Shield

Without electricity, our way of life is untenable. We rely on an uninterrupted supply of power to bring food to our supermarkets, water into our homes, and prosperity to our citizens. Even minor blackouts cause severe disruption.

Yet the critical electric infrastructure we depend on to sustain our society has been built for efficiency, not for resilience. It is fragile.

Our electrical grid is constantly threatened by cyberattacks and hurricanes, solar storms and terrorist strikes, electromagnetic pulses, and earthquakes.

And the odds are not in our favor. Over the next decade, research suggests we face a one in ten chance of losing much of our grid to a solar storm – a burst of radiation from the sun that would affect the Earth’s atmosphere and compromise our power grid. In fact, Lloyd’s of London concluded that such a storm is so likely, and its effects so devastating, that it refuses to offer insurance against one.

The entire grid can be shut down by destroying just nine critical transformer substations, like the one crippled in minutes by a team of armed attackers near San Jose, California in 2013.

It is only a matter of time until one of these events – manmade or natural – triggers a catastrophic blackout on the mainland United States. Experts estimate it would result in the loss of trillions of dollars in economic value and millions of American lives – many times greater than the losses from Hurricanes Harvey, Sandy, and Katrina combined. And with no outside force to rescue us, a country-wide blackout could last more than a year and would be next to impossible to recover from.

Thankfully, this tragedy can be prevented – and Helena’s Shield Project is fighting to do so.

Since 2017, we have worked with public and private sector actors to support fundraising, educational, and operational efforts to secure the United States’ electrical grid against the threat of prolonged blackout.

Helena’s educational efforts have successfully resulted in the drafting, introduction, and passage in the California State Senate of two bills designed to protect the electrical grid – SJR 20 and SB 1076. Following this State success, the project supported two successful Presidential Executive Orders.

But while the victories have been welcome, the job is not done. Until we fully harden the electrical grid, our power remains one storm, solar flare, or keystroke away from going out.

In 2013, as part of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan, sixteen sectors were identified as comprising the country’s critical infrastructure. They were Agriculture and Food, Chemical, Commercial Facilities, Communications, Critical Manufacturing, Dams, Defense Industrial Base, Emergency Services, Energy, Financial Services, Government Facilities, Information Technology, Nuclear Reactors, Materials, and Waste, Public Health and Healthcare, Transportation Systems, and Water and Water Treatment Systems.

These were chosen based on the criterion that if any one of them were to be significantly disrupted, the societal consequences would be both severe and pandemic.

But what if they were all to collapse? If the failure of just one would lead to almost irreparable societal harm, what would the failure of all sixteen lead to? It is a scenario that, while seemingly outlandish, is unsettlingly possible, because each one of those systems is critically and immutably reliant on one thing: electricity.

Telecommunications satellites and law enforcement; sewage and refrigerators; gas pumps, banks, production factories; hospitals. Without power, they all fail. No running water or complex food production. No internet or credit cards. No advanced medical care or ambulances. Cars and trucks would be useless in days. Cell phones would be fragile paperweights; computers would be typewriters with two-hour lifespans and no printing capabilities. In 2011, the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant melted down because there was no power to cool the reactors after tsunamis disabled the area’s electrical grid. Almost overnight, our society would be transported back to the 1800’s.

The reason this scenario is even possible is that our country’s electrical infrastructure is exceedingly vulnerable. Our electrical grid is constantly threatened by cyberattacks and hurricanes, solar storms and terrorist strikes, electromagnetic pulses, and earthquakes, any one of which can cause a long-term (potentially months, even years) blackout. And the odds are not in our favor. Besides the everpresent threat of a cyberattack, hurricane, or earthquake, each decade, we face a one in ten chance of losing much of our grid to a solar storm – a burst of radiation from the sun that would overload and cripple our electrical grid’s EHV transformers. (In fact, Lloyd’s of London concluded that such a storm is so likely, and its effects so devastating, that it refuses to offer insurance against one).

