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CNN Live Saturday
What Do We Need To Do To Improve Our Power Grid?
Aired August 17, 2003 - 18:12 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN ANCHOR: The blackout is raising some security concerns. Would be terrorists -- would terrorist be able to create the same chaos and what steps can be taken to protect our infrastructure from another such outage. For some answers lets ask our next two guests. James Lewis is director of technology policy at the Center for Strategic and International Study. He joins us from Washington. And Harvey Kushner, is the author of the "Encyclopedia of Terrorism". He is in West Babylon, New York.
I'd like to start with you, if I could, Mr. Lewis. We've heard a lot of talk, in the last could of days, about infrastructure and about these power grids. What do you think we can learn from what just happened?
JAMES LEWIS, DIR. CENTER FOR STRATEGIC INTERNATIONAL STUDY: Well, we can learn a couple things. In terms of the power grid and the transmission grid, there's steps that could have been taken -- there was a commission in 1998 that suggested a number of steps. There's steps that could have been taken. It's been 5 years, maybe it's time to take them.
In New York, there's a few things we learned. You might want to think about ways to harden critical infrastructure for communications and for transportation. Maybe if there was some way to make sure that the subways got power, even when the whole grid was having problems. That could be a useful thing in and emergency.
And we do need to look at how we regulate the power industry. How we regulate transmition to make sure that we aren't doing things on the regulatory side that work against security.
KOPPEL: Well on that point, it was about 10 years ago that the U.S. government decided to deregulate the monopolies that existed in the electrical power industry, because they wanted to let the free market take over. It, apparently, because electricity is not a commodity you can store and for a variety of other reasons, perhaps, was that a mistake?
LEWIS: Well, the deregulation worked really well on the generating side, in that it encouraged people to go out and build new generating capacity. So we have a good supply of electricity. Somehow, it didn't work on the transmission side. So we have a successful effort to increase our ability to generate electricity, but a not so successful effort to move it around the country. So we need to probably go back and take a second look on the transmission side.
KOPPEL: Well, do you think, because obviously, a lot of this has to due with making money and for those of us who are paying the bills, not paying a lot of money. Is it a question that you think perhaps we should not have deregulated? Will that be one of the questions that will be looked at in the days ahead?
LEWIS: I'm sure people are going to look at whether or not we should have deregulated. The thing that we might want to think about is common standards. Giving the FERK, the federal authority that regulates this industry, a bit more authority. Finding some way to encourage research and to encourage investment.
So there are things you can do beyond reestablishing a tight regulatory system, but we will need to take some steps to make this better.
KOPPEL: Harvey Kushner, I'm sure I wasn't the only one at 4:00 on Thursday afternoon when this story broke that the idea that popped into my that, oh my goodness, could this be terrorism. Fortunately, it wasn't, but do you think that there could be lessons that terorists might learn by what just took place.
HARVEY KUSHNER, AUTHOR: Well certainly this was on their agenda before this event. They knew that our grids were vulnerable, whether it's water, whether it's electricity, whether its communications, certainly our air system. Lessons learned is that when looking at this, they see the masses of people that were out on the street and were vulnerable.
Remember, terrorists want to create the most havoc they can and get the most casualties. And if you look at the pictures you've just shown before, with people who were walking across bridges and in the streets, this was a very dangerous situation. Think, in fact, if the idea was out there, that there was some type of biological, or some type of chemical element that was being spread.
So, in a sense, this was a dry run for us, to understand what might happen. Al Qaeda viewing these tapes might say, well you know what, maybe we got to change our scenario a bit, we might not have to go after civil aviation, let's just go after the power grids.
KOPPEL: I wan you to put your school master's hat on, if you would, Mr. Kushner. And give us a grade as to how you think, in terms of A,B,C, or D, that you think the various cities involved did, in terms of reacting to the blackout.
