Letter from Washington: April 2014

摘要

The US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held a standing room only hearing in April on grid safety. The size of the audience for such a relatively arcane topic underscored the current level of concern the issue is generating. Worries about grid terrorism are running high in Washington after a leaked government report showed the potential for massive outages from even a small, targeted attack. A well-timed assault on just nine of the country’s 55,000 substations could cause a national power outage that would last weeks or maybe months, according to the confidential findings of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which were published in March by the Wall Street Journal.