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A New Security Paradigm for Critical Energy Infrastructure

September 20th, 2009

The post below by my colleague Michael Mylrea and myself may be of interest to a number of you as many of the same solutions to climate change also aid in solving some of our problems with energy security which elevates the issue in importance especially to those who call themselves “conservative.”  In reality, they are actually one issue. There is, however, a warning on the new Smart Grid technology, which, while promising, if not done just right could add more vulnerabilities, not reduce them.  These issues  should be part of the Building Energy 10 conference as NESEA has traditionally included cutting-edge concepts even if they may be somewhat controversial.

Best,

Joel Gordes

A new security paradigm is needed to protect critical US energy infrastructure from cyberwarfare

By  Joel N. Gordes and Michael Mylrea

With the 8th anniversary week of 9/11 behind us, the US remains vulnerable to a devastating cyber attack directed at its critical infrastructure.  Despite warning signs of this threat, policy makers continue to prepare for the last war, ignoring the major lesson of both 9/11 and Pearl Harbor–not to “be prepared,” but to understand the changing nature of warfare.  US policy makers need to adopt a new security paradigm to defend critical asset, especially energy infrastructure, from a devastating cyber strike.

Several years ago the California Independent System Operator reported: “For at least 17 days at the height of the energy crisis, hackers mounted an attack on a computer system that is integral to the movement of electricity throughout California.” A more recent public report by a CIA analyst says this is a global problem and criminals have launched cyberattacks against foreign power utilities with the goal of extorting money.

One call to action came with the release of a CNN video showing how a software attack quickly destroyed a generator. A similar attack on key electric facilities could take out power to major geographic areas and if incapacitated for three months, the economic price tag would be about $700 billion, according to Scott Borg, Chief Economist at US Cyber Consequences Unit, a private non-profit think tank. That is “equivalent to 40 to 50 large hurricanes striking all at once,” Borg told CNN. “It’s greater economic damage than any modern economy ever suffered.” While the the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) approved new standards to improve cyber security the grid remains vulnerable as regulations require further refinement, focus and effective enforcement.

In preparing for the future, it might be useful to look back at other grim prophecies that, had they been heeded could have prevented catastrophes. One example was Brigadier General Billy Mitchell who warned in April 1926 that there would be “a surprise aerial attack on Pearl Harbor;” or just as Richard Clarke, former top US counterterrorism official and “Cyber Czar” warned White House officials of the threat of al Qaeda prior to 9-11.

The Obama administration’s prioritization of energy security is a start as energy and telecom are the two primary critical infrastructures upon which all others are dependent. All modern infrastructures including banking, hospitals, water,  and defense depend on these interrelated infrastructures for their operation and “the power grid is the foundation of it all,” noted cyberwar expert Winn Schwartau.

Enter the “Smart Grid.”

One bright spot is the government’s allocation $4.1 billion of stimulus funds to invest in the new “Smart Grid.” “Smart” implies a move away from totally centralized generation and control to two-way communications between the utility and end users. It also enhances use of  energy efficiency and decentralized renewable energy such as wind and photovoltaics along with other distributed generation sources. This will help realize Obama’s goals of diversifying fuel supplies and curbing carbon emissions. However, unless security is part of the design criteria, the smart grid will not live up to its name; done poorly increased communications will be accompanied by increase cyber vulnerabilities. First and foremost, a new paradigm must include security into the design and operational criteria as something more than merely an afterthought.

More specifically, adaptive islanding or physically dispersing small, modular generators allows for some continued operation if the overall transmission system has been disrupted either physically or by cyberattack. Locating the distributed sources closer to the place of use minimize the vulnerability of transmission lines. By diversifying the mix of fuels and technologies used by the distributed units there is safety from disruption of any one fuel source. Due to the increasing reliance on gas, incapacitating a pipeline compressor at a critical location could disrupt the flow of gas to large areas.

Another one of the challenges is the private sector owns and operates the majority of the country’s critical energy infrastructure.  A leading advocate of building a private-public-partnership, Richard Clarke, commented: “The owners and operators of electric power grids, banks and railroads; they’re the ones who have to defend our infrastructure. The government doesn’t own it, the government doesn’t operate it, [and] the government can’t defend it. …..the military can’t save us.”

