[House Hearing, 115 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
RESILIENCY: THE ELECTRIC GRID'S ONLY HOPE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
OCTOBER 3, 2017
__________
Serial No. 115-29
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
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COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas, Chair
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
DANA ROHRABACHER, California ZOE LOFGREN, California
MO BROOKS, Alabama DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon
BILL POSEY, Florida ALAN GRAYSON, Florida
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky AMI BERA, California
JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut
RANDY K. WEBER, Texas MARC A. VEASEY, Texas
STEPHEN KNIGHT, California DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia
BRIAN BABIN, Texas JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia JERRY MCNERNEY, California
BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado
RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana PAUL TONKO, New York
DRAIN LaHOOD, Illinois BILL FOSTER, Illinois
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida MARK TAKANO, California
JIM BANKS, Indiana COLLEEN HANABUSA, Hawaii
ANDY BIGGS, Arizona CHARLIE CRIST, Florida
ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas
NEAL P. DUNN, Florida
CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana
RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
C O N T E N T S
October 3, 2017
Page
Witness List..................................................... 2
Hearing Charter.................................................. 3
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Lamar S. Smith, Chairman, Committee
on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 4
Written Statement............................................ 6
Statement by Representative Marc A. Veasey, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 8
Written Statement............................................ 10
Witnesses:
Dr. William Sanders, Department Head, Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois
Oral Statement............................................... 12
Written Statement............................................ 15
Mr. Carl Imhoff, Manager, Electricity Market Sector, Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory
Oral Statement............................................... 89
Written Statement............................................ 91
Dr. Gavin Dillingham, Program Director, Clean Energy Policy,
Houston Advanced Research Center
Oral Statement............................................... 114
Written Statement............................................ 117
Mr. Walt Baum, Executive Director, Texas Public Power Association
Oral Statement............................................... 130
Written Statement............................................ 133
Discussion....................................................... 138
Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Mr. Carl Imhoff, Manager, Electricity Market Sector, Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory.................................. 164
Dr. Gavin Dillingham, Program Director, Clean Energy Policy,
Houston Advanced Research Center............................... 166
Mr. Walt Baum, Executive Director, Texas Public Power Association 168
Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record
Statement submitted by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson,
Ranking Member, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
U.S. House of Representatives.................................. 170
Documents submitted by Representative Marc A. Veasey, Committee
on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 172
RESILIENCY: THE ELECTRIC GRID'S ONLY HOPE
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Tuesday, October 3, 2017
House of Representatives,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
Washington, D.C.
The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:09 a.m., in Room
2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Lamar Smith
[Chairman of the Committee] presiding.
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Chairman Smith. The Committee on Science, Space, and
Technology will come to order. Without objection, the Chair is
authorized to declare recesses of the Committee at any time.
Welcome to today's hearing entitled ``Resiliency: The
Electric Grid's Only Hope.''
I'll recognize myself for an opening statement and then the
Ranking Member.
Good morning. Today, the Committee on Science, Space, and
Technology will examine the ongoing effort by federal agencies,
industry, and the Department of Energy's National Labs to
ensure that a resilient U.S. electric grid can deliver power to
American homes, businesses, and essential services. This
hearing specifically will consider the recommendations made by
the National Academies of Sciences' in their July 2017 report
identifying ways to enhance the resiliency of our electricity
system.
This Committee has held hearings addressing physical and
cyber threats to our power system, as well as technological
solutions to stop or prevent damage from these attacks, but we
often ignore the fact that damage to the power grid can and
will continue to occur. We cannot predict when a cyberattack
would threaten our power supply, and as we were reminded a few
weeks ago with the impact of Hurricane Harvey, we don't know
when the next devastating natural disaster will occur.
Instead of simply focusing on threats, we should prioritize
improving the resiliency of our electric grid. The resiliency
of the grid is the ability of system operators to prevent
disruptions in power, limit the duration of a power disruption,
and quickly repair potential damage. Resiliency is also
increased by incorporating data analytics and anecdotal
evidence to improve preparation for future disruptive events.
Since it is not a question of ``if'' but a question of ``when''
the power grid will face significant physical and cyber
threats, resiliency should be a priority for our electricity
system.
Congress requested that NAS conduct a study on the
resiliency of the Nation's electric system. The final report
was authored by a group of academics and industry partners with
a knowledge base in electrical systems, engineering, and
cybersecurity. The author of this report, Dr. William Sanders,
will testify today on the NAS report and its recommendations.
The report recommends government and industry collaboration
and improved data-sharing as the primary strategy for improving
the resilience of the Nation's electrical system. The NAS
report also stresses the importance of the Federal Government's
investment in the kind of long-term, early-stage applied
research and technology development that is the mission of the
DOE National Labs.
DOE maintains research infrastructure at National Labs that
is vital to better understanding and operating our electricity
system. High performance computing systems can conduct complex
modeling and simulations that predict potential electricity
outages and plan responses to attacks. And information-sharing
programs like the Department's Cyber Risk Information Sharing
Program facilitate industry communication on shared threats. By
partnering with industry through the National Labs, DOE can
provide critical knowledge and enable the deployment of new
technology that improves grid resilience.
There are still challenges to improving resilience. The
current federal programs to protect and preserve our electric
grid are fragmented and complex. Within the Science Committee's
jurisdiction alone, programs to improve grid security and
resiliency are funded at the Department of Homeland Security,
FERC, the Department of Energy, and the National Institute of
Standards and Technology.
And incorporating utilities across the country, both large
and small, adds even more complexity. Agencies will need to
work together to simplify the information-sharing process for
industry. Federal agencies, including DOE, must also prioritize
the early-stage research that industry does not have the
capacity to undertake. This will lead to the next-generation
technology solutions.
I thank our witnesses today for testifying about their
valuable efforts in research, and giving their insights about
operations of the electric grid. I look forward to a productive
discussion about how federal agencies can work with industry to
secure a resilient electric grid and what role Congress should
play in providing direction and oversight to this complex
process.
[The prepared statement of Chairman Smith follows:]
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Chairman Smith. That concludes my opening statement, and
the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Veasey, is recognized for his.
Mr. Veasey. Good morning, and thank you, Chairman Smith,
for holding this very important and timely hearing today. I
really appreciate that. I'd also like to thank the
distinguished panelists for being here this morning. I'd also
like to thank Dr. Dillingham in particular. It's my
understanding that your house was affected by the storm and
hope that you and your family are doing okay now and recovering
well.
And also I'd like to--I look forward to this hearing and--
because I want to hear your professional findings and your
firsthand account of what storms like this can cause to
communities across the country. I'm also interested in learning
what we can do to improve their ability to restore power and
other essential services as quickly as possible.
Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria are very unfortunate
examples of events that our world's leading scientific
institutions many times here in this committee have warned us
would happen more often. It is difficult to attribute any
single storm to one specific cause but there is a strong
scientific consensus that human activity is responsible for
conditions that may lead to more frequent and intense
hurricanes, and the severity of these events may continue to
get worse unless we do something to change our trajectory. This
is a major reason that resilience is so important, and I am
glad that we are elevating our examination of this topic today.
With that said, I am very concerned again with how the
Department of Energy may actually be using and redefining grid
resiliency to accomplish a political agenda. Just last Friday,
the Department of Energy submitted a proposed rule to FERC with
the direct purpose of adjusting market rules to favor coal and
nuclear plants because they may have several weeks of fuel on
site. The Department asserted that this makes these plants more
resilient than natural gas and renewables and therefore deserve
extra compensation for this attribute.
And I would imagine, Mr. Chairman, that there are probably
some people that drill in Texas for natural gas that will
probably be--will probably disagree with that.
Now, to be clear I'm a very strong supporter of developing
and incentivizing carbon capture methods and technologies. It
will help us to--it will help us reasonably use the abundant
fossil fuel resources our nation has at its disposal, including
coal. I also support the development and deployment of next-gen
nuclear technologies while doing what we can to safely extend
the lifetime of our current fleet.
But that doesn't mean that we should unfairly favor coal
and nuclear without a strong independently reviewed
justification. The Department has leaned on its recently
released report on the electric grid for its justification, but
the lead author of that report, Alison Silverstein, pushed back
against this mischaracterization of her work. According to the
conversations she had with committee staff, the bulk of her
work remained intact after she handed it to the Department.
However, the final report's specific recommendations supporting
coal and nuclear plants due to their resiliency characteristics
was not justified by any research that she or her colleagues
were aware of. In a piece she published in Utility Dive
yesterday, Ms. Silverstein took issue with how DOE interpreted
her technical work in the staff report.
And, Mr. Chairman, I would like to enter this article in
the record.
Chairman Smith. Without objection, so ordered.
[The information appears in Appendix II]
Mr. Veasey. In it, she states the characteristics, metrics,
benefits, and compensation for essential resilience and
reliability services are not yet fully understood.
Specifically, she concludes that, ``At this point we could not
say that coal and nuclear have unique characteristics that
provide such resiliency benefits that they should receive
special treatment in the market.''
This conclusion is also echoed by a thorough analysis
released by the conservative R Street Institute on Sunday,
which found that this proposal is neither technically nor
procedurally sound. R Street summarized it as an arbitrary
backdoor subsidy to coal and nuclear plants that risk
undermining the electrical competition throughout the United
States.
And a story published in Energy and Environment News on
Friday titled ``Flooded Texas Coal Piles Dampen Reliability
Arguments'' is an example of why this proposed rule may not
have been as rigorously developed as it should have been, never
mind the fact that in addition to doing what we can to ensure
the resiliency of the grid, the cost of unmitigated pollution
from fossil fuels should also be incorporated into the cost.
Propping up coal for one insufficiently justified reason
without properly pricing a major cost of its development and
use to our public health and the environment is not what I
would call good policymaking.
And before I conclude, Mr. Chairman, I would like to note
that while the natural disasters are considerable threat to our
grid infrastructure, there are a number of other concerns to
keep in mind, too: cybersecurity, physical attacks, our aging
infrastructure, geomagnetic disturbances, all of those present
unique challenges to grid resiliency. And I look forward to
hearing all of these topics discussed today.
And finally, I would be remiss to not remind the majority
of--the majority here on the panel that we are fast approaching
the end of the year, and we have still not heard from Secretary
Perry yet on this committee, and we need to hear from him. And
I would think that with all the Texans that are on this
committee that it would be like when he was with Randy Weber
now in the State Legislature and he would feel fine coming on
down here and talking to us. We've got east Texas, west Texas,
the Houston area, Dallas-Fort Worth. We're all represented and
I'm sure that Rick, as we used to call him when I was in the
Texas Legislature, that he would feel fine coming on down here
and talking to us and testifying.
So, Mr. Chairman, with that, I yield back my time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Veasey follows:]
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Chairman Smith. That's a good pitch, Mr. Veasey, and a good
statement as well. Thank you.
Let me introduce our witnesses. Our first witness today is
Dr. William Sanders, Department Head of the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of
Illinois. Dr. Sanders received a bachelor's degree in computer
engineering, a master's of science degree and a Ph.D. in
computer science and engineering from the University of
Michigan.
Our next witness is Mr. Carl Imhoff, Manager of the
Electricity Market Sector at Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory. With over 30 years of experience at PNNL, Mr.
Imhoff has been involved with multiple electric power system
organizations. He received a bachelor's degree in industrial
engineering from the University of Arkansas and a master's
degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University.
The third witness is Dr. Gavin Dillingham, Program Director
for Clean Energy Policy at Houston Advanced Research Center.
Additionally, Dr. Dillingham is the Director of the U.S.
Department of Energy Southwest Combined Heat and Power
Technical Assistance Partnership. He received a Ph.D. in
political science from Rice University.