The damage of such a blackout is practically incalculable. Economically, it would easily cause trillions of dollars in damage. Lloyd’s of London estimated that a blackout isolated just in the Northeast, lasting a matter of days or weeks, would cost at least $1T. But that pales in comparison to public health. Some experts have put the potential loss of life in the millions.

Hardening the grid is neither difficult nor prohibitively expensive. From installing modifications like faraday cages, capacitor banks, surge arresters, and EMP-hardened battery chargers and generator controls, to monitoring where parts are being manufactured or simply expanding the amount of spare parts kept on-site, there are plenty of ways to physically harden the country’s infrastructure. The cost is debated, but it is generally placed somewhere between $2 and $12 billion. Not a small sum, to be sure, but a fraction of the societal cost of a poorly timed solar flare or cyberattack.

In July of 2017, Helena Executive Director and COO Sam Feinburg read an article in “The World If” section of The Economist titled “If an electromagnetic pulse took down America’s electricity grid.”

It described the nightmarish scenario in which an EMP device were detonated above Nebraska, resulting in exactly the kind of horrifying effects detailed above. What was particularly terrifying—and perplexing—to Sam was how susceptible the country was. If this threat was real – and so easily solvable – why hadn’t we done anything about it?

In August, Helena led a meeting between a small group of our members to try to answer this question. The issue of grid security was raised, and members reacted with the same incredulity Sam had; bewildered that a threat this severe could exist in developed economies without drawing government attention and remedial regulation.

So Helena decided to investigate whether a potential grid shutdown:

1) Would cause an critical level of harm and disruption

2) Had a non-trivial probability of occurrence and

3) Was within our financial and technological capabilities to prevent.

From that analysis, the Shield project began. The first step of Shield was its research phase. Helena and a select group of our members interviewed experts from NASA, NOAA, USGS, the CIA, Stanford University, the Congressional EMP Commission, the RAND Corporation, and the United States Congress to investigate threats to the US electrical grid.

Three areas of consensus emerged from these meetings:

1) A prolonged loss of electric power due to a partial or total failure of the United States’ electrical grid would result in an extremely high magnitude of harm to American society.

2) The probability of such a prolonged loss of power is non-trivial.

3) This potential catastrophe is avoidable; it is well within our financial and technological means to prevent through simple grid hardening.

We then conducted an analysis of the current state of affairs around grid hardening in the United States. We researched and spoke with a cross-section of public, private, and nonprofit entities with varying opinions, positions, and activities related to grid security and hardening.

Our aims were to investigate:

— What other efforts to solve the problem currently existed, and whether Helena could add anything non-duplicative to those efforts, either as a partner or an independent actor.

— Why those existing efforts had not succeeded in fixing the problem; what mistakes had been made, and how Helena could avoid making them.

— The avenues to potential success in hardening the grid and the relative merits and demerits of each.

During our research, four reports stood out as being of particular significance in the field. They came from the Congressional EMP Commission, Lloyds of London, the National Academies of Sciences, and the RAND Corporation.

It became clear that the ongoing vulnerability of the electrical grid was neither inevitable nor new. Hardening technology had existed for years, it was not prohibitively expensive, and a handful organizations and special interest groups had already been trying to make progress in the space but had been largely unsuccessful.

This begged the question of why. The electrical grid’s vulnerability was a potentially existential issue for the country. It was also eminently solvable. Why had so little been done? Helena examined the various efforts existing organizations had made over the years to secure the grid, and attempted to identify why prior efforts had come up short.

One clear failing was in the messaging and communications used to describe the issue. For some reason, despite its importance, the grid security problem was often unknown or not taken seriously. Its advocates – often highly passionate and technically competent – had struggled to escape a perception that their concerns were overblown or unserious.

What was also evident from these examinations was that the most effective approach to grid security would most likely be legislative. Between the utilities, power companies, and state and federal governments, electrical grid security is a knot of bureaucratic responsibility, and resolving those entanglements requires legislation.

So Helena began preliminary educational outreach work. We met with state and national legislators and agencies. We held extensive meetings with public regulators, private corporations, nonprofit entities, other stakeholders, and Helena Members including California State Senator Robert Hertzberg. Senator Hertzberg, it turned out, cared deeply about the issue and was passionate about addressing it.

