Why Read: The future demands a new approach to electricity generation and distribution. Internet protocol and distributed generation software offers a path forward. - bba
It's not just you. The world and its systems are growing less stable - the international world order, the climate emergency, the economy, supply chains and access to global goods, drought and famine, the rate of technological change and its social and cultural disruptors, spiking inequality and political polarization, and, around the world, civil unrest.
Bill Frist, chair of the Nature Conservancy, authored a piece in Forbes last week on the cascading and complex nature of formerly rare disasters.
Today, these disasters increasingly arrive as compound events. They unfold as interconnected systems of risk, with physical damage escalating into supply chain disruptions, business interruption, ecosystem loss, and humanitarian emergencies. A hurricane during a heat wave that knocks out a power grid is not three separate events. It is one correlated risk cluster. These cascading risks are exactly what climate change accelerates and what actuaries and insurers are struggling to price.
Insurers aren't the only ones struggling to adapt to this new norm of interconnected and cascading risk.
The most famed speech out of Davos last week was that of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who put words to that feeling from the perspective of what he called the "middle powers" - a term he used to mean countries that are not the US, China, or Russia. Said Carney:
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied - the WTO, the UN, the COP - the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving, are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.
Carney's overall comments took aim at Donald Trump and the US's international aggression, but his words apply to critical infrastructure here in the United States just as much as they do to the rest of the world.
Globally, we have arrived at the Age of Polycrisis. Our success navigating the world ahead will depend on our ability to build systems that are redundant, resilient, and decentralized.
The design constraints have changed. It's time we adapt our responses accordingly.
The Fragility of the Grid
One of the most fragile - and most fretted about - architectures today is the grid, which is still somehow functional despite being fundamentally unchanged since its initial analog invention in 1882.
As David Roberts, host of the "Volts" podcast, remarked in an interview last week with Swedish tech entrepreneur Jonas Birgersson:
[T]oday's grid, absent batteries, absent the ability to store energy, which has been most of the grid's history, demand and supply have to sync up in real time. You produce the power, it has to be consumed instantly, more or less, which is an enormous and truly mind-boggling coordination problem. It's amazing it works at all.
Looking ahead, as climate and geopolitical instability intensify, that real-time need to balance supply and demand will continue to accelerate and lengthen outages.
The factors contributing to the grid's fragility are numerous:
The grid's current governance structure, in which ISOs and RTOs must approve all new interconnection and manage supply and demand in real time, necessarily throttles the speed at which additional storage and generation could be added and limits key efficiency opportunities behind the meter.
The centralized design of the grid means that damage to just one part or component can take out power for entire communities. And this isn't just an issue for specialized control systems. Those wooden utility poles we're so accustomed to seeing along roads? Fire crews refer to them as "roman candles" because they're coated with highly flammable materials that make them nearly impossible to extinguish. One burned pole can cut off service to an entire community.
To prevent wildfire liability, utilities will plan more frequent anticipatory outages in the effort to prevent megafires during times of high winds.
Increased electricity demand during climate emergencies - including extreme cold snaps and heat waves, combined with insufficient energy storage across the grid - will mean a growing gulf between supply and demand. And more outages.
A huge share of electrical equipment across the US is purchased from China, which is known to include backdoors in transformers and other systems that enable surveillance and cyber attacks.
The speed and scale of both kinetic and cyber attacks will intensify, particularly with the combination of the LLM-driven ability to identify and exploit vulnerabilities, ramped-up information warfare driving domestic terrorism, and the continued great power struggles between the US, Russia, and China.
Going Deeper on Kinetic Attacks
While most of the fear around grid attacks focuses on data security and ransomware, the most damaging of attacks on grid infrastructure are of a different nature: those that attack the workings of the grid itself.
There are two key types of kinetic attacks that we've already seen across critical infrastructure and that we are likely to see more of in the years to come: control system attacks and conspiracy chaos attacks.
Control system attacks aim to undermine control systems and grid function by shifting their internal functions just enough to cause damage to critical systems, but not so much that operators and controllers detect the change.
One such kinetic attack is known as Aurora. Aurora undermines the internal mechanics of the grid's control systems; it is nearly impossible to identify as it's taking place, damages essential hardware, can start lithium battery fires, and can take a grid down for "nine to 18 months or longer," according to control systems expert Joe Weiss in a recent article in Utility Security.
Uh ... what? How long did you say, Joe?
Technically, here's how it works:
Aurora is reclosing protective relays out of phase with the grid, so the sine waves of the relay and the grid are not synchronized. The lack of synchronization creates damaging mechanical and electrical forces on the alternating current (AC) equipment connected to the relay. Causing the out-of-phase condition can be done either manually or remotely (cyber). There is no malware involved. Aurora uses the protection of the electric grid, arguably the most critical of all infrastructures, as its attack vector. [...]
The unstable out-of-phase conditions generated large torques, current spikes and harmonics that created increased equipment heat. Large torques can damage AC induction motors and generators, while the current spikes can damage transformers - and the increased heat can cause fires in lithium-ion battery energy storage systems.