Our final witness today is Mr. Walt Baum, Executive
Director of Texas Public Power Association. Previously, Mr.
Baum was the Executive Vice President of the Association of
Electric Companies of Texas. He received a bachelor's degree in
economics from Austin College with concentrations in political
science, regulatory policy, and land-use economics.
We welcome you all, look forward to your testimony today.
And Dr. Sanders, if you will begin.
TESTIMONY OF DR. WILLIAM SANDERS,
DEPARTMENT HEAD,
DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL
AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING,
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
Dr. Sanders. Thank you, Chairman Smith. Chairman Smith,
Ranking Member Veasey, and Members of the Committee, I am
honored to appear before you today. My name is Bill Sanders,
and I'm the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I was a member of the committee that wrote the National
Academies of Science's engineering and medicine consensus
report entitled ``Enhancing the Resiliency of the Nation's
Electricity System.''
The subject of this hearing is resiliency. Resiliency is a
fundamental and different concept from other abilities such as
reliability or cybersecurity. In the context of electric power,
a key insight about resiliency is that it attempts to avoid an
event--in this case a long-term blackout--but understands and
admits that avoidance may not be possible and thus works to
respond as quickly as possible, preserving critical individual
and societal services and over time strives for full recovery
and enhanced robustness to further impairments.
The reference studies focuses largely on the Nation's
vulnerability to large-area, long-duration outages, those that
span several service areas and last three days or longer. If
found that much can be done to make these outages less likely,
but they cannot be totally eliminated no matter how much money
or effort is invested. To increase the resiliency of the grid,
our report argues that the Nation must not only work to prevent
and minimize the size of outages but must also develop
strategies to cope with the outages when they happen, recover
rapidly afterward, and incorporate lessons learned into future
planning and response effort.
The offered report also recognizes that at least for the
next two decades most consumers will continue to depend on the
functioning of a large-scale, interconnected, tightly
organized, and hierarchical structured electric grid for
resilient electricity service.
In addition to many specific recommendations directed to
particular organizations, the report makes seven overarching
major recommendations. They're documented in detail in the
report, and I'll just summarize them here. First, emergency
preparedness exercises that include multisector coordination;
implementing available grid resiliency technologies and best
practices; supporting DOE research and grid resiliency;
creating a stock pile of physical components, namely
transformers, that enhance resiliency; developing a means for
grid cyber resilience; continuous envisioning of possible
impairments which could lead to large-scale grid failures; and
ongoing efforts as needed to mandate strategies designed to
increase the resiliency of the electricity system. In all of
these efforts, the joint and collaborative involvement of
government, industry, and academia is key to their success.
A new concern to the resiliency of the power cyber portion
of the grid and how that cyber portion could affect overall
grid resiliency, the electric power system has become
increasingly reliant on its cyber infrastructure, including
computers, communication networks, control system electronics,
smart meters and other distribution-side assets. A compromise
of the power grid control system or other portions of the grid
cyber infrastructure can have serious consequences ranging from
a simple disruption to--of service with no damage to physical
components to permanent damage of hardware that can have long-
lasting effects.
Over the last decade, much attention has been rightly
placed on grid cybersecurity but much less has been placed on
grid cyber resiliency. The sources of guidance on protection as
a mechanism to achieve grid cybersecurity are numerous and
documented in the report. It is now, however, becoming apparent
that protection alone is not sufficient and can never be made
perfect.
An experiment, for example, conducted by the National Rural
Electric Cooperative Association and N-Dimension in 2014
determined that a typical small utility is probed or attacked
every 3 seconds around the clock. Given the relentless attacks
and the challenges of prevention, successful cyber penetrations
are inevitable and there is evidence of increases in the rate
of penetration in the past year. Serious risks are posed by
further integration of operational technology systems with
utility business systems, despite the potential for significant
value and increased efficiency.
Given that protection cannot be made perfect and the risk
is growing, cyber resiliency, in addition to more classical
cyber protection approaches, is critically important. While
some work done under the cybersecurity nomenclature can be used
to support resiliency, the majority of the work today has been
focused on preventing the occurrence of successful attacks
rather than detecting and responding to partially successful
attacks that occur.
As argued in the report and in our overarching
recommendation number 5, further work is critically needed to
define cyber resiliency architectures that protect against,
detect, respond, and recover from cyber events that occur. So
the title of this hearing, ``Resiliency: The Electric Grid's
Only Hope'' is apt. The threat to grid resiliency is
multifaceted and real, and the time to act is now.
Thank you for the opportunity to be with you here today. I
would be happy to answer any questions you have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Sanders follows:]
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Chairman Smith. Thank you, Dr. Sanders. And, Mr. Imhoff.
TESTIMONY OF MR. CARL IMHOFF, MANAGER,
ELECTRICITY MARKET SECTOR,
PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY
Mr. Imhoff. Thank you, Chairman Smith, Ranking Member
Veasey, and Members of the Committee today, for the opportunity
to join this important conversation. My name is Carl Imhoff,
and I lead the Grid Research Program in DOE's Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory in Washington State. For more than two
decades, PNNL has supported power system resilience,
reliability, and innovation for DOE and utilities across the
Nation. I also chair DOE's Grid Modernization Laboratory
Consortium, a team of 12 National Labs that support DOE's grid
modernization initiative with--along with over 100 partners
from industry and academia such as ERCOT and Texas A&M and the
University of Illinois.
Today, I offer three main points regarding grid resilience.
Point 1, substantial opportunity exists to leverage fundamental
science and applied research to enhance the Nation's options
for modernizing the grid in ways that enhance overall
resilience, and I'll share five examples.
Point 2, the national laboratories have delivered important
new approaches to enhance grid resilience, and I'll share some
recent accomplishments and some emerging new efforts that were
just recently announced.
And point 3, state and federal regulatory stakeholders need
resilience valuation tools in addition to the science and
technology innovation so that they can better enable the
required investment to actually deliver the science and
technology innovations.
Let's start with science and technology opportunities
themselves. The definition of a resilient grid addresses both
avoiding and resisting outages before an incident occurs, as
well as rapidly responding to an incident and recovering as
quickly as possible afterwards, two sides of the coin. Science
and technology can contribute on both sides, avoidance before
events and recovery afterwards.
Specific S and T topics we think are vital to the future
include the following: enhanced, real-time, predictive
operational tools to detect problems early and steer around
them; enhanced precision planning tools to better predict risk
and design accordingly to make systems more resilient; advanced
grid architecture, coordination, and control of the grid to
pinpoint new structural risks and options on how to control the
system and recover it more quickly; number 4, advanced data and
visual analytic tools for better situational awareness across
all hazards whether it's physical, weather, cyber; and then
number 5, energy storage at an affordable price point to
provide a new grid flexibility option for the future.
For the hearing objective of improved cyber resilience,
advanced data analytics and new grid architectures and controls
would substantially improve the situational awareness of cyber
threats and provide more resilient control options to present--
to prevent further system damage. And advanced predictive
operation tools and energy storage would help operators limit
the spread of cyber-induced outages.
For the hearing objective of physical resilience, an
important emerging tool is the development of design basis
threat assessments to frame the physical threat scenarios of
highest priority to individual utilities. These systematic
threat assessments, linked with enhanced planning tools, would
better guide resilience investments for utilities and other
stakeholders.
Switching now to progress in the national laboratory grid
modernization efforts, a foundational project in that effort is
developing metrics to support government and industry efforts
in grid modernization. Grid resilience is one of those six
metrics. It's one that's still under debate in terms of its
definition, and it's closely related to the traditional metric
of grid reliability, as well as emerging metric called grid
flexibility.
Other projects include dynamic contingency analysis tools
to help planners better avoid white area cascading outages like
we experienced in the Northeast in 2003. This tool was
developed in partnership with DOE and ERCOT and soon will
become part of ERCOT's regular planning efforts.
Grid analysis and design for resilience was another recent
GMLC project delivered for New Orleans to help coordinate
microgrids and other critical functions like water pumping, et
cetera, to help them ride through emergencies.
Finally, DOE awarded $32 million last month to fund seven
resilient distribution public-private projects around the
country to validate the performance of new resilience
innovations emerging from the GMLC portfolio.
My third point is that science and technology advances must
be complemented by new tools to help utilities and regulators
chart the investment strategies to improve grid resilience.
Utilities at all levels, consumer-owned and, must have the
capacity to understand the value of alternatives to improve
their system, and state regulators need the same tools to
provide the regulatory incentives to deliver the resilience
improvements at scale. The National Labs are developing such
evaluation framework with state and industry participation.
So I conclude that science and technology innovation can
enable a modernized grid that we can see, control, and protect
like never before. Big data management, new data analytics,
machine learning, and exascale computing will be central to
delivering this modern grid and maintaining U.S. leadership.
Grid resilience is intricately linked to other attributes such
as reliability and flexibility, and new tools to value and
simulate grid resilience concepts in concert with public-
private field validation will accelerate national grid
modernization efforts.
I look forward to answering any questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Imhoff follows:]
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Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Imhoff.
And, Dr. Dillingham.
TESTIMONY OF DR. GAVIN DILLINGHAM,
PROGRAM DIRECTOR,
CLEAN ENERGY POLICY,
HOUSTON ADVANCED RESEARCH CENTER
Dr. Dillingham. Good morning. Chairman Smith, Ranking
Member Veasey, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the
opportunity to appear before you today. I'm Gavin Dillingham,
Program Director of Clean Energy Policy at HARC. We're a
nonpartisan research institute in the Woodlands, Texas. I'm
pleased to provide testimony on the resiliency of the United
States' power infrastructure, particularly in respect to risks
posed by extreme weather events.
Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the findings of
the latest NAP report on resilience. It's very timely and
important. It pushes forward the discussion that we must have
to ensure a more resilient power system.
A key area of interest for me is the discussion on the
increasing intensity of extreme weather and the impact on the
electric system. The systems must be designed and constructed
for a multitude of extreme weather events, and I wanted to
provide one example and specific to Texas. Texas has
experienced multiple extreme weather patterns resulting in
significant power outages in the last few years.
First of all, there was the statewide drought of 2011/2012.
This multiyear drought placed considerable pressure on power
generation, which is highly dependent on water for cooling.
During the drought, there was not enough water to cool the
plants or the water was too warm for cooling. There was a
significant concern by ERCOT about losing millions of
potentially several thousand megawatts of power if the drought
did not end.
A recent Argonne National Labs study finds--that looked at
the drought situation finds that the Texas grid could face
severe stress due to lack of water availability, as well as
derating of thermal electric plants due to high water
temperatures. The stress on the power system due to this
drought is not only limited to Texas. It's an issue across the
entire western United States, particularly in the arid States.
And Texas, beyond drought, we've had three 500-year-plus
flood events in the last three years, the most recent being
Hurricane Harvey, which dumped about 27 trillion gallons of
water along the Gulf Coast. If you're familiar with Texas and
the eighth wonder of the world, that's 68,000 Astrodomes'--or
86,000, I'm sorry, Astrodomes' worth of water. If you actually
added that out, it'd be about 400 square miles about 128 feet
high, I mean, a huge amount of water at one point, left close
to one million utility customers without power.
The other two floods we've had was the tax day flood of
2016, and the 2015 Memorial Day flood. Flooding can cause
significant damage to transmission and distribution systems,
particularly substations, and the potential long-term duration
of floods can significantly delay the restoration of power to
communities.
I'd be remiss not to mention Hurricane Ike, which happened
in 2008. During Hurricane Ike, 2.1 million customers lost
power. Many of them were out of power for over two weeks. which
is actually fairly small when you look at what just happened
with Hurricane Irma where there were over 9 million customers
that lost power. And then you look at the Hurricane Maria,
which essentially took out the entire island of Puerto Rico.