KUSHNER: Well certainly they get an A plus for keeping the people calm. In New York in particular, Mayor Bloomberg, and the Police Comissioner Kelly, did a fantastic job in making the public know that they had things under control.
The mayor might have said, you know, we're going to get power back up quicker than it actually happened, but in terms of what went on behind the scenes, I think we had some significant failure. I know for a fact, that communications networks within the police department, in between agencies did fail. There was one federal agency, that I won't name, only had 1 fax machine and one LAN line up and running. So in that sense, you got to give them a C or even a D, but the public did not know this. So in terms of how they handled it, public relation wise, and A plus. In terms of what went one, what failures they had themselves, our hard targets became soft, you got to give them a C or even lower.
KOPPEL: James Lewis, in terms of where you think the policies will go on this, and perhaps even some legal changes, do you think that we need to examine this sharing, these various grids? I know that there's one, in fact, the major one that is up in Ohio, the -- known as the Lake Eerie Loop, that that's a 1,000 miles long.
LEWIS: Sharing the grids isn't really the problem, it's making sure that you've hardend critical points and that you've installed the technology that will keep the kind of cascading blackout that we saw this week. This was not supposed to happen and theoretically we have the technology that could prevent it from happening. What we haven't done is put that technology in place.
I hope this doesn't become a political football. You know if it's tied to drilling and wilderness, it may very well, be something that we won't fix this year, just as we didn't fix it in the year before.
KOPPEL: Well, help us out, then. What is this technology that we could be putting in place.
LEWIS: I think improved standars for the companies to all work to the same standards so that you wouldn't have this, 1 company doing one thing, another company doing another thing. I think further investment in monderizing the switches, the lines, these are not rocket science applications but it's things that you won't see companies doing until they have some regulatory certainty. And until they get a littl direction from Washington.
KOPPEL: Why is it that this would not have been put in place. I know back in 2000, the former energy secretary Bill Richardson, who is now the governor, of course, of New Mexico, said that these were questions that they were saying, it wasn't a question of if, it was just when this was going to happen?
LEWIS: Yes, the first report was in 1998. So we've known for about 5 years that this was on the horizon. Some of it is that when investors and companies don't know what's going to happen to their market, they're reluctant to put more money into an infrastructure. If you don't know if you are going to be deregulated and face competitors. So the way we deregulated might have discouraged investment.
The way that we split power generation and transmission, that may have worked against us. These are things that people are going to have to take a second look at.
KOPPEL: Mr. Kushner, do you have a final thought?
KUSHNER: My final thought is more money needs to be spent in Homeland Security. Certainly, getting better power grids and not having them come down like they did is an issue that affects the private sector, and that's going to be more difficult to work with. And I think, bottom line is, the government needs to spend more money in homeland security so that police departments, emergency reponders, hospitals and the like have better communications and have back-up generators in case something like this happens again.
KOPPEL: And where is this money supposed to come from.
KUSHNER: Well, obviously, it has to come from allocated from the budget, from congress, and even taxpayers. It's a serious thing. It's the security of the United States that's a stake. I'm not talking about people sitting in their homes sweating for 24 hours, that's going to happen with a nature disaster, we're going to fix that, but we need to have instantaneous communication, whether it's through cell phones or other mechanism with our law enforcement agencies, and back-up generators in important infrastructures that have to continue when we do indeed have another power failure.
KOPPEL: Mr. Lewis I saw you nodding your head yes, but what kind of money are we talking about here?
LEWIS: We are talking about 3 different pots of money. The pot of money that we'll need to fix the transmission system is pretty big, we might have to double what we're spending now, and that could easily be in the billions of dollars.
The other pots of money though, when you think of hardening communications infrastructure. When you think of hardening some of the critical transportation nodes in the city. That could be smaller, and that's money that's Washington should be spending now.