Too Little to Late

Until these improvements are made the current electrical grid will continue to operate  with inefficiencies; physical and cyber vulnerabilities that could potentially cripple our economy. Current economic inefficiencies cost billions of dollars in losses each year and present a major challenge as increases in the world’s energy demand will require supply to triple by 2050. Combined with the new cyber threats we must quickly employ public-private partnerships that engage entrepreneurs to incorporate comprehensive security into any future “smart grid” design in a ways that also minimize loses in operational efficiency. Moreover, building a stronger and smarter electrical energy infrastructure will transform the country, mitigate risk, create jobs, and slow destruction of the environment. Indeed, a challenge worth undertaking, allowing us to look forward to future opportunities, instead of catastrophes of the past.

Joel Gordes is President of Environmental Energy Solutions and is involved in energy security matters. Michael Mylrea is a Security Consultant that has worked on energy and cyber security issues for private sector and government.

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Sustainability:Intergenerational Equity Part I

May 5th, 2009

In this continuing blog on “sustainability” I want to address another of the major tenets which in this case is intergenerational equity. Just as on the techie side of things we always go back to “heat goes from hot to cold in the most direct path possible,” we once again return to the roots of sustainability as defined by the Brundtland Commission report.  As you will recall, it says “meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” While the report itself may not actually used the words “intergenerational equity”  it is inherent in that definition and deserves further discussion.

There appears to be an almost universal wish to make your childrens’ world and condition just a little bit better than your own and while I myself am not a parent, I do feel a profound responsibility to do that in some small part on a global basis.

So how do we implement something like intergenerational equity? Maybe one starting point goes back to the Native Americans of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy who believed that in decision-making we had the responsibility to look at the effects unto the seventh generation going forward. This early and wise warning recognized that the smallest as well as the largest of our acts may have unintended but profound consequences that go beyond the present day. How many times have we seen the results of decisions that were not so carefully considered? On everything from opening up the prairies of Oklahoma for farming to the dust bowl it initiated several decades later to our current use and abuse of resources, we have left ensuing generations with far less than what we have had. This is particularly true of fossil fuel resources as well as water both of which will become increasingly of lower quality and quantity in the years ahead. But it is also true of soil quality, fish stocks and innumerable other natural resources which we too often take for granted. It also includes certain social trends that impact the quality of life of future generations like warfare, vehicle use and population. One of the best places to look at these trends is the yearly compilation of indicators in the “Vital Signs” report put out each year by the World Watch Institute (see http://www.worldwatch.org/taxonomy/term/39 or for a more detailed look). Looking at a number of the individual indicators as well as the entire picture they paint when taken in toto should be enough to make us take pause if you feel any responsibility at all for coming generations.

This, then, brings us back to one of the root causes that may make intergenerational equity more difficult to obtain in the future and one that is conveniently swept under the rug in most polite conversation. That is overpopulation and maybe the best gift we can give our children is to have less of them. The Brundtland Commission report speaks directly to this and it says, “In many parts of the world, the population is growing at rates that cannot be sustained by available environmental resources, at rates that are outstripping any reasonable expectations of improvements in housing, healthcare, food security, or energy supplies. The issue is not just numbers of people but how those numbers relate to available resources.” They go on to say, “But this is not just a demographic issue; providing people with facilities in education that allow them to choose the size of their families is a way of assuring — especially for women — the basic human right of self-determination.”

All this has some pretty deep implications for those of us who are not in a developing country where we see that it may be customary for them to have a large number of children and to understand some of the reasons why. In some instances having large families takes the place of Social Security that we have in our country and in their case the children are there to see after the welfare of their parents later in their life. The other aspect is that it helps to provide the family a source of labor for vital needs such as to sometimes carry water or firewood from extremely long distances.

