America’s power grid, providing electricity to hundreds of millions of homes and businesses, has come under attack more than 360 times in the past three years from hackers, thieves and vandals, according to a USA TODAY review of federal data.
Five of the incidents, from 2011 to 2014, were reported by Iowa’s electric utilities, which mainly were victimized by thieves looking to steal copper.
“Continuing to keep an eye on substations when copper prices are high is always an issue,” said Tom Peterson, a spokesperson for ITC Midwest, an electricity transmission company.
Though the security breaches haven’t resulted in a widespread outage, they raise concerns that the system could be vulnerable to acts of terrorism. A widespread outage lasting a few days could disable devices ranging from ATMs to cellphones to traffic lights, and jeopardize heating, air-conditioning and health care systems if they exhaust their backup power supplies, according to the USA TODAY report.
Peterson confirmed that ITC in Iowa reported three incidents in 2014. Two were tied to theft attempts at Boone County substations. The third involved a single bullet that hit a substation in Jones County, which ITC believes was unintentional.
MidAmerican Energy of Iowa reported the two other incidents, one at a Webster County substation in 2013 and the other in 2012 in Council Bluffs. Both MidAmerican incidents had ties to copper theft, according to police reports.
No arrests were made in either the Council Bluffs or Webster County incidents. No customers lost power from any of the five incidents.
During 2012 and 2013, copper prices were upward of $3.20 a pound, reaching $3.80 a pound in some cases.
Substations typically are secured by chain-link fences and occasionally security cameras, said Ian Dobson, a professor of engineering at Iowa State University. If the substation has equipment, it is locked and protected from outside elements.
“Typically, there’s not very much security, and the transmission lines are unsecured,” Dobson said. “It’s very difficult to protect these at a reasonable cost.”
Both Peterson and Ruth Comer, a MidAmerican spokeswoman, said their companies work with local law enforcement if an incident occurs at a substation.
Neither provided specifics on their security measures, but Peterson said ITC will conduct “irregular, unannounced and periodic inspections.”
“It’s also very dangerous to try and get into an electrical substation or a control house, so we do all we can to discourage that,” Peterson said.
Dobson said utility companies and customers are faced with a tradeoff: pay more for higher security to protect against a few incidents and have higher bills, or pay for less security, have lower bills and deal with the occasional problem.
“There’s always been some low level of vandalism on the grid … it’s an expensive problem, but it’s not the most important thing that goes wrong with the power system,” he said, noting weather is often a more common problem for the power grid.
This article was originally written by Matthew Patane of the Des Moines Register.