Texas also deals on average with 146 tornadoes per year,
wildfires and ice storms, and most recently, the Texas
panhandle, January 2017 ice storm that cut power to 31,000
customers.
This is one example of one State. Similar stories of
extreme weather events can be found across all States. For more
info, you could check out the Department of Energy's U.S.
Energy Sector Vulnerabilities to Climate Change and Extreme
Weather.
Natural disasters will increase in number and have already
increased in intensity, and this puts our existing grid at
risk. It's very difficult to determine the timing, location,
and intensity of these events. With this level of uncertainty
and when financial resources are limited, it is challenging to
make the appropriate investment decisions. When decisions are
not made, infrastructure is not built, and our systems are not
prepared. This will result in significant damage and loss.
Uncertainty is the enemy of action. Fortunately, we're
seeing the deployment of downscaled regional climate models
that provide improved certainty of the likelihood of extreme
weather events. Texas Tech University Climate Science Center is
a great example of doing some of this work. Better visibility
into future climate patterns will improve planning for power
systems and decision-making, and the--more investment must go
into these models to reduce further uncertainty.
Some of the solutions we'd like to discuss, first of all,
in the United States, the power portfolio is very highly water-
dependent. Approximately 85 percent of our power generation
requires water. Fortunately, systems not requiring water being
deployed across the country largely in the form of wind and
solar generation systems, battery storage, and microgrid.
However, the speed at which these systems are being deployed
does not look to significantly shift the grid away from water
dependency. Projections differ significantly, but regardless of
what projection you look at, both--most of them look at over 60
percent of the power system dependent on water out to 2050.
The technology and capability is available to quickly
deploy these systems. Unfortunately, policy and regulations
have not kept up. It should hearten the Committee to know that
the recently released DOE grid reliability study finds
increased deployment of renewable resources has not and will
not negatively impact the operation of the grid. This should
remove some of the policy and regulatory headwinds here.
A key issue is availability of funding. Two funding
mechanisms that could increase the deployment of renewable
energy is to allow renewables to participate in master limited
partnerships, similar to what fossil fuel assets are allowed to
participate in, and allowing the deployment of green bonds to
fund renewable infrastructure. These are two market-based
funding solutions.
Other hindrances are the patchwork of grid interconnection
standards, old utility models that do not account for the
benefits of DER. We should also start looking into PEER,
performance excellence electricity renewable--renewal. These
are voluntary power resilience standards that should be
considered to improve the reliability and resilience and
operational effectiveness of our grid. And then also looking at
microgrids and microgrids with combined heat and power. These
are proven systems to improve--increase the resilience of
critical infrastructure. It's estimated that 3.7 gigawatts of
microgrid systems will be deployed by 2020, which is small in
comparison to other resources. But a very important resource as
we look for systems that are resilient and have demonstrated
their efficacy through a wide number of natural disaster
events, most recently being the UTMB in Galveston during
Hurricane Harvey.
The DOE has actively worked to increase deployment of CHP
through its Better Buildings Initiative Resiliency Accelerator
and Combined Heat and Power Technical Assistance Partnership.
It is recommended this technical assistance continue.
To conclude, the tendency is to count the number of
hurricanes and extreme weather events and make that the key
climate metric. The numbers are increasing. There is
uncertainty when exactly there'll be a material increase, but
that is largely irrelevant as the intensity of these storms
increase. There's considerable agreement by climate models that
they will continue to do so. We are not prepared for this
growing intensity.
Natural disasters threats are real and now directly impact
the operation of our grid. If we continue business as usual,
systems will become more vulnerable, the economic and social--
societal disruption cost will increase, and recovery will be
less sustainable to growing demand on constrained resources.
The technology and systems exist that are being deployed now to
limit this risk. However, barriers exist with funding,
regulations, and utility models that hinder deployment of these
resilient systems.
Thank you for the opportunity today. Sorry for going long.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Dillingham follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Dr. Dillingham. That is fine.
Mr. Baum.
TESTIMONY OF MR. WALT BAUM,
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
TEXAS PUBLIC POWER ASSOCIATION
Mr. Baum. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Veasey. I
appreciate the opportunity to testify today. My name's Walt
Baum, and I'm the Executive Director of the Texas Public Power
Association. TPPA represents the 72 municipally owned utilities
in the State of Texas. We represent about 15 percent of the
customers. In Texas you also have electric co-ops that serve
another 15 percent of the customers, and then the investor-
owned utilities serve the rest. TPPA is also a proud member of
American Public Power Association, APPA.
I'm here today to talk about the real world--a real world
example of a resilient grid and that is how ERCOT, the grid the
serves most of Texas, recovered from Hurricane Harvey. I don't
have to tell any of you about the devastation that Hurricane
Harvey caused. Many--all of you have seen it; many of you
experienced it firsthand. It was an incredible storm that Dr.
Dillingham talked about, all the water and wind that was
dropped. It really was two different storms when it hit Texas.
It was a wind event in the Corpus area where first made
landfall as a category 4 hurricane, and a lot of transmission
was damaged, but then, as it moved on to the coast and into the
Houston and the Beaumont, Port Arthur areas, it became much
more than just a rain event. And utilities there were dealing
with flooded substations and other issues.
In the Corpus area, AEP, the utility which serves the
Corpus area, they alone had over 550 transmission structures
that were damaged and 5,700 distribution poles that were hurt
by the storm. And, as we said, then in the Houston and Beaumont
and Port Arthur areas you had flooded substations. We actually
had to bring in some temporary mobile substations to replace
those flooded substations, which was--which is newer technology
that probably wasn't available 10, 15 years ago. We're proud of
that.
It was a tough storm, but the story is largely good in
Texas. There were about--right at about 1-1/2 million customers
were affected but not at any time. Because of the way that the
storm was very slow-moving, we never had more than about
300,000 customers out at any one time. And all customers were
restored--96 percent of the customers were restored within 14
days when the storm first made landfall. There were a few
others that took a little bit longer to restore just because of
flooding and high water. But as of--20 days after the storm
originally made landfall, all customers who could take power
were back and receiving power. And we're really proud of that
work and the tireless work of linemen and line workers to
repair the grid.
Reliability and resiliency are really closely intertwined
concepts in the electric grid. Reliability is when you turn on
that switch is--are the lights going to come on? And resiliency
is when those lights don't come--turn on when you flip that
switch, how long does it take to get them back on. Our goal is
always 100 percent reliability, but because we can't prevent
weather or other manmade emergencies, a reliable grid must have
built-in resiliency.
Every storm's different and Harvey's historic. And because
I'm from Texas, this is where I'm contractually obligated to
say this wasn't our first rodeo. Utilities nationwide plan and
coordinate to prepare for these types of events, and plans
address how crews will be deployed and how information will be
shared with customers and when to call for additional help.
Grid resiliency is really part of day-to-day operations in the
electric utility industry from going out and doing tree
trimming and vegetation management to when you're planning the
grid, planning it with redundancy in mind, and grid operators
and utilities with generation plan for reserve margins to make
sure there's ample power during our peak times, even if large
generation units go off-line. Transmission and distribution
systems are always designed with redundancy, and ERCOT actually
conducts annual Black Start training which is done to simulate
the total loss of our grid and bringing it back up from zero.
Mutual aid is also a key important part of resiliency. Just
as firefighters, police officers, and other emergency
responders combine forces to help rebuild communities, line
workers and other personnel do that as well. Crews from all
across Texas and other areas of the country shared in our
restoration efforts. Utilities that were most affected called
in crews from other areas. In our systems, municipally owned
utilities went to go help out the investor-owned utilities
after getting there systems back online. CPS Energy sent crews
to help AEP Texas and CenterPoint. And not just electric
workers, they also sent IT personnel to help them get their
networks back up and running. APPA, the American Public Power
Association, has its own mutual aid network, and they
coordinate with EEI, the investor-owned trade associations, and
NRECA, the electric co-ops associations.
During Harvey, we did daily calls with APPA to talk about
how the municipally owned utilities were affected and then
moved on to calls that DOE ran in which all of the different
sectors of the electric industry got together to help. And
similar coordination was in place for Irma.
Once restoration was complete in Texas, we sent many crews
to Florida and CPS Energy, Austin Energy, Denton, Garland and
other Texas utilities were all out there helping Florida. And
we have our own mutual assistance group in Texas as well to
first respond to our different systems.
While the story is positive, each event is also a way for
individual utilities to learn and be better prepared for the
next round of storms. Our new Public Utility Commission Chair
had a hearing last week in which she identified several issues
for the industry and government partners to work together to
prepare for the next storm. My members' Public Power utilities
and the entire electric industry are committed to sharing
information, technology crews, and equipment to continue to
keep the lights on.
I especially want to thank all the crews and personnel in
our industry. The tireless work of the line workers and support
staff behind them is truly inspirational. It's also serious and
dangerous business. Unfortunately, the industry lost a young
lineman last month who is helping to restore power near
Victoria.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify, and I'm
happy to answer any questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Baum follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Baum.
Thank you all for your testimony, and I'll recognize myself
for five minutes for questions. And let me direct my first
question, Dr. Sanders, to you.
You will be challenged, by the way, to give a brief answer
to my question, which is what are the short-term and long-term
steps that need to be taken to protect the electric grid from
cyber attacks?
Dr. Sanders. You're right. Professors are not known for
being brief, but I'll do my best.
Chairman Smith. Okay. And if you have to pick, choose the
short-term as opposed to long-term.
Dr. Sanders. Okay.
Chairman Smith. Yes.
Dr. Sanders. So, first, let me say that there's a large
effort underway today much different than there was at the turn
of the century to protect the grid against cyber attacks. Since
the early 2000s the Department of Energy, the National Science
Foundation, the National Labs, and others have been working in
this area, and substantial progress has been made. So, in a
sense, what needs to be done and I think what we are doing is
taking a concerted approach where industry, government, and
academia come together to work on this problem.
Many ideas, technical ideas and technical solutions, have
been developed, and a short-term challenge and maybe the most
important short-term challenge is to find ways within the very
multifaceted landscape that includes regulation, that includes
issues with cost, that includes States and Federal Governments
to find ways to implement those solutions. We've made
substantial progress there, but there are many things that
still have been developed that need to be implemented to make
our grid secure.
Chairman Smith. Okay. Thank you, Dr. Sanders.
And, Mr. Imhoff, what can the government do to encourage
innovation that will promote resiliency?
Mr. Imhoff. Another short answer. I think the key is to
provide leadership, to encourage the combination of fundamental
advances in mathematics, in control theory, and data analytics
and advanced computing and link those closely with industry
through bodies such as NERC, the Electric Subsector
Coordinating Council, which is a strong government industry
body, work with NRECA and APPA and others to help move those
fundamental advances to practice and implementation within
industry. Step one would be field validation. Most of those are
cost-shared. I think most industry members would argue that
they've been very productive. So I think from the federal
standpoint, leadership to help drive forward the fundamental
knowledge to help us innovate and stay in front of the wave is
a fundamental contribution.
Chairman Smith. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Imhoff.
And, Mr. Baum, in what way does the Texas electric grid--in
what way does it differ from other grids and why?
Mr. Baum. Well, the Texas electric grid is--we talk a lot
about--you know, Texas is very different and Texas has its own
grid. ERCOT covers 85 percent of the area of the State and
about 90 percent of the load. It doesn't cover the entire
State. Areas in the Panhandle and the corners of Texas aren't
part of the grid, but we are our own grid. Power that is
generated in Texas largely stays in Texas. Of about 70,000
possible megawatts of generation, at any time we can only
import or export under 1,000 megawatts. So, you know, we
truly--we're--I like to say that Texas is an island a lot in
electricity. That sounds a little calloused now with what's
going on with Puerto Rico, but we pretty much are on our own,
and so, you know, that--we are different from the rest of the
country in terms of that goes.
