Rebuild California
Decentralizing and Decarbonizing Our Power Grid Is Our Best Defense Against Cyberattacks and Natural Disasters
Visualize a late summer afternoon traffic jam in the Bay Area, a nightmare on the best of days. But on this commute, wildfires ravaging the coastal hills near Santa Cruz have cloaked and choked the entire region in a toxic pall of wood ash and scorched building materials. Two weeks into the fires, the sparkling cities by the bay can’t be seen across the water. The whiff of apocalypse drives pedestrians indoors, windows closed. Those who must bear the air wear any mask they can muster, but most fail to filter the lethal particulates. Suddenly the power goes down. In department stores and office buildings everything electrical judders to a halt. “Ah!” everyone sighs, resigned to yet another inconvenience. “Now this!” They share a laugh in the spirit of black humor that’s become a source of bonding in an era when public services are predictably unreliable. Everyone anticipates a quick return to normalcy, but for some reason it doesn’t come. Residents emerge from their apartments and workplaces, BART stations and Muni buses, asking strangers what’s happening. Huddling around cell phones with dwindling charges they check Facebook and SFGate, contact friends and family, wondering why the power doesn’t come back on and how long the wait will be.
What happens when the power goes down, not for a few hours or a few days, but for weeks, months, even years? Is it really possible? What else ceases to function when the lights go out? Have we ever bothered to imagine what we would do if we suddenly lost access to food, fuel, transportation and medical care?
Among the existential challenges facing the United States today, U.S. intelligence agencies now rate cyber warfare as our #1 national security threat, exceeding even nuclear war. Inflicted by hostile nations, criminal gangs or rogue hackers, cyber attacks targeting the giant regional electrical grids that supply the nation with the power to run an advanced technological economy could paralyze large regions of the U.S. for extended periods of time, devastate our economy, sow chaos, and hold us hostage to the dictates of strategic adversaries or cyber terrorists.
No region of the country is more vulnerable to such attacks than California. As the epicenter of three industries most critical to economic prosperity and national survival, the state ranks #1 in the nation in two of them — IT and agricultural production — and #4 in electrical power generation. Concentrated in Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area, both the advanced infrastructure and innovation engines of both private industry and academic excellence make ideal targets for cyberattacks. Given their high degree of connectivity, disabling any sector of this infrastructure would ripple across all sectors, potentially paralyzing regions far distant from Northern California. Just as the terrorists who hijacked two commercial airliners on 9/11 had no clue they would altogether collapse the two tallest towers on earth, hackers attacking California’s IT infrastructure would never be able to predict the cascade of failures that would likely follow. But one can readily imagine, and the scenarios are not pretty.
Likewise, California’s vast and highly centralized agricultural industry, concentrated in the Central Valley, bears no resemblance to the tapestry of small, self-reliant and technologically rudimentary farms of a generation ago. Agribusiness is now a totally high-tech industry intensively dependent on networked computer connections and fossil fuels for everything from plowing, harvesting and irrigation to market pricing and coordination of just-in-time transport of agricultural products. What fuels all these power-hungry industries is electricity, still largely generated by fossil fuels and nuclear power. Renewables are a growing percentage of the mix (and a larger share than in any other state) but California still falls far short of where it needs to be to meet climate goals the state set in SB100–100% carbon-free by 2045. The largest share of solar is utility scale, located in deserts hundreds of miles from the coastal cities where their energy is being consumed. But such distant electrical generation creates extreme vulnerabilities. In recent years, transmission lines carrying solar electricity across great distances have been found to ignite the hugely destructive fires that have ravaged the state and driven PG&E, the largest utility in the country, into bankruptcy.
The centralized architecture of our regional electrical power grids renders them exceptionally vulnerable to cyber warfare. Adversaries, be they state-sponsored, criminal gangs or rogue individuals, can remotely access and disable highly complex information systems, even those that are deliberately designed to prevent damage from propagating across the grid. A December 2018 official report from the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council, commissioned by the federal Department of Homeland Security, projects scenarios in which between 50 and 75 million people could be impacted by catastrophic power outages affecting large regions of the United States (“Surviving A Catastrophic Power Outage.” For a link to the full report, see https://microgridknowledge.com/community-enclaves-microgrids/). Still more alarming, these paralyzing digital disruptions could continue and deepen over a period of weeks, months, or even years.
