Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?]
From: "Bernie, CTA" <cta () hcsin net>
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2003 17:50:23 -0400
On 16 Aug 2003 at 20:37, Stephen Clowater wrote:
First of all, it is unrealistic to assume that the power plants, distribution nodes and sub stations are still equipped with 1965 technology. Have you ever visited any of these facilities? I have.Thats not what I said, What I said was the warnings that had been coming for the last 10 years that this could happen, the situation in californa a few years ago and the grid failures on the west coast in 1996 can also attest to this. And Yes I have visited these facilites, and done work in them.
Ok, my mistake. I am glad to see that we have someone else here with some knowledge of the inside.
The lightning bolt theory has already been ruled out. And was ruled out before the first night of outage was over. The working theory that the inital data out of the investigation is that it was a transmition failure inside the loop that caused current to beging moving irregularly and ultimatly ended in a massive surge coming from the loop and traveling back down the grid. Monitoring stations at Niagra saw what is now belived to be this and initated emergency shut downs on their generators.
Ok, but...
I still feel that there was human intervention to disrupt or otherwise circumvent the automatic safeguards, in response to an anomaly (i.e. MSBlaster). ...
This is precicly what has been warned by people in the energy community for years. In fact, the former head of the dept of energy on CNN thurs Night said "america is a first world nation with a third world power grid". President Bush was quoted the next day as calling the power grid "antiquated". The problem is that the grid that is around today was initaly constructed in a time were power plants served a local area. Now power plants ship power via the grid over hundreds of miles. Over a grid that was not designed to be continually distributing power. It was designed to pick up the slack. Not be the principle transmitter of the power. The power grid is old, the plants on it are not. The avilable evidence at this point, and the logical course at this point would be that the inital report out of the loop that a major transmition line failure (wich was confirmed by the responsible utility) of a line carying a current of approx 31,500 amps, triggered a massive displacement and subsequent overload inside the loop, wich then spread thruought the system in a matter of seconds. After these few seconds, safty measures caught up to the surge and was able to midigate it and eventually stop the outage.
Here I have a problem. If your saying that a supplement of 32,000 Amps were placed on the Grid, then the surge arrestors should have tripped at many points in the Grid. The characteristics of the surge arresters in the protection topology should have been rated to withstand between 60 and 240 kV rms, with impulse sparover of between 190 and 685 kV, and designed to easily handle up to a 40 kA discharge for an 8 X 20us discharge current wave / kV crest. In other words, if the protection system was fully online the transient surge should have been absorbed by the arrestors, as if a lightning bolt hit the Grid. However, given that the latest news that a Power plant went offline, thus reducing the amount of power being inputted to the Grid, then the problem is more of demand load balancing, and surge drain, not overloading. Each of the transfer stations, sub- stations, and Power Plants remaining on the Grid have many sensors and computerized switchgear to automatically identify and compensate by increasing power input or shutting down sections of its distribution matrix. Unless again, the switchgear and protection systems at other Power Plants and sub- stations were not functioning or fully online when the surge incident occurred. Or, there was purposeful human interdiction with the transmission and/or load-balancing system matrix. Otherwise, given the time period involved, I find no logical explanation or evidence to support that the Grids' current infrastructure design could not isolate and manage the loss of one Plant supplying even if it was supplying 31,000 amps. After all 31,000 Amps is not that much considering the size of the area affected and the amount of Power that was under demand at the time. If it was one Plant that droped, the switchgear in that area should have isolated the demand and disconnected consumption from only that section of the Grid. IMO, the bottom line is that the protection / load balancing system failed not the Grid. So why did this system fail at so many points along the Grid? - **************************************************** Bernie Chief Technology Architect Chief Security Officer cta () hcsin net Euclidean Systems, Inc. ******************************************************* // "There is no expedient to which a man will not go // to avoid the pure labor of honest thinking." // Honest thought, the real business capital. // Observe> Think> Plan> Think> Do> Think> ******************************************************* _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Current thread:
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?], (continued)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Stephen Clowater (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Geoff Shively (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Stephen Clowater (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Bernie, CTA (Aug 16)
- RE: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Richard M. Smith (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Geoff Shively (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Bernie, CTA (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Geoincidents (Aug 16)
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- RE: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Bernie, CTA (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Stephen Clowater (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Bernie, CTA (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Stephen Clowater (Aug 16)
- Re: east coast powergrid / SCADA [OT?] Valdis . Kletnieks (Aug 15)