail I would have like to have seen included on energy, but if they had, given all the other challenges facing the department at this time, it wouldn't be a QDR.

I'll pursue the usual path from this point on: reminding the Department that this is what it's told itself it needs to do on energy matters, and nudging it to move faster when it looks like other challenges, or more likely, mind-numbing bureaucratic inertia, tribal squabbling and/or status quo thinking get in the way of desperately needed progress.

Photo Credit: abnskyshark / Andrew Michael Smith @ Flickr

Latest GAO Report Hits DOD Hard on Grid Reliance

Sometimes it seems like there's just too much on the DOD's plate:

• having to simultaneously kill people and build trust with communities
• with too many risks to track and mitigate, and 
• too many jobs to be done by too few folks ...
• in an increasingly constrained budgetary environment
• and I'm not even going to mention EMP (woops)

Now comes GAO telling Congress and DOD that the Department is asleep at the wheel when it comes to plans and preparation for extended power outages in CONUS and overseas. Here's a couple of excerpts from the summary:

DOD’s most critical assets are vulnerable to disruptions in electrical power supplies, but DOD lacks sufficient information to determine the full extent of the risks and vulnerabilities these assets face. All 34 of these most critical assets require electricity continuously to support their military missions, and 31 of them rely on commercial power grids—which the Defense Science Board Task Force on DOD Energy Strategy has characterized as increasingly fragile and vulnerable—as their primary source of electricity.

and

The 10 Defense Critical Infrastructure Program vulnerability assessments we reviewed did not explicitly consider assets’ vulnerabilities to longer-term (i.e., of up to several weeks’ duration) electrical power disruptions on a mission-specific basis, as DOD has not developed explicit Defense Critical Infrastructure Program benchmarks for assessing electrical power vulnerabilities associated with longer-term electrical power disruptions.

Sounds to me like this necessary work could piggyback nicely with efforts to prepare for and take advantage of new and emerging Smart Grid and microgrid capabilities. Somebody on that?  Hope so.

DOD Energy Blog Interview with Amory Lovins - 5 Part Series (part 5)

In this final installment of the DOD Energy Blog/Amory Lovins mid 2009 interview, we come full circle to one of the two primary findings of the 2008 Defense Science Board (DSB) Task Force report on Energy: that bases put way too much faith in the reliability of the national electrical grid. Especially in times of war or terrorism that targets critical US infrastructure, bases need a Plan B that'll keep them up and running for weeks or months or longer, not the day or two that seems to be the norm at present.

Previous questions in this series have focused on two new energy-related systems traits Lovins has been championing recently: endurance and resilience, primarily from a mobile platform perspective (e.g., planes, tanks and jeeps, ships, etc.). This question takes one of them, resilience, and turns it to the above mentioned challenge of base dependency on the electrical grid, also known as the "brittle grid" problem.

A word of caution. It usually behooves a blogger to keep his work short and accessible, so busy readers can get a quick bite of hopefully helpful info and be back to other tasks in a flash. Well, that will not be the case with this post. Nevertheless, fans and followers of the influential Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and its outspoken founder will find there's a lot to sink their teeth into on this final part of the series.

Question 5) It seems the Resilience vector promotes traits similar to the benefits often ascribed to micro grids. Is that right? And is Resilience one response to the Brittle Grid problem?

Lovins: Resilience, said our DSB report, "combines efficient energy use with more diverse, dispersed, renewable supply—turning the loss of critical missions from energy supply failures (by accident or malice) from inevitable to near-impossible." I first described the design elements of resilience in Chapter 13 of Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security (a 1982 report to DoD that remains probably the definitive unclassified synthesis on energy-related critical infrastructure. What it predicted, and worse, has now come true. In 1984 I wrote:

These brittle devices [over-centralized energy systems] are supposed to form the backbone of America's energy supplies well into the 21st century—a period likely to bring increasing uncertainty, surprise, unrest, and violence. The U.S. cannot afford vulnerabilities that so alter the balance between large and small groups in society as to erode not only military security but also the freedom and trust that underpin constitutional government.

Here's how I described the design philosophy of resilience back then:

An inherently resilient system, it should include many relatively small, fine-grained elements, dispersed in space, each having a low cost of failure. These substitutable components should be richly interconnected by short, redundant links….Failed components or links should be promptly detected, isolated, and repaired. Components need to be so organized that each element can interconnect with the rest at will but stand alone at need, and that each successive level of function is little affected by failures or substitutions at a subordinate level. Systems should be designed so that any failures are slow and graceful. Components, finally, should be understandable, maintainable, reproducible at a variety of scales, capable of rapid evolution, and societally compatible.

Resilience can be achieved by design with comparable or, often, lower capital and operating cost. (For example, I've done it in my own photovoltaic-powered house: the lights don't flicker when we pull the plug on the grid. nor when we plug back in.) It's now governed by standards like IEEE 1547. In other words, COTS hardware now permits electric resilience at a wide range of scales. 

As DOD Energy Blog readers probably know, the DSB report recommended that at least the 584 CONUS bases eliminate their ~98+% reliance on the brittle power grid, and for their mission continuity, use their power efficiently and produce it onsite in netted islandable microgrids that also serve the surrounding communities where many of their people live. (This was already DoD policy under DoDI 1470.11 sec 5.2.3 but had been ignored.) Pacific Northwest Lab has found that ~90% of bases can do this, often with renewables, and often to economic advantage. A few bases have made a good start, but much more coherent policy and execution are needed.

There you have it: the case Lovins has been making for renewables-augmented Smart and micro grids for 25 years. And here we are today trying to decide if the time is right, and if so, how fast to push versus the thousand other priorities facing DOD and the country at present. Seems to me senior leadership is more attuned to the urgency of energy issues than at any time in the past, with the possible exception of a brief moment during the OPEC oil embargo of the 1973. Lovins learned and retained key lessons from that event and they have informed his work ever since.

The rest of us, less diligent, have taken energy for granted for too long and now the need for change has arrived with a sense of urgency that is surprising to some. Regardless, let's ensure we get off our butts and update our bases' power systems to ensure they are ready to fulfill critical missions for times when we need them most.