Catastrophic Power Failures and Societal Collapse
Neither California, the United States nor any other technologically advanced nation has ever experienced long-lasting power outages affecting vast regions and populations. It’s not simply a matter of the lights going out. In a highly interconnected and complex society, every system depends on every other in ways that exponentially multiply the disruptive impacts of cyber attacks. This is especially true when disruptions persist for weeks or months and are so widespread that few resources are immediately available to offer aid from outside the affected area. When there is no power, fuel can’t be pumped from storage tanks or transported by trucks to fueling stations, which themselves have lost the power to pump gas. When trucks delivering food to markets run out of gas and can’t refuel, supermarkets quickly run out of supplies, prompting widespread panic and looting at the prospect of going hungry. When power is cut, many forms of communication and media are also interrupted and those without extensive auxiliary sources of power that don’t depend on fossil fuels go silent. Cell phones that have become the primary form of communication and information dissemination can’t be recharged. Radios and televisions as well as computers quickly run out of the several hours of energy stored in their batteries.
Families, friends, and business or work associates can no longer reach one another to coordinate their responses, locations and status. Medical facilities powered by diesel generators cease functioning once trucks hauling more fuel can no longer access it from storage tanks. Only those hospitals and clinics fueled by renewable sources of energy located in or near their facilities are capable of serving the sudden surge in patients needing emergency care. But resupplying them becomes an almost impossible logistical challenge since freeways and city streets alike are trapped in gridlock by those residents seeking to flee to still functioning communities. Yet these cities or towns may be located at a great distance when the grid serving a region encompassing 50–75 million people has been disabled.
Small towns may themselves become inundated by desperate urban refugees fleeing from the chaos in their own neighborhoods, seeking food, fuel and shelter that are already in short supply. During and since the November 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California, tens of thousands of residents became instant refugees and joined the existing homeless population in an often fruitless search for shelter in a region already short of affordable housing. Consider that the population of Paradise is just 26,000 and that larger neighboring cities and towns like Chico and Sacramento are still functioning, yet quite unable to absorb the newly homeless refugees. Imagine how much more difficult it would be if the situation were reversed and Sacramento and the Bay Area were the disabled communities whose displaced residents were seeking shelter. One can well imagine the chaos and violence that would almost certainly ensue if proper preparations and a renewably powered network of self-reliant, cyber-secure microgrids hadn’t already been built to forestall such calamities.
The danger to Californians would be multiplied if hackers time their attacks to coincide with natural disasters like the ever more intense wildfires that have already strained regional support systems and preoccupied emergency resources and personnel. Recent Trump administration policy changes in both cyberspace and climate action greatly intensify the risks of this lethal convergence. In August 2018 the U.S. Cyber Command issued new guidelines reversing a longstanding policy of restraint in the use of cyber weapons and instead emphasizing pre-emptive strikes against potential adversaries. Past experience indicates that offensive uses of new cyber capabilities only indicate to adversaries new directions for their own hostile innovations, creating a lethal boomerang effect. When the U.S. attacked Iranian nuclear facilities with Stuxnet weapons that disabled some of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, it didn’t take long for the Iranians, Russians and others to replicate the technology and add it to their own offensive arsenals. The history of nuclear weapons demonstrates that for every innovation in destructive capability and missile technology pioneered by the United States, within a few years the Soviet Union matched it and raised the ante. Cyber weapon innovation, being a software rather than hardware modification, costs far less, involves no costly or time-consuming construction, and thus evolves at quicksilver speed. The pre-emptive cyber strategy recently adopted by U.S. Cyber Command is the starting gun for an all-out cyber “harms race” between dozens of contestants, any of whom could strike critical infrastructure in any adversary nation.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has reversed most Obama-era policies to restrain use of fossil fuels, undermining the Paris Accords by withdrawing from them and accelerating the country’s and world’s headlong plunge into climate catastrophe. So California, like the world as a whole, will inescapably endure still more severe natural disasters as droughts make wildfires ever more expansive and destructive. In the tinder-dry forests of California, it takes but a single match to trigger a wildfire. It wouldn’t take much imagination and no technical expertise for a rogue actor, acting alone or on behalf of a hostile power, to strike that match and light an uncontainable conflagration.
In a situation where a power outage extends for weeks or months, both public and private transportation would quickly come to a standstill, blocking urgently needed food, fuel and medical supplies from reaching their destinations. Even mass transit by bus or train would be severely impacted by the logistical challenges of refueling them with fossil fuels. Law enforcement routinely maintains auxiliary sources of power that will enable them to continue functioning, at least in skeletal form, for some time after outages occur. But the chaos that would ensue when residents realize they can’t access food or fuel or communicate with loved ones or their workplace would quickly overwhelm the capacity of police departments to keep civil order. In a society already saturated with guns in private hands and severely divided by race and class, random and vigilante violence would inevitably break out and rapidly spread as chaos and desperation deepen.
