Time to ditch private oversight of America’s electric grid system

From: Fox News

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In April of 2013, unknown parties used a high-powered rifle to shoot out seventeen transformers at a San Jose substation—but only after cutting the fiber optic cables alerting 911 emergency centers.

A prescient 2007 report by the National Academy of Sciences foresaw this grid attack, but the report’s release was suppressed by security classification at the Department of Homeland Security. Only recently has the national media begun to cover the San Jose substation attack and its implications for national security.

Most Americans probably don’t know that standards for protection of electric grid facilities against terrorist attack are set not by the federal government, but by an electric power industry consortium located in Atlanta, Georgia — the North American Electric Reliability Corporation or “NERC,” as it is called by industry insiders.

NERC had spent years developing a standard for physical protection of transformer substations, but this effort was cancelled after the San Jose attack. For NERC and the electric utilities that control its governance, avoiding regulation looks to be more important than protecting against terrorists.

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