Grid attacks are likely from both foreign actors and domestic terrorists

//DH

Though an opponent’s power infrastructure is an alluring target for any combatant looking for an edge in a conflict, attacks on electricity supplies carry a particular appeal for domestic extremists. Intelligence bulletins indicate that many of these groups identify the power grid as ripe for such sabotage, and recent attacks across the United States only vindicate those assessments. As these nongovernmental threats continue their decades-long ascent up the ladder of national security risks and with a contentious election looming in 2024, the severity of the threat is likely to grow.

Foreign adversaries have had the U.S. power grid in their sights for years. Industry players have warned that the energy sector is among the most targeted by hackers. The 2021 shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline offered a preview of the economic and political disruption energy-focused attacks can incur. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine, in which Russia has systematically bombarded Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, has illustrated the extent to which at least one U.S. geopolitical rival views opponents’ power grids as a legitimate combat target: Moscow has already threatened the American power grid as a reprisal for U.S. support for Ukraine.

By the same logic, the nature of the power grid and its function in modern society make it an enticing target for domestic extremists. These groups rarely engage in direct, military-style confrontations with their better-equipped opponents in law enforcement (though there are notable exceptions to that rule). Power grid attacks do not require that sort of head-on combat. Disabling or destroying electrical infrastructure is merely a strategy to spark rancor or to indirectly threaten civilians. Those desired ends are often informed by “accelerationist” ideologies, namely a drive to hasten the collapse of civilization to realize prophesied outcomes or goals. A tenet of accelerationism is that modern society is perennially only a few blows away from disintegration: Remove the cornerstones, and collapse will follow. That is why domestic extremists who espouse accelerationist ideologies increasingly target critical infrastructure of all types.

Power grid attacks are well suited to accelerationism. It is hard to name a component of modern society more essential, and its disabling more catastrophic, than electricity. Wastewater treatment, personal banking, home security—so many of the ballasts that anchor modern American life, and curb its ills, would cease to function if the power grid faltered for an extended amount of time.

Unsurprisingly, digital researchers report that online chatter among extremist groups points to a cresting fascination with coordinated attacks on the power grid. These communications also suggest an awareness of the grid’s inadequate defenses. After an attack on a power substation in Metcalf, California in 2013, FERC warned that a coordinated assault on nine critical substations around the country—combined with an attack on one of the few domestic transformer manufacturers—could plunge the United States into darkness for 18 months. This possibility has become so tantalizing to domestic extremists that its progenitor has gained its own stand-in in extremists’ parlance: the “nine substation problem.” Though the utility that owns the Metcalf substation subsequently erected a wall around the facility, most substations and infrastructure lack such defenses.

In the years since the Metcalf incident, despite an order from FERC pledging to review and improve the grid’s physical security, the number of attacks on the power grid has risen. There were more than 100 attacks on U.S. electrical infrastructure in 2022, the most in more than 10 years. The final weeks of 2022 saw low-tech attacks on power substations in North Carolina, Washington state, and Oregon. (It’s important to note that the motives for these attacks are still under investigation, and not all power grid assaults are carried out by non-state actors with extremist aims. However, at least one of these recent incidents appears to have been driven by political aims.) The perpetrators were able to knock out the power to tens of thousands of Americans for multiple days with everyday tools and a desultory spray of bullets. FERC ordered a review of the grid’s physical security after the North Carolina and Pacific Northwest attacks, but for the reasons outlined in the preceding section, the federal government’s past forays into the issue do not inspire confidence.

Federal security agencies have echoed energy regulators’ calls for greater attention to the risks posed to the grid by domestic extremists. The Department of Homeland Security emphasized in a recent bulletin that power grid attacks could satisfy the goals of a wide range of groups with diverse ideologies because of the potential for such attacks to cause widespread disruptions. The FBI has conveyed the same possibility. The Homeland Security notice links an uptick in threats against the power grid to dissatisfaction with the results of the 2020 election, demonstrating how extremists construe the power grid—or, in this case, its collapse—as an optimal vehicle by which to effect sociopolitical distemper. With no indication that polarization or the threat from domestic extremists is likely to abate in the near future, the 2024 election could be a flashpoint for such attacks depending on the character of the race and its outcome. Experts understandably fear the consequences should a coordinated, advanced assault succeed.

Climate Change: Amplifying the Risk, Worsening the Costs

The grid’s defenselessness and the bedlam to which a successful, concerted attack could give rise are national security risks in normal times. But a new, unprecedented threat—with a harsh economic and human toll—is rising. Climatic conditions in the 21st century are rapidly straying from the Edenic sweet spot that modern humans have inhabited for thousands of years. As a result, climate volatility engendered by human activities is colliding with the grid’s languishing physical security and surging domestic extremism to make power outages an even more potent piece of the extremist toolkit. Societal advances toward decarbonization—necessary to address climate change—introduce another challenging variable into the risk calculus by expanding the pool of basic survival needs that a power grid attack would compromise.

Even without pressures from domestic extremists, the power grid is flagging under the yoke of more punishing and frequent extreme weather. The United States already endures more blackouts, most of which are weather related, than its developed counterparts. The root causes of those outages hearken back to the long-standing underinvestment and neglect covered above, but even higher levels of investment and resilience-outfitting would struggle to completely prepare the grid for the catastrophic natural disasters now routinely battering its infrastructure.

These outages incur steep economic and human costs. Estimates put the average economic losses from weather-related blackouts between 2003 and 2012 at $18 billion to $33 billion per year. The February 2021 winter storm that blindsided the central United States killed nearly 250 people (with some experts pegging a much higher death toll), most of whom died from hypothermia. Estimates of the death toll from the June 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave range from the low hundreds to more than 1,000 from Oregon to British Columbia. Extreme weather wreaks greater havoc on the U.S. power grid with each passing year, leading to more frequent outages and endangering—and in the worst cases, killing—the most vulnerable.

Each of these events, the clip of which will accelerate as climate change intensifies, is a risk multiplier for national security and a potential opportunity for domestic extremists. The power grid is already a target for those groups; power outages foment unrest and strain societal systems even in tranquil weather. By coordinating an attack on power infrastructure before a slug of extreme weather, extremists may be able to augment the disruption they seek to inspire and threaten hundreds, if not thousands, more lives by escalating a power outage from a nuisance to a potentially life-or-death threat. A regional blackout engineered to coincide with a prolonged, triple-digit heat wave is manna to extremists who aim to orchestrate the chaos they believe will herald the long-sought collapse central to accelerationism or who simply wish to inflict suffering and death. The same can be said of an outage before an Arctic outbreak, hurricane, or any other variety of extreme weather.