Cyber warfare is not some science fiction dystopian fantasy projected into the far distant future. Its first phase is already well underway in the form of the disinformation warfare that has wreaked havoc on the American electoral process since 2016 and divided Americans to a degree seldom seen in U.S. history. This first phase of cyber information disruption has proven strikingly successful. Yet cyber disinformation campaigns disseminating fake news are just a faint foreshadowing of phase two cyber warfare that disables and paralyzes the essential functions of an advanced data-driven society and economy like California.
One of the great strengths and core values of American society and California culture is their openness. California has long attracted innovators from around the world who have invigorated its economy and culture. Yet such transparency of both private and public data, including in the infrastructures that power our most complex corporate and governmental information systems, is also one of our greatest vulnerabilities. We’ve seen that Silicon Valley tech giants vacuum up every bit of private information they can access, then sell it indiscriminately to businesses, extremist trolls and even inadvertently to hostile nations as a core strategy to increase their reach and profitability. By contrast, secretive, autocratic regimes like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea maintain intense surveillance on their citizens but are utterly opaque about their own operations. We have very little knowledge of the locations and nature of strategic infrastructure installations in these countries. Yet to adopt the same kinds of surveillance and secretiveness that characterize authoritarian regimes at the state or national level would be to defeat ourselves, allowing our worst fears to drive us to adopt policies and practices that would inflict more irreparable damage on all that we value than could any foreign adversary.
An Effective, Non-Threatening Defense
Fortunately there is another, more direct path to cyber security and defense for both California and the entire United States that not only make us less vulnerable to catastrophic cyberattacks but strengthens our resilience in response to climate-caused natural disasters while reinforcing the values of openness and freedom we most cherish. This path strengthens our governing institutions and in California alone would create tens of thousands of high-quality, mission-critical jobs of mid-level skill rebuilding and modernizing our infrastructure for the 21st century. In the process such an infrastructure-rebuilding venture could regenerate an urgently needed sense of common purpose by uniting us across partisan divides in a project to achieve shared prosperity.
The alternative path is to decentralize our entire infrastructure, starting with the energy grid and extending as appropriate to other forms of institutional organization and governance. Decentralization doesn’t mean isolation. It means developing standby self-reliance, producing locally generated energy and then feeding into the regional grid at the substation level. In this grid architecture each component in an integrated system is capable of decoupling in a microsecond to protect its own viability or isolate its sudden collapse in order to protect the integrity and functioning of the rest of the grid. Contrary to the mechanistic, hierarchical design model of centralized power grids, self-reliance and mutual aid are the nature of biological organisms and their best assurance of survival. The simplest and most enduring biological organisms — take bacteria, for example — grow in such ways that they continue to thrive and replicate even when severely disrupted. That’s why they’re such a challenge to combat when toxic; they’re highly adaptable and capable of functioning even when temporarily impaired. Yet under ordinary circumstances, most bacteria are beneficial. Indeed, they inhabit every region of our body both inside and out, from our guts and tongues to our lips and the tips of our fingers. Diversity, self-reliance, mutuality and interconnection are the essential survival strategies of any healthy immune system, including those created by humans.
Even the National Infrastructure Advisory Council report, the product of a working group representing highly centralized entities that included CEOs of some of the nation’s largest energy companies and investor-owned utilities, advocates a largely “bottom-up approach” in response to potentially catastrophic cyberattacks. Local communities are urged to form “community enclaves” that can decouple from a disabled regional grid and become temporarily self-reliant in case of a massive attack and its long-term aftermath.
The networked architecture of a 21st century energy infrastructure for California would combine state funding, guidelines and technical support flowing from the state with decision-making and deployment of distributed renewable energy resources flowing from municipalities and local communities. Technical expertise in planning and implementation could be provided by state-funded programs modeled on an agricultural extension service and coordinated with local educational institutions in relevant fields of energy, engineering and environmental studies. Further opportunities for temporary or longer-term employment would be offered for young technicians trained in community colleges and high schools to assist their own local communities in planning and implementation through a program organized like the California Conservation Corps.
A Community-Based Collaborative Design Process
A decentralized system emphasizing local decisionmaking and implementation engages all relevant sectors within each city, community to mobilize, organize, and jointly design strategies for resilience and enhanced cyber-security. Government agencies at city, county and state levels, including sustainability departments and hybrid entities like community choice aggregations (CCA’s), private firms, nonprofits, civic institutions and local residents engage together in a collaborative design process to identify key local vulnerabilities and means of addressing them in ways that most effectively strengthen the energy infrastructure. The internet can be utilized to harness our collective intelligence through online sharing of innovative strategies, techniques and technologies being invented in each locale with the shared objective of strengthening the resilience of states, cities and smaller communities from within. Strengthening each component strengthens all.