Chairman Smith. Okay. But in positive ways that you just
mentioned because the coverage and so forth. Okay.
Mr. Baum. Yes.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Baum.
Dr. Sanders, one last question for you. Would we benefit
from simplifying our structure having fewer government agencies
and departments involved? I guess it depends on how you
simplify, but do you think that's a direction we should go? And
I think that's one of your recommendations anyway.
Dr. Sanders. So the committee report was neutral on the
actual government structure to be used. The committee felt very
strongly that this is a complicated issue, that there are
different issues, for example, the interaction between DHS and
DOE that are working well, and--but these need to be
correlated.
Chairman Smith. Okay. Thank you, Dr. Sanders. And that
concludes my time, and the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Veasey, is
recognized for his questions.
Mr. Veasey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I wanted to ask Dr. Dillingham a couple of questions
particularly as it relates to climate change and rising global
temperatures. I know that there are a lot of people including
oftentimes on this committee we hear that--we don't know human
involvement as it relates to climate change or some people that
outright deny that climate change is happening even though
there's a lot of consensus within the scientific community that
there is some manmade contributions as it relates to climate
change.
And I wanted to ask you, as we consider potential
infrastructure investments, do you think that States and
utilities should consider climate change as it relates to the
resiliency of the systems?
Dr. Dillingham. Yes, thank you for that question. Yes. And
what we seem to find is that when we talk about climate change,
there's usually like a specific type of event that's pointed to
like hurricanes or to floods or just one particular type of
weather phenomenon. And when you look at climate change,
there's a significant number of weather phenomena that are
happening here for what I mentioned, from drought to floods to
hurricanes to ice storms, and all of these are events that are
becoming more intense and more extreme. And the--you know,
we've seen that actually personally, and we've also seen that
within the future climate models that are being deployed.
One of the things that, you know, needs to be considered
and we've been discussing this a lot more at HARC and across
the State is, you know, now that these climate models, the
downscaled regional climate models are becoming a lot more
accurate in understanding the intensity and likelihood of these
events happening. It needs to be at least part of the
conversation here. We have projections for--in ERCOT, for
example the amount of solar and wind that are going to be
deployed. That does not take into--that takes into account
historical weather patterns but that does not take into account
future weather patterns or future weather phenomena. And so if
we have models that were getting greater--we're feeling more
comfortable with and feel like they have better accuracy, it is
important that we start including those within our projections
and understanding on how the grids operate for the future so we
can start developing in that regard.
Mr. Veasey. Well, thank you very much. That sounds
reasonable. What about insurance companies? Do you think that
they need to consider changing environmental factors when
engaging with potential clients?
Dr. Dillingham. The insurance companies are way ahead of us
on this. They already are doing this. They have their
catastrophe models and now they're bringing in the downscaled
climate models. And many of their decisions now are based on
potential future climate factors that they're looking into and
what's the risk of us funding this infrastructure into the
future. And so what you're seeing now is actually development
of resilience bonds that are actually being coupled with
catastrophe bonds. And these resilience bonds are largely put
in place by the insurance companies to mitigate risk. The
Brookings Institute had a nice report on this a couple years
ago discussing the opportunity to bring the--in resilience
bonds into the market to bring in another kind of funding
source essentially, bring in the financial market to help
better develop more resilient infrastructure. And so the
insurance companies are way ahead in this regard.
Mr. Veasey. This is again for you, Dr. Dillingham, and
Walt. As you know, Hurricane Harvey was not the first hurricane
to damage Texas and won't be the last. This is, you know,
something that we've had experience with and will continue to
have experience with. One--and communities are trying to look
for ways they can harden their infrastructure to deal with
future catastrophes. One notable example in Houston is the wall
that was built after Hurricaine Allison to protect the
substation that provides power to the medical center.
I wanted to ask you how have communities adapted to the
changing conditions that we are experiencing as a result of
climate change?
Dr. Dillingham. There has been--I'll just speak specific to
the Houston region. There has been some significant activity or
growing activity in this regard. UTMB Galveston is an example
that was flooded out during Hurricane Ike. They had to
essentially close that down, and there was questions whether or
not it'd even become operational again.
But what they've done since then is they've put in a
combined heat and power system, which is an onsite natural gas-
generated system that operated great during Hurricane Harvey.
They also built that above grade. It's up on the second floor,
so it prevents floodwaters from getting in there and they also
build a flood wall around it. So there's steps happening
especially within critical infrastructure, hospitals
particularly, wastewater treatment plants that are going into
place, and a lot of it is focused on distributed generation
and--which is typically a combined heat and power type system
being put in place.
As far as just in the community in general when you look at
the parts of the community that have started taking action to
be more resilient--so Meyerland is a neighborhood in Houston
that has flooded multiple times. The homes that are starting to
build above grade, the homes that are taking these--you know,
starting to put in these resilience standards to make sure that
they're above grade, none of those flooded. So--and they're--
and those homes are in good shape.
And so it's a matter of starting to put in place these
voluntary resilience standards, educating communities,
educating project developers, engineers, architects to
understand what is the way to start building more--in a more
resilient fashion but do it in a cost-effective manner. You
can't do it in Texas if you're going to mandate regulations,
and you're not going to do it if it's expensive. We built
ourselves on low cost of business and low cost of living.
And so what the important piece is is how do you implement
this stuff and how do you build capacity within our building
community to allow them to do this in a cost-effective way?
Mr. Veasey. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Veasey.
And the gentleman from California, Mr. Rohrabacher, is
recognized for questions.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and
thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing today. And it
is something I just think that we have not given serious
attention to this. I know we've had several Members over the
years who have made it their crusade to talk to us about EMP
and other threats, but it just--nothing seems to be--get done
and there doesn't seem to be a national strategy that actually
coincides with how vital this could be to the well-being of the
American people.
If we have something go crazy with the sun, I understand it
could knock out all of our grid. I mean, you'd knock out 75
percent of the people's electricity in the United States of
America. I mean, this is a tremendous threat that--and again,
we're talking today about reliability and resilience.
Let me talk to you about some real specifics rather than
having the experts get together and talk about it, all right?
What about a more diversified power system that we would then
target that would be a much more diversified power source for
the American people? Would that be a major step towards dealing
with this potential threat? Anybody want to say anything about
that?
Dr. Sanders. You can go first. I'll go second.
Mr. Imhoff. Thank you for the question, and I think that
diversity, whether it's in diversity of fuel mix, diversity of
generation and other things provides resilience and robustness
to the system.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Well----
Mr. Imhoff. And from the standpoint of EMP and space
weather or----
Mr. Rohrabacher. Right.
Mr. Imhoff. --geomagnetic activities, there are
differences. The higher risk is at the further northern
latitudes and the southern latitudes. I think the good news,
sir, is that over the last year, both DOE has put in place an
initial program plan dealing with the space weather issues. The
Electric Power Research Institute has actually begun working on
standards and operational approaches for component purchase and
installation that would begin to deal with these issues. NERC
has actually set two standards that are the beginning of a
journey that would help utilities better plan for and defend
and operate through these storm events.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Well, let me get real clear on this. We
now depend on big, huge electric plants, and it seems to me
that we could have, for example--let me ask you whether this
would have been one solution--if we would have determined 20
years ago or 30 years ago that we're going to build small
modular nuclear reactors which are now we are told we are very
capable--have been capable of building, would that in some--
would that type of diversification help us solve this or deal
with this issue?
Mr. Imhoff. So I think diversity, regardless of the type,
regardless of whether it's natural gas or nuclear, can provide
some resilience, but any device is going to be--has some risk
in terms of electromagnetic fields. They would need to have----
Mr. Rohrabacher. Right.
Mr. Imhoff. --the protection, the shielding, et cetera, on
critical components regardless of the type of generation. So
nuclear itself is not more or less robust.
Mr. Rohrabacher. So--but if we--so we have smaller nuclear
power plants in various communities, for example, which I
understand we're capable of doing in very--which are, by the
way, safer from what I understand than light-water reactors,
that that would not protect--give us more protection than to
have it in one major power plant?
Dr. Sanders. So let me follow up a bit on this. As Mr.
Imhoff said, diversity in the source of generation, both in the
type and in the geographical distribution of the generation,
can be helpful. With regard to the kind of solar events that
you talk about, the same issues, whether we're diversified or--
to different degrees or not will apply with regard to the
resiliency of the transmission and distribution system of the
overall grid. There are very interesting strategies that are
talked about in the report. These include microgrids. These
include----
Mr. Rohrabacher. Right. Let me ask you this. Would it be
easier to fix if you've got a major source versus many smaller
sources, a big nuclear power plant versus small modular nuclear
power plants? No?
Dr. Sanders. I'm not an expert enough to know that.
Mr. Imhoff. I can't speak to that either, sir.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Okay. Well, let me just note that we also
have solar panels that--you know, would that be affected as
well, if a house--you go down right to the greatest
diversification which is individual homes, would this be more
resilient and have more protection?
Mr. Imhoff. I can't speak to the inherent robustness of
solar panels themselves per se, and I don't think the outcome
is to move to completely distributed energy. There are some
values of some of the large centralized plants as well, so I
think it's really an issue at each region, at each electrical
region, whether it's Texas or the Western Coordinating Council
or the Southeast, they need to look at their fuel diversity,
they need to look at their prices, they need to look at their
vulnerability to things like geomagnetic storms and figure out
what's that right balance between centralized and decentralized
activities.
The one challenge, sir, what's changing at the edge in
terms of today's grid is there's an explosion of new devices
and new services and new innovations coming at the edge, many
of which are outside the boundary of the utilities. Microsoft
is providing its own power. Walmart is generating its own
renewables on rooftops in their stores all around the country,
so these are dramatic shifts in how we plan the system, as
opposed to how we did it 20 and 30 years ago, so I think it's
regional and local. I think they each need to figure out what's
the right balance of distributed versus centralized generation
and supply, and that's part of what I think is so important
about regional planning activities across the country, doing
what makes sense for them locally.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Okay. Thank you very much.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Rohrabacher.
The gentleman from California, Mr. Takano, is recognized.
Mr. Takano. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
On Friday, the Secretary of Energy submitted a proposed
rule to the Federal Energy Regulation Commission, otherwise
known as FERC, with the explicit purpose of adjusting market
rules to favor coal and nuclear power plants. The justification
that they provided was for--for this was that these sources
have several weeks of fuel onsite and therefore are inherently
more resilient than natural gas or renewable energy generators.
However, this assertion, along with the overall proposal,
has received widespread criticism not only from the renewable
and natural gas industries but from respected independent and
even conservative experts on power markets. For example,
Utility Dive just published a point-by-point refutation of this
misguided effort by Alison Silverstein, who is the lead
author--who is lead author that DOE hired to draft the grid
report that the agency used to justify the new proposal.
The conservative R Street Institute also released a
thorough analysis on Sunday, which concluded that this proposal
is, quote, ``an arbitrary backdoor subsidy to coal and nuclear
power plants that risks undermining electrical competition
throughout the United States, end quote''. And Nora Mead
Brownell, a former Republican FERC commission said in an Energy
& Environment News article posted yesterday that she, quote,
``has never seen a credible argument, not one, that there is a
problem with resiliency and reliability,'' end quote, due to
coal and nuclear power plant retirements.
On the contrary, a story published in E&E News on Friday
titled, quote, ``Flooded Texas Coal Piles Dampen Reliability
Arguments,'' end quote, is--and it's a clear example of how
poorly justified this proposed rule really is.