The hardware damage can make the grid and AC equipment in other industries and facilities unavailable for nine to 18 months or longer. It can take that long because of both the sheer difficulty of repairing the ensuing hardware damage and the long lead times to obtain replacement equipment. Equipment damage can occur with any AC equipment connected to the affected protective relays, whether that equipment is from the utilities or the utilities' customers. The greater the out-of-phase angle between the equipment and system phase angles, the greater the damage.
That is an almost unfathomable amount of time to be without electricity. Especially when you consider the range of other critical infrastructure - water treatment, sewage, garbage, hospitals and schools - that require electricity to function.
Reached for comment on Saturday, Weiss highlighted the widespread need for Level 0 cybersecurity training, protocol, and awareness among operators of critical infrastructure, stating:
What is needed is dedicated Level 0 cybersecurity training or the foundation of physical operations will remain vulnerable, regardless of how secure the upper layers of the system may appear. Adversarial nation-states are aware of the Level 0 gap and the reticence by cyber defenders to address it. With the lack of Level 0 cybersecurity, authentication, and appropriate training, OT cybersecurity is built on a foundation of sand.
The other type of kinetic attack I expect to see more of in the years to come is what I like to call a "conspiracy chaos" attack. These attacks use information- warfare tactics to indoctrinate locals into conspiracy theories and incite physical, kinetic damage against critical infrastructure.
The most famous of these took place during COVID, when people around the world began setting fire to cell towers. One arsonist in San Antonio was particularly resourceful, setting fire to 22 cell towers in the course of just a few years after finding a Joe Rogan interview with jiu-jitsu instructor Eddie Bravo that sent him down a rabbit hole.
A September 16 WIRED article describes the moment of indoctrination and the subsequent reinforcement of the future arsonist's ideas. Bravo to Rogan:
"What do you think of, um, 5G and all that scare? You think that's legit?" Rogan pronounces himself "terrified" of the wireless networking technology, which was then starting to become widespread in the US. "How much long-term testing have they done?" he asks, without specifying the potential effects he fears. "Zero?" Bravo then urges Rogan to visit a website that contains the government's "400-page plan for the world," a document that he says contains revelations about 5G that will "get your fucking head blown off."
Once convinced that violence is the only moral choice, lone actors are routinely carrying out hit-and-run attacks against pieces of the nation's technological infrastructure, which remain lightly guarded despite their vast importance. The types of sites being targeted are as varied as the causes that motivate their attackers. In 2022, for example, someone shot up two electrical substations in North Carolina, in a possible far-right effort to disrupt a drag show. Two years later, a Tennessee man was arrested for allegedly plotting to use drones to bomb Nashville's power grid in hopes of hastening a race war. This past July, a member of a militia group that trafficked in weather-manipulation conspiracy theories allegedly smashed up an Oklahoma radar station. And saboteurs with unknown motives have also been severing fiber-optic cables in both California and Missouri since the early summer. (Gauging the true number of infrastructure attacks has become more difficult since the DHS shuttered its Terrorism and Targeted Violence database in March.)
And this kind of indoctrination and subsequent infrastructure damage is liable to spike as LLMs enable the coordination of swarms of AI bots posing as real people. Earlier this week, RMI co-founder and chair emeritus (and longtime SNS member) Amory Lovins emailed me an essay jointly written by our friend Gary Marcus with Daniel Thilo Schroeder and Jonas R. Kunst. An excerpt:
The unique danger of a swarm is that it acts less like a megaphone and more like a coordinated social organism. Earlier botnets were simple-minded, mostly just copying and pasting messages at scale - and in well-studied cases (including Russia's 2016 IRA effort on Twitter), their direct persuasive effects were hard to detect. Today's swarms, now emerging, can coordinate fleets of synthetic personas - sometimes with persistent identities - and move in ways that are hard to distinguish from real communities.
Sorry, Joe Rogan; conspiracy theories don't need your help anymore.
Community Resilience & Mobile Microgrids
It turns out that generally what communities without power do is find a way to obtain it. They come together with their neighbors and their generators and their solar panels to create community power hubs that can enable basic communications and serve as centralized distribution points for food, resources, and information.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in September 2024, North Carolina has made moves to formalize this approach, providing $5 million in funds from the State Energy Office to install up to 24 microgrids across 6 western counties.
According to reporting from Canary Media:
The money will also go to two mobile aid units for rural counties on either end of state - one in the east and one in the west. Dubbed'Beehives' by Footprint, these solar-powered portable units will be full of equipment that can be deployed to purify water, set up temporary microgrids, and otherwise respond to storms and extreme weather.
Other communities would be wise to replicate these types of efforts. It's hard to source microgrid components during a disaster.
These moves are important for disaster preparedness, but are so far necessarily limited by two key factors:
The analog nature of the grid and its control systems means interconnected microgrids must be tightly controlled by regulators.
For the same reason, in the US it's generally illegal for anyone connected to the grid to share electricity between households.
