Improvements to Grid Include Advancing Cyber Security

Nick Brown, CEO of Southwest Power Pool.

In addition to grid improvements, the energy industry in Arkansas is also working together on advancements in cyber security, said Nick Brown, the CEO of Southwest Power Pool. In his opinion, cyber attacks present the most significant risk to the grid.

“We are working as a whole industry to understand what standards of operation are appropriate but not overly onerous from a cost perspective,” Brown said. “It’s the balance between reliability and economics, and unfortunately, it’s a continuously moving target every day.”

The Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. invests about $5 million to $15 million annually for enhancements to the grid. Robert McClanahan, the vice president of IT and CIO at the AECC, said about $500,000 is specifically earmarked for grid security.

McClanahan said cyber attacks are an “ever-evolving and ever-increasing threat,” but that the AECC is working to implement a set of Critical Infrastructure Protection standards that were created by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. and approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Those standards specify the minimum protection to be applied to any system, he said.

“We are definitely implementing some systems that are certainly innovative for us. No rocket science, if you will, but we’re taking a very big leap into real-time monitoring and this concept of hardening a system so that you know absolutely every piece of software, every little thing that runs on it, so that you can tell if something’s changed,” McClanahan said.