Together with Senator Hertzberg, Helena immediately began work on drafting two bills, which Senator Hertzberg then introduced to the California State Senate: the first was SJR 20; the second SB 1076.

The first bill, SJR-20, was simple. It expressed the acknowledgement of the California State Senate that the electrical grid is under threat – from geomagnetic storms, EMPs, and more – and “urges the President and the Congress of the United States to work together to implement grid hardening measures and to help ensure our nation’s critical electrical infrastructure is protected from threats from electromagnetic pulses and physical attacks on the infrastructure.”

It was passed unanimously.

This simple resolution represented landmark progress for the grid resilience issue – the Senate of the largest State in the Union publicly declaring the legitimacy and importance of the problem gave weight and validation to those fighting for the cause.

With the Senate unanimously acknowledging the dangers facing the grid, Senator Hertzberg introduced the second bill, SB-1076. This bill took aim at the California’s Office of Emergency Services (roughly analogous to the Federal Government’s FEMA). The OES plans state responses to disaster scenarios including terrorist attacks, earthquakes, and wildfires.

Curiously, at the time, a large-scale blackout or brownout across the electrical grid was not among the scenarios it planned for. (Though this was not unusual; the federal government has no such plan, nor do most states in the union.) SB-1076 directly remedied that, requiring “the State Emergency Plan to include preparedness recommendations to harden the critical infrastructure of electrical utilities against an electromagnetic pulse attack, geomagnetic storm event, or other potential cause of a long-term outage.”

On May 29th, it, too, was passed unanimously. It was then passed unanimously in amended form by the California State Assembly 79-0, and was then passed again by the Senate 39-0.

In a matter of months, Helena had managed to pass two pieces of legislation, even after similar bills had failed in Maine, Virginia, Florida, and Texas. This legislation represented progress in California, while also setting an example for other states—and organizations—to follow. Perhaps most importantly, they showed that the issue—after remaining dormant for so long—was gaining momentum.

With both bills passed in California and the issue gaining more traction, Helena turned its sights nationally. Working with Helena Member R. James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, Helena became one of the two nonprofit partners of the 2018 United States Air Force Electromagnetic Cybersecurity Summit.

The summit coincided with the kickoff of a DHS initiative to improve cybersecurity defenses across US critical infrastructure. In the wake of revelations that Russian hackers infiltrated U.S. electrical utilities the previous year, government officials’ statements expressed increasing concern over the vulnerability of US critical infrastructure to cyberattack.

This Summit also came on the heels of the United States Department of Defense declassifying two reports relating to solar geomagnetic disturbances. The reports describe an immediate and pressing threat to critical infrastructure posed by the sun, and the insufficiency of the USA’s Federal resiliency standards.

From this Summit came the watershed Executive Order on EMPs signed by President Donald Trump on March 26th, 2019.

Signed less than two years after the launch of the Shield Project, the order uses the executive power of the US Presidency to marshal a whole-of-government response to the full spectrum of threats posed by natural and manmade EMPs.

It mandates action by the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Homeland Security, Commerce, and the Interior to prevent, prepare for, and mitigate the effects of electromagnetic threats to the US grid. This action spans private and public sector R&D, diplomatic deterrence, infrastructure hardening, and more, including mandating the Department of Defense to submit a report every three months on the status of the EMP threat, the National Guard to evaluate the country’s readiness in dealing with a multi-state electromagnetic pulse event by September, and the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to develop plans and procedures for dealing with such an event by June.

Hertzberg responded to the Executive Order with the following statement:

“If we wait until after a cyberattack or solar storm has plunged part of our nation into chaos and destruction, it will be too late to act. Last year, I worked with Helena– a new type of organization dedicated to taking on urgent societal problems – to pass SJR 20, which called on the federal government to meet this urgent need to implement electrical grid hardening measures nationwide and SB 1076, which paved the way to do so in California. I am relieved, and excited, at the news of the new Executive Order to strengthen Washington’s efforts on this critical issue.”

