Power system infrastructure security and defense

The massive 14 August 2003 power outage evoked eerie reminders of what shook our world on September 11 2001. While early reports indicated that there was no apparent evidence of terrorism in this outage or in blackouts in the UK and Italy. The UK experienced a blackout in south London and surrounding area on August 28, southern Sweden and parts of Denmark on September 23 and Italy on September 28. At the time of this writing, the major outages of August and September 2003 in the US, Ontario Canada, UK and Italy have occurred. A bi-national US-Canada Joint Task Force on the power outage of August 14 investigated what happened and what the root causes were. The outage affected 50 million people, interrupted 60,000-65,000 MW of load initially (approximately 11% of the entire Eastern Interconnection), over 400 Generating units were tripped, and the final steps of the cascading lasted approximately 12 seconds. US-Canada Power Outage Task Force's report was published on Nov. 19, 2003, and root causes cited include: "inadequate situational awareness;" failure to adequately trim trees in its transmission right-of way; and failure of reliability coordinators to promptly identify and deal with problems. Infrastructures depend on the continental power grid to energize and control their operations. Secure and reliable of these networks is fundamental to national and international economy, security and quality of life.