So we need to ask ourselves here in this country some pretty hard questions if we’re really interested in global sustainability. Is it better for us to make an investment to buy solar panels for ourselves or maybe buy a system half that size and donate the rest of the money for solar ovens, solar water purification devices (see http://www.box.net/shared/4fc3de3piv or the more detailed http://www.box.net/shared/ytcd6gp84h ) and solar lighting in developing countries?  Each of those might in some way help reduce their need to maybe have families that large. The lighting would also provide an opportunity for some women to educate themselves which, as noted by the Brundtland Commission, has been tied statistically to lowering the birth rate.

But then the responsibility goes a lot further than placing any onus on developing nations for population growth as our own society, on a per capita basis, uses many, MANY times their resources. While countries like China and India have growing rates of resource use, we have had over a 200 year jumpstart on them in everything from food production to climate change gasses and they cannot be blamed for wanting to attain a higher standard of living for their children as well.  More on this next time.

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It’s the Oil, Stupid

March 25th, 2009

At the urging of one friend I’m going to take a little interlude from nagging people on sustainability principles and detour into my of my more common harangues. Not that this crowd needs it as much as most but sometimes some of our architects forget to really stress the energy efficiency aspects of their designs and the recent LEED hoo-haa has made some good points about this. So, let me try to recount a few things about why we ought to be doing some of this–and not using so much glass in a helter-skelter way. Here goes:

It’s the Oil, Stupid !

It’s a sign that ought to hang over the desk of every politician, general and journalist—and architect.

OIL has literally made us what we are today.

Without it, we would not have had the mechanization of agriculture. Before that a farmer could only support the food needs of about 5 others and most of those were his family. Most of us would have been farmers without oil.

Beginning just after WW I it allowed many to leave the farm to become doctors, lawyers, artists, factory workers and so many other professions. OK, so more lawyers may not have been one of the better benefits of oil.

It also meant the beginning of our consumerist society and a value system which often focuses on what we have rather than who we are. It took us from being inner-directed to other-directed

HISTORICALLY, let me give you a litany of events:

Oil. It has been a cause of conflict for decades.

In 1933 Smedley Butler said:

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. .. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I helped make Mexico, .. safe for American oil interests in 1914…. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you,  Smedley was a Marine Corp Major General and the recipient of two Congressional medals of honor. He would have had a third but the rules at that time prevented it.

On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. A source close to the emperor noted they took this action largely because the US imposed a de facto petroleum embargo on them.

During WW II President Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud and basically laid a policy that we would protect the Saudi Kingdom in return for access to oil. Every US president has renewed that pledge to a nation so abusive of human rights it makes the #1 or #2 spot in that category every year from Amnesty International.

In 1952 the President’s Materials Policy Commission (the Paley Commission) warned that the nation’s oil supply would begin to dwindle by the 1970’s.

In 1953 the US CIA engineered the overthrow of Mohammed Mosidique and put the Shah of Iran in power to protect our access to oil

In 1956 M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil geologist, determined the US would peak in oil production between 1966 and 1970 by three impeccable proofs. It peaked in 1970.

In 1971 the first wave of US military flew arms to Iran. It was later to lead to the revolution. I delivered a jet to them and trained them.

In 1973 we had the Arab oil embargo and developed plans to invade if need be.

In the 1979 Iranian Mullahs together with the middle class, angry about arms spending, overthrew the Shah.

In 1991 we intervened in Iraq to maintain access to Kuwaiti oil

In 2001 the US was attacked by Jihhadist terorists. 15 of 19 were Saudi who saw us as “foreign guards” defiling the land of Mecca and Medina.

In 2003 we invaded Iraq. It’s not because they had rutabagas there–OR weapons of Mass Destruction but they had the second largest oil reserves at the time.

In 2006 George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address “America is addicted to oil”

SO, WHERE ARE WE TODAY?

4% of global population using 25% of oil use

We use 20.5 million barrels per day OR ~7.5 billion barrels a year. China uses about 1/3 as much.