Decentralizing and greening California’s infrastructure along these lines today would bear little resemblance to top-down command-and-control missions like Pentagon war planning, mega-projects directed by the Army Corps of Engineers, or for that matter FDR’s New Deal. The original New Deal was a highly centralized enterprise (think of the Tennessee Valley Authority), appropriate in its time but no longer an effective defense and not capable of garnering support from many Americans averse to “big government.” Funding, guidelines and technical support would be issued by the state but local communities would retain the flexibility to adapt these plans to suit their particular circumstances. “Rebuild Fresno,” like “Rebuild Yuba City,” would enlist all sectors of its local community in a comprehensive planning process while coordinating with surrounding cities and towns regions and the state. Through such bottom-up programs, the frustrated energies of overlooked and under-utilized workers and residents can be redirected towards locally identified, urgently needed common projects that advance their agreed-upon climate and cyber security goals. The most effective antidote to the self-destructive populism that has infected public discourse in this country and across much of the democratic world is pragmatic self-rule and locally directed and implemented reconstruction.
In this approach, decentralization and mutual aid merge elements of both liberal and conservative approaches in contrast to extremist, authoritarian ideologies. Small-government conservatives and decentralist progressives can find shared purpose in pursuing this approach. There will surely still be powerful opponents in the form of those who cling to centralized power. But there is ample space to cultivate common ground since existential threats like cyberwar and climate change-triggered natural disasters compel us to work together.
Rightly conceived and implemented, Rebuild California would also help diminish the widening gulf between the state’s over-priced, overcrowded coastal concentrations of wealth and opportunity (and unsustainable inequality) and the undervalued, under-utilized rural areas, the regional capitals and small towns of the Central Valley and northeastern California. Crucial to reducing these disparities is extending advanced IT access to isolated communities and making smaller cities into regional hubs for retraining and employing workers in the declining agricultural sector and natural resource extraction industries to perform mid-range technical tasks at a living wage. Many of these jobs can be equally well be done at a distance as in unaffordable and overburdened marquee cities. The outflow of coastal residents to more affordable parts of the state and country has been underway for some time now and is actually to be encouraged since it brings new talent and energy to formerly neglected smaller cities that are both more affordable and more livable. Initially the mix between locals and newcomers may produce a certain measure of unease but ultimately it will help reduce political polarization and mutual incomprehension as the two cultures grow more familiar with one another.
Equally crucial to integrating rural areas in the digital economy is giving special priority to infrastructure renewal projects in low-income, mostly minority communities in both coastal cities and rural communities in the Central Valley and northeastern parts of the state. Too often these are neighborhoods that have historically been damaged by environmental toxins due to the siting of fossil fuel industries in their immediate vicinity. With lower land prices and ample space for solar arrays in brownfields, atop warehouses and factories, and in port facilities, cities like Richmond, home to a huge Chevron refinery, could much more affordably accommodate large deployments of renewable energy than pricier Bay Area suburbs like Marin county. Moreover, once the costs of installation are repaid, the extended lifetime of city-owned solar and wind installations would enable municipalities to reap revenues from generating low-cost energy and selling its surplus to neighboring communities. These revenues in turn could be funneled into under-funded local priorities like extending healthcare and repairing threadbare social safety nets.
There has never been a more urgent or opportune moment to transition to a decentralized architecture for California’s energy grid. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the investor-owned utility that serves 16 million customers in Northern and Central California (and is the nation’s largest) has been driven to bankruptcy by $30 billion in lawsuits arising out of the role of its inadequately maintained transmission lines that triggered a series of catastrophic wildfires in Santa Rosa, Mendocino and Butte county over the past few years. As legislators, Governor Gavin Newsom, state regulators and others debate whether and how to “break up” the company, proposals ranging from spinning off its gas operations to replacing much of the company’s electrical services with truly public municipal utilities are emerging.
