BIRMINGHAM – At first glance the idea of a US Smart Grid is appealing: Update the power grid so that it is more dynamic, granular, and controllable. In practical terms it means replacing the meters on every house, apartment, restaurant, gym, plant, and business in the country with digital meters that provide a control point that the utilities can use to measure consumption.
The part that makes Smart Grid so appealing politically is that renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and geothermal, can easily put power into the grid through these digital meters. That would create a market for those sources and jump start America?s move towards energy independence.
The investment to deploy new power meters to every end point is going to be large. How large? Hundreds of millions of devices and the digital networks to talk to them and control them could cost billions. Last week the Obama administration announced $3.4 billion for 100 utility projects to deploy Smart Grid networks and technology. But wait. Just how are the utilities going to communicate with those devices? You guessed it. They are going to communicate via TCP/IP, essentially over the Internet. This is a problem.
The utilities will attempt to segregate those networks from the Internet of course. But the existing control network, called SCADA, has already experienced ?leakage? to the Internet. Network segregation will be required. But that is not the problem. The problem is that there are going to be tens or hundreds of millions of devices that act a lot like computers connected to a network. As a matter of fact Smart Grid meters are computers. They may run Linux or – mother help us ? Windows and they will suffer the fate of all such devices as will the consumers behind them.
Imagine the nightly re-boot as the Utility updates each device with patches and security fixes! Imagine the brown outs and black outs from malicious or accidental actions. Would you really want something as reliable as your broadband modem providing electricity to your radial arm saw? Today when a major backbone provider on the Internet mis-configures a few routers you get router-flap that shuts down communications. The equivalent on the Smart Grid will be a disaster.
The Smart Grid is going to happen. Going digital has too many advantages. Leaving aside the fact that thousands of meter-readers will lose their jobs, the increased efficiency, the new products and services, the cost savings will be worth the investment. But be prepared for glitches, Smart Grid crime, (get the device to report that you are a net producer of electricity), and cyber attacks, until the day the manufacturers and utilities figure out how to secure the grid.
Richard Stiennon is a security industry analyst in Birmingham, Michigan. You can email him your comments and column ideas at email IT-Harvest.Com
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