KOPPEL: All right. Something tells me folks on Capital Hill be talking about this in the days ahead. James Lewis and Harvey Kushner, thank you gentlemen both for joining this evening.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired August 17, 2003 - 18:12 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN ANCHOR: The blackout is raising some security concerns. Would be terrorists -- would terrorist be able to create the same chaos and what steps can be taken to protect our infrastructure from another such outage. For some answers lets ask our next two guests. James Lewis is director of technology policy at the Center for Strategic and International Study. He joins us from Washington. And Harvey Kushner, is the author of the "Encyclopedia of Terrorism". He is in West Babylon, New York.
I'd like to start with you, if I could, Mr. Lewis. We've heard a lot of talk, in the last could of days, about infrastructure and about these power grids. What do you think we can learn from what just happened?
JAMES LEWIS, DIR. CENTER FOR STRATEGIC INTERNATIONAL STUDY: Well, we can learn a couple things. In terms of the power grid and the transmission grid, there's steps that could have been taken -- there was a commission in 1998 that suggested a number of steps. There's steps that could have been taken. It's been 5 years, maybe it's time to take them.
In New York, there's a few things we learned. You might want to think about ways to harden critical infrastructure for communications and for transportation. Maybe if there was some way to make sure that the subways got power, even when the whole grid was having problems. That could be a useful thing in and emergency.
And we do need to look at how we regulate the power industry. How we regulate transmition to make sure that we aren't doing things on the regulatory side that work against security.
KOPPEL: Well on that point, it was about 10 years ago that the U.S. government decided to deregulate the monopolies that existed in the electrical power industry, because they wanted to let the free market take over. It, apparently, because electricity is not a commodity you can store and for a variety of other reasons, perhaps, was that a mistake?
LEWIS: Well, the deregulation worked really well on the generating side, in that it encouraged people to go out and build new generating capacity. So we have a good supply of electricity. Somehow, it didn't work on the transmission side. So we have a successful effort to increase our ability to generate electricity, but a not so successful effort to move it around the country. So we need to probably go back and take a second look on the transmission side.
KOPPEL: Well, do you think, because obviously, a lot of this has to due with making money and for those of us who are paying the bills, not paying a lot of money. Is it a question that you think perhaps we should not have deregulated? Will that be one of the questions that will be looked at in the days ahead?
LEWIS: I'm sure people are going to look at whether or not we should have deregulated. The thing that we might want to think about is common standards. Giving the FERK, the federal authority that regulates this industry, a bit more authority. Finding some way to encourage research and to encourage investment.
So there are things you can do beyond reestablishing a tight regulatory system, but we will need to take some steps to make this better.
KOPPEL: Harvey Kushner, I'm sure I wasn't the only one at 4:00 on Thursday afternoon when this story broke that the idea that popped into my that, oh my goodness, could this be terrorism. Fortunately, it wasn't, but do you think that there could be lessons that terorists might learn by what just took place.
HARVEY KUSHNER, AUTHOR: Well certainly this was on their agenda before this event. They knew that our grids were vulnerable, whether it's water, whether it's electricity, whether its communications, certainly our air system. Lessons learned is that when looking at this, they see the masses of people that were out on the street and were vulnerable.
Remember, terrorists want to create the most havoc they can and get the most casualties. And if you look at the pictures you've just shown before, with people who were walking across bridges and in the streets, this was a very dangerous situation. Think, in fact, if the idea was out there, that there was some type of biological, or some type of chemical element that was being spread.
So, in a sense, this was a dry run for us, to understand what might happen. Al Qaeda viewing these tapes might say, well you know what, maybe we got to change our scenario a bit, we might not have to go after civil aviation, let's just go after the power grids.
KOPPEL: I wan you to put your school master's hat on, if you would, Mr. Kushner. And give us a grade as to how you think, in terms of A,B,C, or D, that you think the various cities involved did, in terms of reacting to the blackout.
KUSHNER: Well certainly they get an A plus for keeping the people calm. In New York in particular, Mayor Bloomberg, and the Police Comissioner Kelly, did a fantastic job in making the public know that they had things under control.