Now, each--gentlemen, I need to get through--I want to get
to several questions. Do you think subsidizing the coal
industry is an efficient and cost-effective way to make the
grid more resilient? I would prefer a yes or no answer.
Dr. Sanders. So I think, first and foremost, we have to
remember that resiliency is a system issue. No single source of
generation can determine the resiliency of the grid. It depends
on having enough generation in a distributed fashion, having
the transmission and distribution infrastructure to deliver the
power to the consumer----
Mr. Takano. Excuse me, Mr. Sanders, I've got to get
through----
Dr. Sanders. Okay.
Mr. Takano. --a few questions. Can you kind of give me a
yes or no, I mean, as far as--I mean, my question is pretty
simple. Do you think subsidizing the coal industry is an
efficient and cost-effective way to make the grid more
resilient knowing all we know about coal and competition----
Dr. Sanders. Right. Right. The report did not find that to
be true.
Mr. Takano. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Imhoff?
Mr. Imhoff. So, just quickly, resilience is a system
activity, and what I think is more important is what are those
plans replaced with? If they're replaced with combined-cycle
natural gas or other things, those have equal and sometimes
better resilience capabilities than the coal plant. I am not a
markets person, so I can't really speak to the issue of
subsidy.
Mr. Takano. All right. Thank you. Dr. Dillingham?
Dr. Dillingham. I would have to answer no. Being from the
State of Texas, we're not a big fan of subsidies and especially
in this case.
Mr. Takano. Thank you. Thank you for that. Mr. Baum?
Mr. Baum. The key, as has been mentioned is, you know,
multiple fuel sources and redundancy on the grid, but I don't
think any special subsidies is needed.
Mr. Takano. So subsidizing coal industry is not an
efficient and cost-effective way to make the grid more
resilient? Probably not? Would that be fair to say, Dr. Baum?
Mr. Baum. Probably not.
Mr. Takano. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Imhoff, in your
testimony you discuss how energy storage could provide more
flexibility in how operators might mitigate cyber outage and
improve recovery. Can you expand more in the specifics about
energy storage is able to accomplish such a task?
Mr. Imhoff. Yes, thank you, Mr. Takano, and thank you for
your leadership on the advanced battery grid caucus.
Mr. Takano. You're welcome.
Mr. Imhoff. The issue around energy storage is it
fundamentally decouples supply from demand. It's like a shock
absorber for your truck that you drive down your ranch road.
The shock absorbers help smooth it out and enable you to keep
from spilling the coffee in your lap. Energy storage will help
decouple supply from demand, and what that adds to the grid is
flexibility. So if there's a cyber attack that takes out a
certain substation or certain supply sources, having that added
flexibility in terms of energy storage linked with advanced
control and power electronics that are smart power electronics
give the operator more degrees of freedom for how they steer
around that problem. So that's the role it will play, adding
more flexibility to the system to respond to an outage.
Mr. Takano. Well, and it's also energy-source neutral, so
if we found--in the case of Mr. Rohrabacher--small nuclear
power plants were more efficient than gas--than the gas-powered
plants, I mean, this still would be a tremendous addition to
the resilience of the system.
Mr. Imhoff. It is source-neutral, correct.
Mr. Takano. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Takano.
The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Posey, is recognized.
Mr. Posey. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank
you, gentlemen, for appearing today.
Have any of you read the book One Second After? It's a
novel by William Forstchen. It was a New York Times bestseller.
Well, it was obviously written from a report about the EMP,
electromagnetic pulse, threat our nation faces, and if you're
in the energy business, I would really recommend the book to
you to read.
A little over a year ago, the Earth's orbit missed by about
one week a solar eruption which seems would have taken out all
our satellite communications and probably destroyed our power
grid. My question to you is what you think we should be doing
to protect our citizens against that threat? About 60 seconds
each would be appreciated with Dr. Sanders first.
Dr. Sanders. So, first, let me say that I am not personally
an expert on this topic, but we did have expertise on our
committee and I've--on this matter Tom Overbye from the
University of--or from Texas A&M University is an expert on
this topic. I talked with him about this issue, and this is an
issue of intense research. This is an issue of intense study,
and there are solutions that are beginning to emerge but
they're in the early stages. They include raising awareness to
the potentially severe impacts of GMDs. There is software now
to plan for the impacts of GMD on systems, and people are using
that to do studies.
We're at the stage really where engineers are getting down
to looking at what the real issues are. There are magnetometers
that are being installed across the country to measure these
kinds of disturbances. In fact, the University of Illinois has
one on some land that my department owns right off site. And
research is ongoing with groups like NERC and EPRI helping in
this effort.
So in summary, we don't have all the solutions we need now,
but progress is being made.
Mr. Posey. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Imhoff. To follow up, nor am I an expert but I will say
the following. We have a number of disparate activities in the
country related to electric magnetic pulse. We have a spread of
tools, but what we don't have is an integrated toolset, nor do
we have a common reflection across the three different
waveforms, E1, E2, and E3, and we need to get to that so that
we can provide guidance to industry to--for them to better
shield and protect the new devices that are being produced for
the grid for which we are modernizing and investing heavily
each year.
So there is work underway. There are coordinating groups
trying to drive that, but I think we need a more focused
national effort to move towards a common set of integrated
tools that reflect all three of those E1, E2, E3 waveforms. And
the challenge is--and some of the solutions for geomagnetic
sometimes might interfere or confound the solutions for the EMP
waveform, so that's why we need this integrative view of the
waveform so we can get a common voice to industry on how to
design around this issue.
Mr. Posey. Thank you.
Dr. Dillingham. I would have to say Dr. Sanders and Mr.
Imhoff are the experts here, and they did a good job in as far
as explaining stuff. I learned something there, but I cannot
speak to this issue.
Mr. Baum. And I would say, you know, this is an issue that
is being studied right now. EPRI, the Electric Power Research
Institute, is conducting a multiyear study on this where they
are also releasing what they find every few months and all
different types of utilities, investor-owned, municipally
owned, co-ops are participating in that EPRI report.
I know there are--my feeling is the first thing we need to
do is study and figure out what if any technical changes needs
to be made to the grid, but I think you need to do the study
and research first. There are people out there saying we've got
this quick fix that if you buy this type of Faraday cage or
this type of new equipment, you know, then you'll fix your
problem, but I think you need--I think we need more study first
and then decide what if any new equipment needs to be made.
Mr. Posey. Thank you. Which agency do you see having taken
the lead in this or do you think should be taking a lead in it?
We've had hearings on this before, and I found the industry had
very little interest in this.
Mr. Imhoff. So, my understanding is a group called the
Mission Executive Council is actually working on this, and I
believe that that council has represented some Department of
Energy and from the Department of Defense and other agencies
that are linked to the satellite systems, et cetera. So I would
start with Mission Executive Council. I don't know a lot about
them, but I believe there already is some coordination across
the key involved agencies.
Mr. Posey. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I see my time is
expired.
Chairman Smith. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Posey.
The gentleman from New York, Mr. Tonko, is recognized.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our
witnesses for being here today. Obviously, this hearing was
rescheduled due to the recent natural disasters. In light of
those disasters, I believe it's an appropriate time for this
committee to consider how to strengthen our grid. I would hope
as we invest in the comeback for all the States that have been
impacted by these natural disasters and also areas like Puerto
Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the various territories, I would
hope we build a grid of the future.
We've learned many lessons from Mother Nature. Following
the devastation from major disasters, people begin to think and
plan for all possibilities. In New York, the REV initiative,
borne by the New York State Public Service Commission, came in
the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. It was inspired by
Superstorm Sandy. That disaster showed the value of distributed
generation and encouraged the State to invest in microgrid R&D
and consider barriers to deployment.
So, Dr. Dillingham, you mentioned microgrids paired with
combined heat and power systems. Can you describe the value
these systems add to our grid system in general?
Dr. Dillingham. Yes, absolutely. So, a microgrid system
with combined heat and power is typically a natural gas-based
system, and so what these combined heat and power systems do is
they produce power onsite and then also provide thermal
services if it's for hospital sterilization, domestic hot
water, steam for industry manufacturing, and such.
And so what we typically find is that the natural gas
infrastructure is significantly--can be significantly more
robust than a transmission distribution infrastructure. It
seems to withstand a lot of the severe weather events. And so
what we're seeing now is a greater deployment of these CHB
microgrid systems particularly in the hospitals--in Texas and
in kind of most of our region in hospitals, wastewater
treatment plants, first responder-type facilities, data
centers, and you're seeing a greater growing of flexibility in
application of these.
At one point, combined heat and power was largely seen as
kind of an industrial type of approach. Now, you can get them
down to very small even residential size to build even
community microgrid systems. And in many cases these are fairly
diverse systems to where you have maybe the CHP or a natural
gas generator as your base system, and then you have solar and
batteries there as well, so you have an additional--other types
of generation components.
But it's largely, you know, a system that allows you to
potentially island from the grid so if the power does go down,
you would want to island from the grid. And if you do have
that, you also need to have Black Start capability, so there's
plenty of other types of components that go into a more
resilient type microgrid system there that have been
demonstrated and proven to work time and time again. And it
adds to the diversity that we've been talking about of a power
system.
Mr. Tonko. Okay. Thank you. I would add that school systems
where you might have a swimming pool as part of the phys. ed.
infrastructure are also opportune----
Dr. Dillingham. Right. And filters are used quite a bit
for--or high schools, schools use them quite a bit for shelters
as a last resort, and that's a very good application for that.
Mr. Tonko. Absolutely. How important is federal funding for
the development of these systems?
Dr. Dillingham. At this point, it's a fairly mature system
as far as the combined heat and power piece goes here. These
have been around for quite a while. The diversity of
applications now, most of the issues we find is there's just a
lack of knowledge as far as how these systems can be used
beyond, say, a gas refinery or beyond a natural gas processing
plant, and how do we move this into a diversity of other
groups.
And so most of the work that we do has to do with kind of
educating and kind of capacity-building among those that have
not had a lot of experience with this. It's like when you talk
with someone about solar and they still think it's, you know,
$5 a watt, and right now, it's down to 60 cents a watt. People
still think the economics are not there, but they are now, and
so you just need that education piece of that, as well as some
early technical assistance.
Now, as far as microgrids in general, you know, there's
still some significant work that can be done especially when
you look at the communication devices, the sensors, how these
are coupled together, how to do the appropriate optimization
models. You know, there's some--still some significant work
that needs to be supported at the R&D level, but the basic
component of like a CHP, combined heat and power system is
largely there and just needs to continue to be built out.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you. The National Academies of Science's
July report on resiliency suggested that distributed energy
resources, and I quote, ``may help avoid or defer the need for
new generation transmission or distribution infrastructure to
address congestion localized, reliability, or resilience
issues.'' So, Dr. Sanders, if integrated properly, can
distributed generation contribute to making a resource
generation mix more resilient?
Dr. Sanders. To give you a simple answer, yes. We believe
that putting together distributed generation sources, together
with an appropriately engineered grid, can add to resiliency.
Mr. Tonko. And if we include other investments such as
storage and microgrids, does that offer new opportunity?
Dr. Sanders. Definitely, they are all possibilities. It's
hard to predict the future, and in one of the chapters, we talk
about various features and how the grid would have to adapt to
those futures, but they're all things that could be part of the
mix.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I yield.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Tonko.
The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Weber, is recognized for
questions.
Mr. Weber. [Presiding] Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My district 14 in Texas, the three coastal counties
starting at Louisiana and coming southwest, arguably ground
zero for Harvey flooding. It's just unbelievable. I have
learned more about restoration, recovery, and all of the
efforts that have gone on than I ever wanted to know about
disasters, and I hope I never get to--have to use it again.