This executive order was quickly followed by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, signed by President Trump on December 20, 2019, which implemented and signed into law the provisions in the Executive Order that called on the government to harden critical electrical infrastructure against both natural and manmade EMPs.

Since then, the momentum has only grown, as has the visibility of the issue. While early inroads had been made mostly with an eye on EMPs (though hardening against EMPs also hardens against other threats), progress—and awareness—began to accelerate with respect to other threats as well.

On May 1st, 2020, President Trump signed the Executive Order Securing the United States Bulk-Power System. The Executive Order makes stringent guidelines for what equipment can be used and installed, prohibiting “Federal agencies and U.S. persons from acquiring, transferring, or installing BPS equipment in which any foreign country or foreign national has any interest and the transaction poses an unacceptable risk to national security or the security and safety of American citizens. Evolving threats facing our critical infrastructure have only served to highlight the supply chain risks faced by all sectors, including energy, and the need to ensure the availability of secure components from American companies and other trusted sources.”

In early 2020, a budget cut to the United States Geological Survey Geomagnetic monitoring program was put before Congress. The USGS currently operates 14 magnetic observatories spread across the country that monitor the geomagnetic field on a global scale. Chief among their many uses, is that this distribution of observatories is able to monitor and predict space-weather, which means the USGS can give an early warning for potential solar flare impacts.

Although the proposed budget cuts were not substantial, they would have required the shutting down of two of the fourteen observatories. That may not sound devastating, but the locations of the observatories had been specifically chosen, and losing just two would make the other twelve practically useless. The potential harm cannot be overstated; a lead time of just minutes can be the difference between a blackout of six months and six hours.

The budget cut was rejected. USGS funding was successfully maintained, and all fourteen stations are still operating.
In less than four years, Shield has taken an issue that had seen little progress in decades and brought to the the cover of the Wall Street Journal, before Congress, and onto the President’s desk.

But more needs to be done. Implementing intelligent federal resiliency standards, a greater density of micro-grids, and individual state action to harden infrastructure would offer enough protection to turn an existential catastrophe into a minor disaster. In a sweeping blackout, the difference between 30% electrical coverage and 0% could prove the difference between civilization and none.

We have sat on this knowledge for years without acting. Our government first learned of the threat from electromagnetic pulses in the 1960s. In 1989, a small solar storm left millions of people without power in Quebec. In the Ukraine, cyberattacks have cut the power to hundreds of thousands of homes twice since 2015. Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in 2017 and left hundreds of thousands of US citizens without power for months, showed how difficult it can be to restore electricity after a massive outage, even to a small and contained area.

It often takes tragedy to catalyze change. If we wait until after a cyberattack, solar storm, or earthquake has plunged part of our nation into chaos and destruction, it will be too late to act. We cannot afford such complacency now. That is why Helena remains deeply committed to securing the grid.

According to a report released on October 28th from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and National Counterterrorism Center, July of 2020 saw the first reported incident of a drone attack on the US electrical grid. A DJI Mavic 2 drone, affixed with a length of copper wire, was flown at a substation in Pennsylvania, with the apparent intention of potentially short-circuiting the high voltage equipment. Thankfully, the attack was unsuccessful, and the drone crashed into the roof of a neighboring building.

There is precedent for air-based attacks on electrical infrastructure. Graphite bombs, such as those used by the United States Air Force in the Gulf War and by NATO in the Kosovo war, work similarly: when they detonate, they don’t explode; they shower treated carbon filaments on electrical infrastructure, causing short-circuits. It is estimated that the USAF disabled 85% of the electrical supply in Iraq, and that NATO disabled 70% in Serbia.

The DJI Mavic 2 attack is a reminder of how ever-present and asymmetric the threats to our grid can be. The drone itself is barely over a foot in width and relatively inexpensive (it can be purchased for around $1000). It is widely available and only requires a single person to operate. And yet, when paired with a simple strip of copper wire, it presented the possibility of doing substantial harm to our electrical infrastructure.