The mayor might have said, you know, we're going to get power back up quicker than it actually happened, but in terms of what went on behind the scenes, I think we had some significant failure. I know for a fact, that communications networks within the police department, in between agencies did fail. There was one federal agency, that I won't name, only had 1 fax machine and one LAN line up and running. So in that sense, you got to give them a C or even a D, but the public did not know this. So in terms of how they handled it, public relation wise, and A plus. In terms of what went one, what failures they had themselves, our hard targets became soft, you got to give them a C or even lower.
KOPPEL: James Lewis, in terms of where you think the policies will go on this, and perhaps even some legal changes, do you think that we need to examine this sharing, these various grids? I know that there's one, in fact, the major one that is up in Ohio, the -- known as the Lake Eerie Loop, that that's a 1,000 miles long.
LEWIS: Sharing the grids isn't really the problem, it's making sure that you've hardend critical points and that you've installed the technology that will keep the kind of cascading blackout that we saw this week. This was not supposed to happen and theoretically we have the technology that could prevent it from happening. What we haven't done is put that technology in place.
I hope this doesn't become a political football. You know if it's tied to drilling and wilderness, it may very well, be something that we won't fix this year, just as we didn't fix it in the year before.
KOPPEL: Well, help us out, then. What is this technology that we could be putting in place.
LEWIS: I think improved standars for the companies to all work to the same standards so that you wouldn't have this, 1 company doing one thing, another company doing another thing. I think further investment in monderizing the switches, the lines, these are not rocket science applications but it's things that you won't see companies doing until they have some regulatory certainty. And until they get a littl direction from Washington.
KOPPEL: Why is it that this would not have been put in place. I know back in 2000, the former energy secretary Bill Richardson, who is now the governor, of course, of New Mexico, said that these were questions that they were saying, it wasn't a question of if, it was just when this was going to happen?
LEWIS: Yes, the first report was in 1998. So we've known for about 5 years that this was on the horizon. Some of it is that when investors and companies don't know what's going to happen to their market, they're reluctant to put more money into an infrastructure. If you don't know if you are going to be deregulated and face competitors. So the way we deregulated might have discouraged investment.
The way that we split power generation and transmission, that may have worked against us. These are things that people are going to have to take a second look at.
KOPPEL: Mr. Kushner, do you have a final thought?
KUSHNER: My final thought is more money needs to be spent in Homeland Security. Certainly, getting better power grids and not having them come down like they did is an issue that affects the private sector, and that's going to be more difficult to work with. And I think, bottom line is, the government needs to spend more money in homeland security so that police departments, emergency reponders, hospitals and the like have better communications and have back-up generators in case something like this happens again.
KOPPEL: And where is this money supposed to come from.
KUSHNER: Well, obviously, it has to come from allocated from the budget, from congress, and even taxpayers. It's a serious thing. It's the security of the United States that's a stake. I'm not talking about people sitting in their homes sweating for 24 hours, that's going to happen with a nature disaster, we're going to fix that, but we need to have instantaneous communication, whether it's through cell phones or other mechanism with our law enforcement agencies, and back-up generators in important infrastructures that have to continue when we do indeed have another power failure.
KOPPEL: Mr. Lewis I saw you nodding your head yes, but what kind of money are we talking about here?
LEWIS: We are talking about 3 different pots of money. The pot of money that we'll need to fix the transmission system is pretty big, we might have to double what we're spending now, and that could easily be in the billions of dollars.
The other pots of money though, when you think of hardening communications infrastructure. When you think of hardening some of the critical transportation nodes in the city. That could be smaller, and that's money that's Washington should be spending now.
KOPPEL: All right. Something tells me folks on Capital Hill be talking about this in the days ahead. James Lewis and Harvey Kushner, thank you gentlemen both for joining this evening.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
