The The Hill.com has an excellent article describing the effects of cyberattacks on the country's electric grid. The utility industry gives lip service to the threat and say they are prepared. They have spare transformers and mutual aid pacts among the different utilities. They refuse to acknowledge that with a wide-spread electric outage there will be no fuel to transport spare transformers and unaffected utilities will not send teams of people and spare parts away from their area if they believe they will be attacked next.
There are also tens of thousands of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems embedded in the electric grid that are susceptible to cyberattack and it is extremely doubtful that the utilities have sufficient spares.
The federal government as a whole is also woefully unprepared! As pointed out in an earlier post, the military is taking steps to protect their electronic systems, such as moving command and control back into Cheyenne Mountain, and to build and protect off-grid electric generating systems.
It is time for Texas and it's utilities to harden the electric grid against all attacks, from cyber to EMP and physical attacks.
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