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The world energy landscape is being shaken to its roots. The old-fashioned power grid is evolving into an innovative smart grid—smart, computerized networks capable of balancing supply and demand in real time, merging renewable resources, and enabling consumers. But here's the catch: the smarter the grid, the more vulnerable it is to cyberattacks. In a more and more..
Energy Central…
The term "VEX" has been receiving some wide-spread press coverage due to the efforts of a few people with a vested interest in seeing VEX get traction and the efforts of Allan Friedman promoting the VEX concept which he introduced while working at NTIA. I'm not aware of any working, production implementations of "CSAF VEX" that satisfy Executive Order 14028..
Energy Central…
The California Energy Commission (CEC) is mulling a preliminary planning goal for 3 GW of offshore wind by 2030 and potentially expanding it to 10 GW to 15 GW by 2045. If finalized, California’s offshore wind goals would be the most ambitious in the U.S., surpassing even New York’s, which call for 9 GW by 2035.
In a draft report sent to the state’s governor on May 9, the CEC suggested California has an offshore technical potential in federal waters off the California coast of 21.8 GW, based on wind speed, ocean depth, bottom score, and distance to connecting infrastructure. Preliminary planning goals, however, focus mainly on floating offshore wind deployments, given that the deep waters of the Pacific Outer Continental Shelf off California’s coast have “steep drop-offs and will require offshore wind turbines installed on floating platforms to be anchored to the seabed.”
The CEC’s draft responds to Assembly Bill 525 (AB 525), a law that took effect this January and requires the CEC to develop a “strategic plan” for offshore wind energy developments off the California coast in federal waters.…
The power and energy sector is one of the most critical areas of our country’s infrastructure, making it a prime target for cybercriminals increasingly looking for ways to infiltrate and disrupt the sector and ultimately the national grid. In fact, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report in early 2021 that found the grid, and subsequently its distribution systems that carry electricity from transmission systems to end-users, to be growing targets for large-scale, strategic state-sponsored cyber war operations.
This heightened interest and motivation can be attributed to hackers looking for larger ransomware payouts as well as nation states who consider the sector key to crippling the U.S. economy. High-profile attacks like the Colonial Pipeline have given threat actors more motivation to go after critical infrastructure. These groups continue to mature and adopt sophisticated tactics, techniques, and procedures, while industry leaders look to safeguard their critical systems and essential services.
If recent history is any indication of what we can expect in 2022 and beyond, the power and energy sector must prepare for the worst and prioritize their industrial cybersecurity programs accordingly.…