We import roughly 55-60% of it

Surprisingly most does not currently come from the Middle East –maybe 20% of totals

BUT, neither can we drill ourselves to oil independence. You don’t end an addiction by continuing the drug. Let me try to explain:

The mean availability for both ANWR and Outer Continental Shelf combined is ~96 billion barrels, a mean figure

We use 7.5 billion barrels per year

That’s about 12.8 years if we could get it all out at once–and we can’t

It’s a global market and we do not set the price so drilling will not significantly lower its cost either.

When all is said, the Middle East will still have the easy, cheap oil after we exhaust domestic sources.

We will be back to them but even more dependent

Getting off oil is the only real solution and the transition must begin now.

Sad to say oil and the environmental issues will only be taken seriously when linked to national security–and both of them are. In his 1962 book Enough Good Men Dr. Albert E. Burke warned us:

The problem is not money. It is a problem of education to inform Americans about the close tie which has always existed between a wide margin of resources and freedom. Reduce that margin of resources, reduce the quality of those resources and you reduce what Americans have always meant by the word “freedom.”

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The First Tenet of Sustainability

March 21st, 2009

The First Tenet of Sustainability

As I noted last time it was the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission), chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, that provided the classic definition for “sustainability”. Elegant in its simplicity, it states, “meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

Contrary to my own belief, the book well-articulated that the word “sustainability” is not quite as soft or “fuzzy” as many of us would-be practitioners might have thought. Let’s say it does not carry with it the same uncertainty associated with terms such as “hard-core pornography”. (Got your attention, huh?)  Some may recall Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 noted about that term, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced …  but I know it when I see it.” Well, we have to do a lot better than that for sustainability.

Surprisingly, the first tenet of sustainability according to Brundtland appears to require “a political system that secures effective citizen participation in decision making.”  While not to overly dwell on this point, this can have a number of meanings.  Too often the participation is limited to groups who are often referred to as “stakeholders” and many times individuals who do not represent groups are conveniently excluded. When it comes to “sustainability,” we are all stakeholders whether we represent a group or not. Maybe some of you have felt excluded or that your input was not fairly considered. We need to become better listeners in a world where the distractions are immense and where individuals and their sometimes different ideas seem to count for less.  I mean when you consider that there has only one statue I can recall commemorating a committee, (The Burghers of Calais by Rodin) maybe it is time to consider that “groupthink” that may exclude outliers may not always offer the best solutions.  Consider too, that in general, a great many of NESEA core ideas have been the outliers until relatively recent times.
The Brundtland Commission continues to detail in numerous places not merely the “narrow notion of physical sustainability” personified by green buildings and installing solar panels but also, more importantly, what other changes must take place in society including changes in the legal field to make us “sustainable”. At one point it says:
“National and international law has traditionally lagged behind events…; and “there is an urgent need:… to establish and apply new norms for state and interstate behavior to achieve sustainable development…”
It more than implies that changes in principles and values are required not only in government but in governance issues at all levels, in all forms of organizations within our culture including civil society which includes groups like Lion’s Clubs, Kiwanis and even professional organizations — like NESEA.  Oddly enough, one think tank that has very well articulated some of the other principles is not a renewable energy organization but the Natural Hazards Center in Boulder, CO. Aside from the participatory process discussed above, which they saw as central hub of a wheel to all the other principles, they likened the spokes of the wheel in their diagram to include:

• Social & Intergenerational Equity
• Environmental Quality
• Quality of Life
• Economic Vitality

Brundtland goes into these as well as a number of other areas to provide a more complete tapestry of understanding. In future blogs we will examine some of these before we get into the other  areas of sustainability including some  more closely associated with what NESEA members try their best to accomplish on a day to day basis.

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Sustainability

February 13th, 2009

Well I hate to admit it now in retrospect, but back around 1987 or 88 (and maybe some of the old-timers can recall this more exactly) I was one of the four nasty NESEA Board members who voted against changing the name from the Northeast “Solar” Energy Association to the Northeast “Sustainable” Energy Association. This was not out of any malice to the word “sustainable” or because I’m a cultural laggard, but it was due to the question of how do you explain the word “sustainable” in anything less than a 10 minute conversation? Today, the use of the word has proliferated throughout society and, more pointedly, into the economy along with its twin sister “green”.