In an analysis of the legality of self-generation presented in an Energy Bar Association paper by John Wellinghoff and Steven Weissman, the authors state that the struggle between "traditional monopoly retail distribution utilities [...] and consumers themselves and independent third-party providers
[...] may involve efforts by utilities to preclude third-party providers from selling to individual consumers, or to ensure that neighbors cannot work together to meet their common electricity needs. It can involve efforts to discourage self-generation by imposing steep customer charges on the bills of solar customers, or the insistence that the full output of a customer-sited generating system be fed into the grid, rather than used onsite. If there is a right to self-generate, then such tactics impinge on that right to a greater or lesser extent.
The Anti-Fragile Grid
Luckily, there is another solution, the components of which are being pioneered across Europe: a distributed grid that runs on internet-like protocols to automate balancing, minimize outages, contain security vulnerabilities and intrusions, and maximize new generation and storage installations.
And that grid is already emerging from private industry in Europe, pushing its way into the US to help solve the challenges of ratepayers, utilities, and regulators.
The US has already seen its fair share of virtual power plants (VPPs), designed to gather distributed energy-generation assets into one cohesive package that can be used by utilities to balance their local grids.
UK-based Piclo is gaining ground here with transparency and speed-to-deployment of its distributed energy resource marketplace. After success in the UK, Europe, and Australia, Piclo has set its sights on the US. As of September, it announced that it had registered
a combined 1 gigawatt of distributed energy resources - a term that includes batteries, EV fleets, grid-responsive appliances, and commercial and industrial buildings that can dial down energy use on demand. Companies registering with Piclo include major residential solar and battery installer Sunrun, demand-response provider Enel X, and energy-efficiency startup Budderfly.
Unlike companies that aggregate distributed energy resources and manage them as virtual power plants, "we don't take a position in the market," [Piclo CEO James] Johnston said. "We're that party that partners trust to share data with. We're that matchmaker - we share the right data sets, end to end, across that entire journey. And we're the adjudicator - whether you're matched or not, whether you win a contract or not."
The missing link in all this remains the grid protocol - a problem Jonas Birgersson is now taking aim at with his new EnergyNet project.
Birgersson is a connectivity nerd of the most delightful type: pushing innovation through small-scale, open experiments to prove out new communication protocols.
It was this approach that allowed him to pioneer an early internet service giving Swedes access to unlimited internet for $20 a month. And he's now setting his sights on electricity in the same way.
Crucially, Brussels recently passed a law mandating the ability to share electricity between neighbors. This new regulation has opened the door for Birgersson's energy-sharing protocol experiment, which he is currently pioneering with a set of connected homes in Lund, Sweden. As quoted from a paper of Birgersson's in his "Volts" interview with host David Roberts, cited above:
Starting from a clean slate - in other words, if we didn't already have an electricity system, if we were starting fresh - a modern system would be local first and digitally coordinated: microgrids with power electronics frontiers, software-defined energy flows, open protocols, local buffering and storage, and policy-based interconnection between domains.
In the podcast, the two extoll the additional benefits of electricity allocation, security, adaptability, and efficiency gains made possible by such a system:
Jonas Birgersson
If you then back it up, comparing that to digital control, it means that - the old grid, if you have power at your home, you either have it or you don't have it. That could be for all of California or for all of New York. Here we can say, "We only have 12% power, so we want that power to be transported to that critical function and that critical function." No jacuzzis, but we're going to run this light or open this door.
David Roberts
The refrigerator.
Jonas Birgersson
Exactly. We could say the refrigerator - you only need to get a power boost every 30 minutes or depending on climate. In Sweden, we can just open the door because we live in a refrigerator.
David Roberts
You're talking about software that is embedded at the household level, at the building level. Each individual domain has their software, so when energy comes in, you can send it one place or another based on software rules, which, again, I bet 99 out of 100 people, if you just pulled them off the streets of America, would think that you could already do that. But that is new.
Jonas Birgersson
You get excited about this because there are many different things that you can do the moment you get it to be digital. There are a couple of things that make the digital even better. One of the things is that you have a common language so that you have your port inside the home, but your neighbor has bought different boxes, completely different vendors. As long as they still have the same language - Wi-Fi - it means that we can now help each other out. But I'm not locked into a vendor or an ecosystem.
Later on in the interview, David gets to the meat of why such an architecture is essential for progress and speed:
The key thing that I wanted to highlight is all of this can be done by the private sector. All of this is profitable and useful and does not require - the main thing about the policy-based interconnection that I meant to mention when we were talking about it is everybody listening to this pod is very familiar at this point with the interconnection problem in the US - meaning everybody who wants to connect to the grid has to get in a line and wait for the utility's permission, which is slowing everything down fatally here in the US. But if you have these software policy-based interconnection rules, if you build something, you just hook it up and the software handles the routing, etc. for you. You don't have to get anyone's permission.
While this particular innovation is small-scale at the moment, if successful it could become a platform for an entire ecosystem of energy innovations that protect against vulnerabilities, enable new types of efficiencies, and generally bring electrical infrastructure out of the 1800s and into the connected age.
It's an idea that could revolutionize our ability to make do with the generation capacity that we have.
Jonas, we're counting on you. Let us know if we can help.
Your comments are always welcome.
Sincerely,
Berit Anderson