One of the most ambitious is a package of legislation called the Advanced Community Energy (ACE) Act, which would establish a statewide program to optimize the deployment of renewable, cyber-secure energy generation and storage (known as “distributed energy resources” or DER) both on and around critical services (municipal buildings, water and sewage systems, fire and police stations, medical facilities, emergency shelters and the like). Other optimal sites include flat-roof factories and warehouses, arrays over parking garages and parking lots, port facilities and brownfields that need not be fully remediated to accommodate solar arrays. Coordinated by the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), local governments in partnership with Community Choice Aggregators (CCA’s) where applicable would engage in collaborative planning processes with all relevant stakeholders to design renewably powered, resilient and cyber-safe ACE energy systems suited to their own needs and circumstances and built to feed into local substations. In the case of most urban environments, the energy would be generated by solar arrays but in more spacious environments, wind (onshore and offshore), biomass and other renewable sources would be utilized. Local community- and neighborhood-centric DER would not altogether displace utility-scale renewable generation coming from a distance but would greatly augment the share of renewables in California’s energy mix while reducing transmission costs and wildfire hazards, and (once capital costs are recouped) generating substantial savings and revenues to local governments for the remainder of the renewable assets’ life cycle.
An Urgent Opportunity
Knowing what we now do about the scale and imminence of the risks innate in the convergence between cyber attacks and climate-triggered natural disasters, what we face is an “urgent opportunity,” both a climate and cyber emergency. These threats are every bit as real as war itself, and call for a broad-scale mobilization as decisive and comprehensive as when facing the prospect of invasion. Yet unlike preparations for wars we’ve known in past history, these threats can be most effectively neutralized by protective rather than offensive measures, by reducing our vulnerabilities while rebuilding those core strengths that we’ve allowed to atrophy for decades. California, a state with a compelling interest in protecting its advanced information and energy infrastructures and ambitious climate action goals, is already committing to reaching 100% renewably generated electricity by 2045. By optimizing the deployment of distributed energy resources, the state can greatly expand its renewable portfolios while reducing its vulnerability to climate and cyber threats. Few indeed are the occasions when an existential threat produces an unprecedented opportunity to make transformational changes that have long needed to happen in any case. This is one of those moments. And there’s no better place to start than California.
Now visualize an Indian summer afternoon a decade from now in the city of Richmond, California. A fire in the tinder-dry Contra Costa hills is threatening the giant Chevron refinery. Back in 2019 several troubling trends had converged in what Californians eventually came to call “the perfect Calamity” — record wildfires northeast of the Bay Area, a 47-day federal government shutdown, and opportunistic cyber attacks by hackers seeking to take advantage of overwhelmed emergency services to trigger chaos and collapse. Coping with that unprecedented event, Californians realized that the highly centralized nature of their energy, information, transportation and agricultural infrastructures had rendered them vulnerable to a new kind of perverse “domino effect.”
Realizing how unprepared the state was for the kinds of threats now facing it, lawmakers adopted a statewide emergency program to greatly accelerate development of locally sited renewable energy that could continue functioning even in the case of simultaneous disasters. Local governments in partnership with state and regional agencies and engaging all sectors of society developed and implemented regional plans for a rapid build-out of decentralized, decarbonized energy as key components in a comprehensive, locally directed climate and cyber security strategy.
With financial and technical support from the state and additional funds from private sector firms, some of which financed construction of their own renewable microgrids, over the next eight years state and local governments largely fulfilled their climate resilience and cyber security goals. The design process brought locals face-to-face in ways they hadn’t experienced in decades. Instead of focusing on their partisan differences they concentrated on what each could bring to the table that would strengthen the whole. They’d had enough of the zero-sum politics in D.C. and had decided to tackle these issues at a level where they themselves could participate.
As the fires burn in the hills east of Richmond, locals are heartened to find that their hard work has paid off. At one point fire sweeps across a residential development, but since the power grid has been segmented into self-reliant microgrids the local substation has automatically decoupled the threatened neighborhood and limited the outage to a few square blocks while the remaining grid continues to function normally. There are indications that while cyber hackers have tried to exploit the emergency by seeking to break into communications and data systems, critical services have proven to be well protected. For the most part, since these community energy systems are such small potatoes next to the giant regional grid that formerly provided power to 16 million customers in Northern California, hackers evidently went phishing elsewhere for more attractive targets.
Meanwhile local residents who worked together during the planning and implementation process gather on a street corner to watch the fire and see if they can help. They recall with a certain fondness how they responded to the Calamity of 2020 and rose to the occasion, working together in much the same way as people of varied backgrounds do in “911 moments” when class and racial identities fade in the fierce urgency of a moment of common need and pragmatic mutual aid. It was “all hands on deck,” just as in wartime but with one crucial difference: in this case it was to prevent rather than wage war. Who knew what we could accomplish, a woman remarks to her neighbor, when we stop seeing each other as the problem and instead move to the same side of the table, redefine the problem as a challenge, and fix it together?
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Mark Sommer directs SolArise, a renewable energy consultancy based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be reached at mark@solarising.net.