So with that as a backdrop, Beaumont lost water because
their electrical boxes went--lost their city water system
because their electric boxes went underwater, and a lot of the
infrastructure there, had it been raised above ground six,
eight, ten feet or more, it could have been protected. We're
talking about infrastructure.
Walt knows that I was on the Environmental Reg Committee in
the Texas House and dealt with energy there that session so
this is very--and I was an air-conditioning contractor before I
sold my company, so this is very near and dear to my heart. A
great, great discussion.
A couple things I did want to follow up on. The gentleman
from California, Mr. Rohrabacher, talked about EMPs and SMRs.
Of course the SMRs are going to be more expensive to buy up
front, so there's a cost factor there, but when you talk about
EMP protection, I don't know probably which one of you guys can
answer this is--does EMP affect only a magnetic field that is
in operation at the time, or is it all electrical devices?
Mr. Imhoff. Again, it's not my area of expertise, but I
believe it would affect all because it's going to create
currents that will tend to overheat and cause issues in various
electrical devices, but again, I'm not an expert in this area.
Mr. Weber. So you're--that is to suppose that a jet engine
in an energy plant built by GE or whoever, this turbine that's
not spinning--in other words, if we had redundancy, if we had a
plant sitting there that wasn't operating, wasn't active, EMP,
solar flare, choose whatever method you want, you were thinking
that that would destroy the windings in that engine. Dr.
Sanders?
Dr. Sanders. So once again, not being an expert but talking
with experts about this, my understanding is potentially yes if
they are connected to the grid in a way that that current can
get to them, but I think the important point is is that
potentially, particularly when this is a solar-generated event,
there is some warning, and so if we have appropriate detectors
on the Earth, then we may be able to reconfigure parts of the
grid----
Mr. Weber. You would have a main switch you could throw----
Dr. Sanders. In a sense.
Mr. Weber. --disconnect it?
Dr. Sanders. In a sense. It's probably not as simple as one
main switch, but there are ways in which we could build
protection according to the understanding----
Mr. Weber. Okay.
Dr. Sanders. --I have.
Mr. Weber. Let me--you know, reading through this and going
back through this brings up some really interesting questions.
I think there's about five ways that we can help make our grid
more resilient, and I'll just name them real quick. We need to
have portable deployable assets. We talked about SMRs. We
talked about other systems. Mr. Dillingham, you called it a
microgrid of sorts I guess. I don't know how you have a natural
gas pipeline that's capable of running that kind of facility,
high-pressure pipeline. That's one of the challenges.
You have to have preapproved--in other words, FERC, all
these agencies have to have preapproved these in emergencies.
You have to have multiple assets. You have to have more than
one you can bring in. They have to be close. You have to have
trained personnel. And I know in ERCOT--Mr. Baum, you and I
talked about this--we really have a good--like I said, I've
learned more about all of the collaboration that goes on after
a disaster--a network of first responders. If you've got
preapproved, if you've got portable assets, if you've got them
close by, and you've got a network of trained responders that's
cooperating, that will help harden our grid.
Now, you get to the transportation part, the lines and
stuff, Fukushima taught us something over in Japan, their
nuclear plant, their backup power was too low. If we had our
way, we would raise everything up eight, ten feet in the air at
least to get everything above groundwater.
Harvey was the single largest flooding event in United
States history, so, you know, I don't know if we can come in
and fix all of those problems and raise all of those things up.
Mr. Baum, I'm going to come to you with a question. What
kind of technology is available in your experience to stop a
domino effect of power outages from moving region to region?
Mr. Baum. In Texas, our grid operator, you know, is--as Dr.
Dillingham talked about earlier, we deal with weather events
all the time, nothing as extreme as Harvey normally, but our
grid operators are used to dealing with loss of certain lines
or loss of certain generation. During Harvey, ERCOT did have--
they have certain power plants that they have under contract to
provide emergency power when needed, and when we lost some
transmission lines due to the storm, they were able to call
those reliability unit commitments into play, and a couple of
power plants spun up to provide voltage support for that area.
So that type of coordination needs to continue.
One of the things you mentioned earlier, the staging and
the moving of equipment, having ways to, you know, before--you
know, before Harvey and especially before Irma, being able to
stage crews and equipment and already have polls on the way to
help out, you know, is very key.
And, you know, like you said with the, you know, having
modular equipment, you know, I mentioned earlier the mobile
substations that we are able to bring in and keep power on the
grid, and those type of activities need to continue.
And it's like you said earlier, design changes do need to
happen. The--you know, in Houston where you lost a big
substation due to flooding, the Memorial substation, that had
been there for 15 years----
Mr. Weber. Right.
Mr. Baum. --and--I'm sorry, for 50 years and had never had
water inside it. But with this storm it was flooded and was
underwater for over 10 days. So that is now--that substation is
being rebuilt with, you know, the new normal to be prepared if
we have another flood event----
Mr. Weber. Right.
Mr. Baum. --and being raised and doing walls and other
things like that, you know, our--we need to look--you know, we
need to take what we've learned from this storm and be prepared
to do those design changes.
Mr. Weber. Absolutely. Well, I appreciate that. Like I
said, I've learned a lot. I hope I never have to use it again,
but it is--it will be very, very important information to have.
I'm going to now recognize the gentleman from California,
Mr. McNerney.
Mr. McNerney. Well, I thank the sitting-in Chairman for
recognizing me. I thank the panelists.
A moment of self-promotion, I care a lot about resiliency
and reliability, and that's why, with Mr. Latta, we formed the
bipartisan congressional caucus on grid innovation, and we've
produced some bills that are now working their way through the
system to answer some of these questions.
My first question goes to Mr. Dillingham. Is there a
significant difference in terms of reliability and resiliency
with regard to microgrids versus distributed systems, or do
they pretty much look the same in terms of those two questions?
Dr. Dillingham. It's largely the same. I mean, it just
depends on how you're defining a microgrid. Out there, there's
still a considerable amount of definitions on what a microgrid
would be, but it's largely distributed energy resources. You
know, typically, if you look at solar rooftop, it's distributed
energy. If you look at a microgrid, it's--typically has
multiple resources associated with it, if it's solar, battery,
CHP, or the like.
Mr. McNerney. Okay. Thank you. You mentioned the adaption
gap. Can you describe why that's a challenging problem?
Dr. Dillingham. That's been--starting to be discussed quite
a bit more and just generally infrastructure issues as far as
how do we best prepare for climate change issues and if that's
water treatment or stormwater mitigation or our transportation
infrastructure or power infrastructure. But the concern is and
the issue that we face is that, due to the multitude of
potential weather events that are being faced, taking one
action in one area may not necessarily solve other action. So
if we deal with drought within our power system, does that
necessarily solve high wind, ice storm, flooding, hurricane-
type issues.
And when you are limited--financially limited, as we are,
you know, within cities and with kind of--just within our
infrastructure budgets, you kind of have this difficulty of
making the appropriate decision, which way do I go as far as
investing in the right piece of infrastructure. If I go and
prepare for droughts and then all of a sudden I have ten years
of floods, I look like I've really made a mistake here.
And so that's one of the--when the expectations with these
downscaled climate models, they're becoming so precise now, you
can actually start putting likelihood estimates associated with
potential storm intensity, as well as number of events, and
those should start at least being considered being incorporated
in our planning as we go forward and that should potentially
reduce that uncertainty.
Mr. McNerney. Very good. Mr. Imhoff, your testimony touches
on the effort in framing metrics to support grid modernization.
What role can the Federal Government play in developing metrics
for the grid?
Mr. Imhoff. Thank you, sir, for the question. The Federal
Government is involved. As part of the Grid Modernization
Laboratory Consortium, we are framing a set of metrics for the
next generation grid, three of which are the traditional usual
suspects of reliability and affordability and environmental
profile, but the new ones of resilience and flexibility are
kind of challenging and under debate but they're very essential
as we go forward.
So I think the Federal Government is providing some of the
innovation to help frame and recast some of these activities,
and they've established the opportunity then to work with
States and the--at the regulatory bodies and the vendor
community and others to help test and validate these, and
they're part of the current GMLC research portfolio.
Mr. McNerney. I've been in standards committees, and
they're a pain, but it's worth it. It's worth the effort.
Mr. Sanders, is enough being done regarding the
interconnectedness of the grid with oil, gas, and other natural
resources?
Dr. Sanders. That's definitely an area in which more work
needs to be done. Much of the work to date has been focused on
the resiliency of the grid, but as I think many of us agree and
as the report notes, that interconnectedness is important, so
more work should be done.
Mr. McNerney. Well, how would you rank cybersecurity issues
with the grid resiliency?
Dr. Sanders. Cybersecurity, if I understand your question
correctly, is a very important impairment to grid resiliency, a
very real impairment, and one of the important things we should
consider. The report takes an all-hazards approach. In fact we
talk about about 12 different impairments of the grid. They're
all important, can't leave them out. What we need to understand
is to what extent can we build protections that can protect
against multiple of these impairments, and to what extent do we
need to build specific mitigations for them?
Mr. McNerney. Well, then how does knowledge of previous
cyber attacks prepare for future attacks? Is----
Dr. Sanders. Great question. Clearly, knowledge is very
important. On one hand, knowledge can be used through
appropriate information-sharing in order to alert others that
this particular vulnerability, which is being exploited, may be
exploited in another location and in a very close period of
time. On the other hand, there are always new kinds of attacks,
so-called zero-day attacks, and so we cannot rely purely on
history to think about the future.
In a sense what we need to do--and this is where resiliency
is very important--is we need to build systems that, rather
than protecting against very specific cyber attacks, protect
against whole classes of effects those cyber attacks may bring
on the grid. So by thinking about the effects and through
resiliency, through that resiliency cycle, mitigating those
effects, then we can begin to protect against zero-day attacks
that we haven't seen before.
Mr. McNerney. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield
back.
Mr. Weber. I thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from Indiana, Mr. Banks, is recognized for
five minutes.
Mr. Banks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
What an incredibly important subject for us to tackle
today, so I appreciate the Committee diving deeply into these
issues.
And when I continue to talk about the cyber-related aspect
of this subject as the growing number of--the growing threat of
cyber attacks is something that concerns me as a policymaker
and does a number of my colleagues as well. And these are no
longer hypothetical threats. We've seen two threats to the
electrical grid in Ukraine, for example. And with the systems
relying more and more on computers and information technology,
we need to do everything, as you know, that we can to counter
potential cyber threats.
So with that, Dr. Sanders, could we take a step back and
maybe give us more specifically how often is the cyber--is
there a cyber attack or an attempt of a cyber attack on our
national grid? And have we seen that number rise over the past
five years?
Dr. Sanders. Thank you very much for that important
question. First, let me say that it's a very difficult question
to answer. Different people have different bits of knowledge,
some of that knowledge in the open, some of that knowledge
classified, some of that knowledge in the hands of other
countries, so it's a difficult question to answer.
Having said that, what we're seeing is an increase in the
rate of observed cyber attacks, right? We now have documented
cyber attacks that are known in the public. We didn't have that
just a few years ago. And we're seeing that the frequency of
lower-grade probing and attacks on both the operational
technology and on the information technology, both on the--if
you will, the online part of the grid and the offline control
of the grid, those kinds of attacks increasing.
Mr. Banks. How do we monitor those attacks? I mean, how do
you--can you give us sort of a dummied-down version of how we
monitor--how do we know that those attacks occur and exist?
