Former CIA Director: The Grid Is Vulnerable To Attack

The electric power grid in the United States is vulnerable to attacks that have already begun, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey said in Chicago Thursday night, and America needs distributed generation as backup—primarily in the form of natural-gas cogeneration and solar power.
On another energy-security front, Woolsey called on automakers to produce fuel-flex cars and for gas stations to offer motorists the choice of gasoline or methanol—a liquid fuel made from natural gas—to free American transportation from dependence on OPEC.
"The problem mainly with the grid is that everything depends on it, and it itself has some very substantial vulnerabilities," said Woolsey, a co-founder of the U.S. Energy Security Council, at an appearance sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "We need to move as quickly as possible to generating power where the load is."
The grid is vulnerable because it is controlled via the World Wide Web, said Woolsey, who directed the Central Intelligence Agency under President Bill Clinton from 1993-95.
"How about hacking? How about the extremely sophisticated hacking coming from the People's Liberation Army hacking headquarters in China? How about Iranians training Herzbollah to figure out how to knock down parts of the grid?"
The grid is under attack already, according to Woolsey, and regularly fending off hacking attempts. To illustrate the possible consequences of a successful attack, Woolsey plugged the NBC series "Revolution," which explores "what happened to America when the power went out."
"We have 18 critical infrastructures in the United States: water, food, electricity and so forth. All 17 of the others depend on electricity," Woolsey said. "Everything depends on the electric grid."
By placing photovoltaic cells on rooftops, batteries in the basement, Americans can have power even if the grid goes down, he said, and even if it's only 10 to 15 percent of the power supplied by the grid, it's better than nothing in an emergency.
"The difference between 10 to 15 percent and zero is the difference between a terrible inconvenience and civilization collapsing."
And with cheap natural gas now abundant in the U.S., Woolsey suggested using gas more often for cogeneration—producing both heat and electricity on location.
"You still are going to have to have the grid, but we could have a much more flexible civilization if the grid were to undergo some very fundamental changes, making distributed generation much easier than it is now."
Now a venture partner at Lux Capital specializing in energy investments, Woolsey said he became interested in alternative energy in the late 1990s, when he and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) coauthored a paper advocating cellulosic ethanol. "The New Petroleum" appeared in the journal Foreign Affairs.
Woolsey's position on ethanol has evolved, in part because of the U.S. boom in natural gas from the hydraulic fracturing of shale.
"In the near term if we are going to get off of oil there is only one way to do it and that's natural gas," he said.
It's relatively easy to convert fleet vehicles to natural gas, Woolsey said, because the corporations and agencies that own them can afford the upfront cost, will soon recover it through fuel savings, and fleet vehicles tend to fuel up at central locations.
UPS announced Tuesday it will buy 700 natural-gas powered trucks and build four filling stations, and the New York Times reported Monday that natural gas is gaining momentum in the trucking industry.
But switching to a natural-gas vehicle is not as easy for the individual motorist.
"Far and away the best way to use natural gas in the family car is to turn it into methanol," Woolsey said. "Making something like liquid fuel out of natural gas is like making it from $20-per-barrel oil instead of $100-per-barrel oil."
It would cost automakers "half of a seatbelt" to enable cars to burn either methanol or gasoline, he said, and the U.S. has already shown it can convert filling stations, as it did when it transitioned from leaded to unleaded gasoline.
"Unless we do something to give ourselves the freedom to choose what we're going to drive on, we will be in the hands of OPEC for a long time," said Woolsey, who called OPEC "a conspiracy in restraint of trade—a cartel," and said the dollars Americans spend at the gas pump support Wahhabism through Saudi Arabia.
In an unrelated speech in Chicago Friday, Nobel prize winning physicist Carlo Rubbia also urged a transition to methanol, but Rubbia's concern was global warming, and he suggested an approach to methanol production that would not result in a net increase in carbon emissions.
Audience members at both speeches asked about environmental problems surrounding hydraulic fracturing of shale, and both Rubbia and Woolsey gave essentially the same answer:
"Well of course you've got to regulate it so you do it right," Woolsey said. "You can't have leakages and so forth, but it is doable fundamentally."