On the surface for those of us who have toiled in the organic fields, this is an absolutely great time; what we’ve waited for so long to see, but deeper inspection of how these terms are used and overused, sort of makes me cringe.  Even among our kindred professionals I often see the terms used in a very limited sense, usually tied in with the word “development” but not recognizing the multifaceted nature of what it means in-depth for other changes we must build into our own institutions and society as a whole.

For a number of years we subtitled our Building Energy conferences “The Practice of Sustainability” which I actually like very much but this was mostly attuned to the physical, built environment as our architectural/builder colleagues like to call it. Largely missing have been some of the main attributes of what we call sustainability but envisioned by those who came before us or the use of the actual word itself.  In my own mind I see them as people who were not as distracted by things like CSI Miami, Ghost Whisperer, Dancing with the NFL or other unnamed forms of entertainment that are deemed “must-see”. With deep apologies to Marty Bauman and Stef Komorowski, our own white hat NESEA marketing team, the marketing profession has gotten hold of these words and made them into the most often used adjectives in marketing history. Yes, we ought to be happy about this but when these noble, well-meaning words are not well-understood or their use is bastardized they carry the risk of our believing that we are accomplishing more than we really are. Then, we are actually foisting off onto future generations the hard lifting that is yet to come because there is little more than an inch deep and  mile wide understanding of the totality of what “sustainability” means–and requires. In effect that “foisting” is the very antithesis of what sustainability strives to correct. More on that later.

I don’t mean to sound like I am the godfather of sustainability; I certainly am not but I was fortunate enough to listen weekly to a Yale Professor named Dr. Albert E. Burke who was the Director of the Graduate Studies in Conservation and Resource Use. I was six or seven years old and he had a local television show that was what I can only call enrapturing. He was one of those rare people who even back in the mid-50s was able to connect the dots between our resources and how well we use or abuse them and our freedoms. It is my opinion that the current environmental movement has not yet seen the equal of Dr. Burke. He gave many specific examples of these connections, some of which I will go into in later blogs. Suffice to say for now, in 1962 he warned about growing oil dependence for this nation before nearly anyone else had a clue on this even as our own domestic sources had just begun to dwindle. Then there were the Choctaw..
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Another formative experience came from an old friend in the renewable energy advocacy community who nagged me incessantly to read a book she referred to as the Brundtland Commission Report of 1987. Virginia (Ginny) Johnson was one of these incessant, nagging, graying but never old, little ladies whose five feet in height belies her power and persistence that somehow when she corners you, you can no longer refuse to face the music. So after four years of nagging, in 1991 I read the book version titled Our Common Future better known in some circles as the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. I am still waiting for the movie.

It was in reading it that I came across what most people now consider to be the classic and, in my opinion still the best, definition of “sustainability” or “sustainable development”. It reads “meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” Reread that and maybe now you can connect with my dismay on how we foist off on future generations the heavy lifting we refuse to do today that I mentioned just three paragraphs above. Good grief, environmental groups get foundation funding for passing a state law that mandates 80% reductions of CO2 by 2050 but sets few if any intermediate, more granular goals.  How about something like “one lousy percent by two years from now”? Actually, recession might do that.

In some ways, though, the word is still enigmatic and a lot of people think they can improve upon it but often get so lost in specifics, they lose site of it overarching wisdom. They add to it, and embellish it which sometimes does aid in upstanding but more often than not is to the concept’s detriment. When you deeply think about that definition it sort of covers the gamut of how we should be investing our efforts. And yet, many of our “sustainability practitioners” do not integrate that simplicity of meaning into either the built environment or the laws and regulations proposed or passed seeking to make us a more “sustainable” society.

So that is an introduction to this blog where I want to try to convey a deeper meaning to the word sustainability and maybe, just maybe, totally replace the word green with something that has not only a deeper meaning but also some standards to go with it. I am sure I’m going to rankle a lot of good people who will disagree with me, and that is fine too. In the next blog I will try to explore Brundtland more for those very few who may be interested.

Yours in Sustainability [whatever it means]
Joel N. Gordes

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