Dr. Sanders. Sure. So some of them are big and we read
about them in the news, right, the Ukraine attack and these
kinds of things. Some of them we can monitor for. The lower-
grade, more frequent ones we can monitor for using online
technology. There are systems called intrusion detection
systems first popularized in our corporate information
technology systems that can look for packets, that can look for
behavior that tends to be abnormal and flag those as possible
attacks. There have been specific versions of those intrusion
detection systems that have been built for the power grid both
on the side of smart meters, for example. One was developed at
the University of Illinois that's been prototyped and used at
FirstEnergy, for example, and other aspects of grid-specific
kind of networks.
Now, the trouble is is those signals are not always clear.
We get a lot of noise in those, and so we have to fuse that
information together, and we have to create higher-level
intelligence that we then can make those determinations, and
work to do that is ongoing.
Mr. Banks. So these might seem like obvious questions, but
what do we know about these adversaries who carry out attacks
like these? What are their motives? Where are they coming from?
Can you talk a little bit--we haven't talked enough about that
today. Can we talk a little bit about----
Dr. Sanders. Sure. Sure.
Mr. Banks. --what we know about these adversaries?
Dr. Sanders. Sure. I think we know a lot, but we know
pieces of the whole story. We know that they come in all forms.
We know that they come from kiddie scripters up to potentially
nation-states, right? The evidence is pretty strong that
nation-states are involved. We know that they're coordinated,
we know that they're deliberate, we know that they will wait,
they will insert code into a system and they may wait months
until they activate that code. So the real challenge is to gain
that understanding and to understand how to react to these
things when the adversaries may be willing to wait months to
gain their information.
Mr. Banks. An incredibly important subject, and hopefully,
Mr. Chairman, we'll have many more opportunities to examine
these issues. I appreciate all of you being here very much.
With that, I yield back.
Dr. Sanders. Thank you very much.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Banks.
The gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Foster, is recognized.
Mr. Foster. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And this is a
technical question here. A lot of the really destructive
scenarios that people, you know, worry about have to do with
phase imbalances, resonant conditions, this sort of stuff,
frequency mismatches that make it really hard to control the
grid. These don't occur in a DC. grid, and there--I was
wondering what studies may have been done about the potential
resiliency differences on DC. grids versus A.C. grids which,
you know, have just a number of advantages I can think of just
in terms of being able to, you know, passively protect them
with things like diode clamps from--and the interface is a much
simpler one. You have--simply, are you delivering the voltage
and current or are you not, and opening up the circuit. It's
just--from a number of ways, it seems to me it's a lot easier
to protect. I was wondering what work has been done on trying
to quantify that difference and that may actually cause us to
think over time of actually switching to a DC. grid, which gets
mooted from time to time. Yes.
Mr. Imhoff. So I'll start but defer to the professor. The--
as you know, the history of our system being an A.C. system is
long, and it started 2 centuries ago I guess, but there's
substantial experience with DC. interties mainly today focused
on movement of large amounts of power over long distance. They
are more efficient and you can--actually, right above the A.C.
system and not have to deal with a lot of the reliability
oscillatory control and other things underneath in that A.C.
system.
Mr. Foster. Correct. Right.
Mr. Imhoff. But it all gets down to cost, and so the
planners--we don't--have not seen a lot of DC. activity here in
the United States over the last decade until the offshore wind
issues became emergent, and so there is more direct-current
activity in Asia and in Europe than in the United States. I
think here is just an artifact of the economics of the current
system where we have a flat demand. We have a lot of
inexpensive natural gas, and I don't think that the economics
have really tripped it in the favor of more DC. activities
going forward.
I will say that, as part of the grid modernization
consortium portfolio, there is a study that's being coordinated
with various ISOs, Midwest ISO, Southwest Power Pool,
Bonneville, and the Western Interconnection looking at seams
issues in terms of how my DC. overlays enable capacity-sharing
beyond the current interconnection boundaries and what value
would that provide and what sort of cost performance would that
offer. So I think there's an emerging body of knowledge and
analytic tools that might look to the next generation of the
modernized grid and re-examine this issue of what might be the
relationship between A.C. and DC. systems at the bulk system-
level. And that study should be wrapping up in January, I
believe.
Mr. Foster. Well, the other thing that's changed is
essentially all power that goes out certainly at the consumer
level goes through an A.C. to DC. converter, and so at some
point, you know, we've been just converting more than we might
necessarily have to. And the pure DC. system may have
advantages just in terms of--you know, if we were to start over
from scratch, I think we'd seriously consider a DC. system.
Also, if you add the requirement of EMP hardness, which is
a very expensive thing but may prove necessary, and cross your
fingers that Rocket Man doesn't do what he's been talking
about, but if that is a requirement added to this, then I think
protecting a DC. system against that will be, my guess,
significantly easier than an A.C. system where you have phase
and frequency to worry about.
So is there any work, you know, at the lower end in Europe
or anywhere looking at--you know, at the distribution-level DC.
system?
Mr. Imhoff. There is consideration of this notion of
avoiding the transform--and the inherent losses in the
transformers to go to more DC. I think some of the large data
farms and others are emerging are very high consumers of
electricity actually do some of that because they're inherently
D.C.-oriented inside and so they're avoiding some of those
issues. But it's more kind of localized and off--one-off
evaluations, I believe. I'm not aware of anything substantial
in the United States.
Mr. Foster. Yes, well inside big data centers, for example,
I believe they are switching to DC. power. It is where they
have got, you know, many megawatts. And so there's another big
vulnerability that gets worried about, which is just how long
it would take us to remanufacture many, many high-powered
transformers, whereas it probably would be easier to rebuild
the fraction of D.C.-to-D.C. converters that got wiped out in
an EMP pulse. And so if you add that as a requirement, it may
again tip the balance when you add the hardness requirement.
Anyway, if there's anything specific that can be talked
about either, you know, publicly or not publicly about efforts
along that direction, I'd be interested.
Mr. Imhoff. I'd be happy to take that for the record.
Mr. Foster. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Foster.
And the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. LaHood, is recognized.
Mr. LaHood. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I want to thank
the witnesses for your valuable testimony here today and want
to particularly welcome Dr. Sanders, who's the Department Head
at our flagship university, the University of Illinois, and for
what you do at the electrical and computer engineering program
there. Great to have all of you here today.
Dr. Sanders, in your testimony, you mentioned your work at
the U of I, the University of Illinois with the cyber
infrastructure for the power grid center and also the Cyber
Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium. Two questions on that,
could you talk a bit more about how these two centers are
helping to make the U.S. power grid more resilient, and then
secondly, is this the type of work that's happening at other
universities?
Dr. Sanders. Thank you, Mr. LaHood. I'll--at the risk of
being self-promoting, I'll try to be a bit brief on this. The
University of Illinois started work on cyber infrastructure
making trustworthy and making resilient and cyber secure the
infrastructure for the grid back in 2005. I can say that this
is a real need that we realized by the turn of the century, but
it took time to get the attention of the funders and really
have people understand this was an important thing to work on.
The first of those efforts, TCIP we call it, or Trustworthy
Cyber Infrastructure for Power was funded by the National
Science Foundation in a grant, and in the wisdom of the
National Science Foundation, even though financial contribution
was not large at the time, they brought in Department of Energy
and Department of Homeland Security to work closely with us.
It was very different than your typical academic research
project. From the very beginning, we brought in people from
industry and the National Labs. People from Mr. Imhoff's group
were with us at 2005, and we were defining the research agenda.
People from about 35 companies came together at that first
meeting, and they worked closely with us from that point out.
A follow-on effort was funded by the Department of Energy,
which is called TCIPG, and TCIPG expanded the scope to say
don't just do the good academic research but find ways to
transition that and get that in the hands of people that need
it.
Several startup companies have come out of that effort.
Technology has been specifically transitioned to large power
system equipment manufacturing, and you can see really that
kind of input going on.
Most recently, in 2015 there was once again an open
competition from the Department of Energy, and the University
of Illinois then received something called CREDC. That's Cyber
Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium. And at that point in
time--and I should say in the original centers that I talked
about, there were four universities that partnered together.
Now, 10 universities and two National Labs, including PNNL,
banded together to look at resiliency issues in the grid.
So that, once again, is a project that takes basic research
but takes basic research and then industry-government
partnership in a way that we can have impact. In fact my
colleague David Nicol, who is the principal investigator of the
CREDC effort, is in Texas today talking with people from the
oil and gas industry about how we can transition our
technologies to them. We flew out together last night from
Champaign, him to Texas, me to here, and this is the kind of
effort we place going on. So thank you for that question.
Mr. LaHood. Thank you. Those are all my questions. I yield
back. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. LaHood. A good Texas-
Illinois connection there I didn't know about.
The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Crist, is recognized for
his questions.
Mr. Crist. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And let me
add, thank you for holding this hearing on this important
issue. As a Floridian, I certainly appreciate it. I want to
thank the panelists for being here, too. I appreciate your
presence and taking of your time to help educate us even more
about our grid and its resiliency.
I recently saw a comparison that the Energy Information
Administration did on grid resiliency during Hurricane Irma and
Hurricane Wilma, which hit Florida in 2005. The assessment
states, quote, ``Although the percentage of Florida customers
without power during Irma was significantly higher than during
Wilma, the rate of electric service restoration has been more
rapid.'' Five days after Irma's landfall, the share of
customers without power had fallen from a peak of 64 percent
down to 18 percent, a recovery rate of about nine percent of
the customers per day. Power outages during Wilma back in 2005
went from 36 percent of customers to 16 percent by the fifth
day after landfall, an average recovery rate of about four
percent of customers per day.
Dr. Dillingham, I'm curious. You know, with this in mind
and--can you speak generally about improvements that have been
made to make our grid more resilient and specifically maybe
focus on discussion of the utilization of underground lines as
a means of increasing resiliency? We see a lot of our barrier
islands and beach communities in Florida moving to this not
only because it's aesthetically appealing, but we get hit by
hurricanes a lot.
Dr. Dillingham. Yes, absolutely. Thank you for that
question. Yes, there have been significant improvements,
particularly in the resilience of the transmission distribution
infrastructure. We are seeing quicker response times. There's a
lot better coordinated deployment, as Mr. Baum talked about
within the ERCOT region. The systems are just becoming more
robust to deal with this.
When you talk about burying lines versus aerial lines, the
significant issues with that is it may solve some problems in
some areas where there is high wind events but where there's a
lot of flooding, that could actually put it at considerable
risk if they're not properly designed. And so you need to--as I
kind of mentioned earlier, developing----
Mr. Crist. I think I'm assuming proper designing.
Dr. Dillingham. Proper designing, right.
Mr. Crist. Wouldn't we?
Dr. Dillingham. We would assume proper design there, but
what we typically find is that if we start--you know, like
within Houston we have lines that are aboveground and
belowground. The concern there is that in more flooding
environments, you just have a higher risk of those lines being
disrupted versus if they're aboveground, and so it's just--you
have to make that tradeoff. If you're going to pay the
additional dollars to bury them, are they properly developed
and properly can mitigate against that, that flooding risk
there.
But to your point, they're--we have seen significant
improvements in the way in which our systems have been
designed. They're more flexible. They're allowing for better
rerouting of power. And so yes, they have improved
considerably, but we need to keep in mind also that, you know,
the focus right now of course we've had three significant
hurricane events, and so we are talking about that quite a bit
right now, but there's a lot of other issues that are being
dealt with across the country if it's wildfire, if it's ice
storms, if it's drought that can also have significant impacts,
and if we're preparing just for hurricanes and preparing for
floods, we may be missing the point as far as preparing for
some of these other disasters. And so we need to continue to
figure out what's the best way to develop a diverse resiliency
grid that can deal with as many problems as possible.
Mr. Crist. Maybe we should talk about those then. If we're
talking about fire, isn't it probably better to have your
transmission lines underground than aboveground also?
Dr. Dillingham. I would assume so, yes, because you're
taking away that risk.
Mr. Crist. And if you're talking about ice, wouldn't the
same hold?
Dr. Dillingham. For ice it could, but then you're--you're
looking at just a significant increase in the cost when you
bury lines versus having them aboveground, and so it becomes
how much are we willing to pay to have that additional
resilience in there, and where is that funding going to come
from them, and how much are we going to pass on to ratepayers
in that regard? And that's just the tradeoff there. In many
cases, particularly--except for pretty much flooding, you can
have a more resilient system underground. It's just a--it's
protected from those events. But are we willing to pay that
additional cost to have that resilience in there?
Mr. Crist. Maybe we should look at it this way. If you're
talking about additional cost and you don't underground them
but you keep replacing them aboveground, you've got that
replacement cost every time or the repair cost every time
versus maybe you come close to eliminating it.
Dr. Dillingham. Absolutely right, but the way in which
economics are typically valued into these projects is first
costs and what is the first cost and that initial cost for me
versus long-term lifecycle analysis, which needs to be
considered further.
Mr. Crist. Wouldn't it be more enlightened to consider the
reality of, you know, having to replace over and over and over
again versus the likelihood of maybe not?
Dr. Dillingham. Absolutely, it's just that's not how
decisions are made at this point. It's very much kind of a
short-term viewpoint versus a long-term viewpoint and so----
Mr. Crist. We're in this for the long haul.
Dr. Dillingham. Oh, absolutely--you're absolutely right.
Mr. Crist. Right.
Dr. Dillingham. I agree with you on that. Yes.
Mr. Crist. I yield my time. Thank you very much, sir.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Crist.
The gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. Norman, is
recognized.
Mr. Norman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to thank
each of you for your testimony. It's been very interesting on a
very important subject.
Let me switch gears with you. Smart meters, Mr. Imhoff,
what kind of information is gathered and how is it used?
Mr. Imhoff. The smart meters typically monitor consumption
in the home. The utilities then use that to support their
billing function, and then in addition, the utilities use them
in support of their outage management systems to help detect in
real time when outages occur. Today, the majority of utilities
still wait for a phone call from a customer to inform them that
the power is out in a distribution feeder area. But in areas
that are served by a combination of smart meters and then
distribution automation devices in the substation have
delivered substantial improvements.
Vista in Washington State, an investor-owned utility there,
as they moved to distribution and smart metering, they reduced
the frequency of outages by 21 percent for the customers and
they reduced the duration of outages by ten percent and in a
very cost-effective fashion. So typically, that's how that
information is used, to support the billing and the outage
management systems. I'm not aware of any other key value
streams.
Mr. Norman. Let me ask you this. What is your opinion? Are
privacy and security concerns on the information that is
gathered something that we ought to--that the customer ought to
be concerned with? And is it encrypted in your--from what you
know?
Dr. Sanders. So, thank you very much for that question.
I'll jump in. So with regard to the--well, to answer your
question simply, there are many different brands of smart
meters, there are many different schemes that are being used,
but in general, yes, the information is encrypted, and steps
are taken for privacy.
With regard to cybersecurity issues and the meters, there's
probably less concern about privacy but a potential concern
that again is being thought about carefully so the sky is not
falling but potential concerns with regard to someone who may
try to gain control of their--those smart meters from the
outside. So smart meters do have the ability to control power
flow to the house, and so one must design architectures--and
those who are designing smart meters are well aware of this--
that ensures that the control of those meters cannot be placed
in the hands of an adversary.
Mr. Norman. And we would depend on experts like each of you
to tell us which meters, as technology improves, can avoid some
of this because, as Congressman Banks said, the--when you
mentioned cybersecurity hacks, particularly with the Chinese
with the military, their face gets very serious and it's a huge
problem.
And, Dr. Dillingham, again, back on the underground versus
overhead, I'm a--we're a developer. I've seen the number of
lines that are cut inadvertently and the problems that it has,
additional to the heavy cost that it takes to put them
underground and the rights-of-way that come with that, so I
appreciate your--mentioning the cost because it's a huge
factor.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Norman.
The gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Beyer, is recognized.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, very much, and thank
all of you for being with us today.
You know, it's very important that we're having this
hearing, especially because our President is visiting Puerto
Rico today. And it's in a time when we talk about electrical
grid utility--resiliency, Puerto Rico has virtually no
electrical grid to speak of. As FEMA Director Long said
yesterday, ``Rebuilding Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria will
be a Herculean effort.''
The Army Corps of Engineers is doing temporary power right
now, 74 generators in place, 400 to come, but I think, as of
this morning, only a little more than five percent of Puerto
Ricans have had their power restored. According to the Army
Corps of Engineers, for some areas of Puerto Rico, it might
take upwards of 10 months before their power is restored. And
it's not just the electrical grid system that's in crisis. As
of 3:00 p.m. yesterday, fewer than half of all Puerto Ricans
had access to clean drinking water, limited to no cell phone
service, 90,000 applications for FEMA assistance, we know of 16
known fatalities, and that doesn't count those who may have
died in their homes yet to be discovered. It's two weeks after
Maria, but now we do finally have an aid package for Puerto
Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
So, Mr. Chairman, may I suggest perhaps a follow-up
meeting--follow-up hearing on the resiliency of the electrical
grid in Puerto Rico.
And, Dr. Dillingham, if today was a hearing about how we
should respond to Puerto Rico, based on your expertise, what
solutions would you suggest to make the grid more resilient?
What are the near-term solutions to bring power back faster to
those, including renewables?
Dr. Dillingham. Thank you for that question. This is very--
absolutely a very important topic at this point. The
significant problem within Puerto Rico was the lack of--the
loss of the transmission distribution infrastructure. The power
plants fared just fine there, and they have a fairly diverse
set of power plants there from--they have natural gas plants,
solar, wind, variety of plants. There was a transmission
distribution infrastructure that went down and is going to take
a while to get back up.
When you look at the power prices within Puerto Rico and
look at what are the different microgrid options that are out
there, it makes--it's starting to make some pretty good
economic sense to start seeing more solar battery deployments
out there. We've already seen the--potentially the wall packs
being donated by Tesla to some degree, but a wider distribution
of these types of microgrid systems that are not dependent on
fuel resources necessarily or not dependent on LNG terminals
being on or transmission distribution terminals working or
making sure that different types of fuel shipments make it
there.
And if you're in a hurricane-prone area such as Puerto
Rico, the ability to have smaller resilient microgrid systems
is probably the best effort. And the quickness in which you can
deploy a microgrid system, especially solar battery system, is
far--happens far more quickly than you can deploy any other
type of infrastructure out there at this point.
And when you look at models of what's happening in Hawaii,
who has similar power costs, and you start seeing their
distribution or their development and deployment of microgrids
out there, it just--it's a good example to start looking at.
The economics are there, the technology is there, and it's
really just a matter of starting to introduce it.
Mr. Beyer. Great. Great. Thank you very much. You know,
this hurricane season, which isn't even over yet, it's
generated more destructive storms than we've seen in a long
time. Four of this year's storms became category 4 or 5 storms.
Three of those made landfall in the United States. The
University of Wisconsin called Harvey a 1,000-year flood, once
every thousand years. Quote, ``Nothing in the historical record
rivals this.'' Maria was the 10th-most intense hurricane ever.
Jose and Irma, only time in recorded history that two active
hurricanes simultaneously had wind speeds in excess of 150
miles an hour.
So while we talk about electrical grid, we cannot afford to
avoid the larger-scale issue that these storms are becoming
more intense as the climate warms as it changes. So, Mr. Baum,
are utilities, especially those in Texas, taking climate
change, the increasing severity of storms into account in their
planning? What are you doing to upgrade the grid system to
recognize that, you know, we're living in a world where the
climate is changing?
Mr. Baum. I think there's no question that we are taking
into consideration the new normal after events like this. And
as I stated earlier, we had a substation in Houston that
flooded that had not flooded in 50 years. That substation is
now being rebuilt to prepare for, you know, what is now the
flood of record. And I think all of the design that utilities
do, it basically says, all right, what's the worst-case
scenario that we've seen and now how do we build our system to
prepare and be ready to face the next type of storm? So I
definitely think practical planning is something that utilities
are doing and will continue to do going forward.
Mr. Beyer. Well, thank you for your vision and your answer.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Beyer.
The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Webster, is recognized.
Mr. Webster. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for
coming.
I thought about, as Mr. Foster was talking about A.C. and
D.C., maybe Edison will get a car named after him instead of
the Tesla. And it's amazing all the things he's doing,
including the battery packs that the company is sending are all
D.C., and yet he was the greatest promoter of A.C. It's a kind
of interesting switch of events.
Mr. Baum, in Texas in the last hurricane, which just
passed, was there a lot or minimal or in between those two
damage to the high tension wires from the generator to, let's
say, the substation, or were most of the outages caused by the
lower voltages?
Mr. Baum. A combination of both, but I would say most of
the customer outages were caused by--on--were more on the
distribution system that were caused by flooding and
substations being out, which then knocks out the distribution
system. But we did have some large--we had six of our largest
345 kilovolt transmission lines were downed or damaged for a
while during the storm, and a large number of smaller
transmission lines were also affected. So it was both in this
storm, transmission and distribution, which goes it--which
again, the lights in the whole State never flickered, and a lot
of that is because of the redundancy in both the transmission
and the distribution network.
Mr. Webster. So from just a hardening standpoint, is there
any change that needs to be done to the high tension lines in
order to make them more resilient?
Mr. Baum. I think you're always looking at ways to
develop----
Mr. Webster. Let me ask you--my knowledge is from a long
time ago, so are they still aluminum with steel cable running
with them or is it--is there a new type of transmission wiring?
Mr. Baum. Most of the transmission wiring is still as you
described.
Mr. Webster. Okay.
Mr. Baum. I think if there are advancements being made, a
lot of it is in the structures that hold up the transmission
lines and finding ways to design those better to withstand
storms.
Mr. Webster. So what was the cause of a structure? Was it
external flying debris or was it water or what was it that
would----
Mr. Baum. With our transmission lines that were affected,
it was high winds that were twisting the structures that hold
up the lines or--and you didn't really have a lot of lines
breaking. It was more high winds twisting the structures that
holds them up that brought down power lines.
Mr. Webster. So was there--is--would there be an effort now
to come up with a better way to build those structures or to
harden them in any way?
Mr. Baum. I think definitely. We have a new Chair of our
Public Utility Commission. DeAnn Walker was just named after
the storm, and the--at a meeting last week, she basically said
let's get the utilities and other providers together to see
what ways we can improve for the next storm, and I'm sure
that's one of the things that we'll be looking at.
Mr. Webster. I mean, I would think that we'd be--building
something like that would be a long-term--is there--was there a
way--you were talking about rerouting, doing some other things.
Were those all able to be rerouted around those structures that
fell or were twisted?
Mr. Baum. We--they were able--through a combination of
rerouting and having some power plants that our grid operator
contracts with to ramp-up to provide voltage support to some of
those areas that were affected by the lines that went down, and
so there were ways to make it to where this did not--the loss
of the transmission system didn't cause a cascading effect.
Mr. Webster. Okay. I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Mr. Webster.
That concludes our questions for the day. Thank you all for
your wonderful testimony. It was very enlightening to us, and
we have lots to do on our part as well.
So I appreciate everybody being here, and we stand
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:06 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
Appendix I
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Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by Mr. Carl Imhof
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Responses by Dr. Gavin Dillingham
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Responses by Mr. Walt Baum
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Appendix II
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Additional Material for the Record
Statement submitted by Committee
Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Document submitted by Representative
Marc A. Veasey
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]