NC power station shootings show major vulnerability of U.S. power grid that requires action: experts

Several recent attacks on power facilities, including shootings at two North Carolina electrical substations that knocked out power for tens of thousands, are a stark reminder of a glaring vulnerability of the U.S. power grid that hasn’t received the necessary attention and funding, two energy experts told Fox News Digital.

More than 45,000 North Carolina residents lost power last week when an unknown person or persons opened fire on two electrical substations in Moore County in an incident that the FBI is currently investigating.

In addition to the North Carolina incident, Oregon Public Radio reported that at least six electric substations have been attacked in similar fashion in Oregon and Washington state since mid-November.

"These are very lightly guarded," Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an Oxford-educated economist and director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital about electric substations in the United States, especially in rural areas.

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"You can drive past these things and anyone can not just shoot at a couple of things but launch something in it, and we really need to pay greater attention to this," Furchtgott-Roth said, adding that "no one is really focusing on" the issue.

Furchtgott-Roth, who served as deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the Department of Transportation under President Trump, explained that there are more than 79,000 substations in the United States, many of them understaffed, with hundreds of thousands of miles of high voltage transmission lines that need to have "better guards up" and be "better protected" from individuals both foreign and domestic seeking to disrupt the country’s electrical system.

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"It's very easy to get close to them, go up to them in the middle of the night, throw something on it, cause arson by pouring gasoline and setting it on fire," Furchtgott-Roth said. "These are very, very vulnerable. We need to do something about it."

Mark P. Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, told Fox News Digital that we should "focus a lot more" on "physical security" at these electric sites, including concrete walls, sensors and cameras similar to high-profile government buildings.

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Mills pointed to studies that have concluded that a coordinated attack from a terrorist organization against a "large number of key substations" with high-powered rifles and explosives "could do far more" to leave people without power than "any other single thing that could be done."

A main reason that not enough attention has been spent on the issue, according to Mills, is that state regulators and the "powers that be" are "much more focused on pushing green energy and spending money on that than they are on grid security."

"Security is simply not as sexy," Mills, who served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan, told Fox News Digital. "It’s like insurance. Nobody cares until something happens."

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"But as we’ve seen, something can happen so I’m in the camp that we should be spending far less money on convincing people to build more green power and spend far more money on increasing the security of our substations because keeping the lights on is obviously important."

Furchtgott-Roth said the recent $1.2 trillion infrastructure package recently pushed through Congress by Democrats was a missed opportunity to address the issue of physical grid security but didn’t happen due in part to energy lobbyists not focusing on security when they go to Washington. 

"In the infrastructure bill a good use of funds would have been to communities to shore up the security to these substations or to power generating facilities but they didn’t do that," Furchtgott-Roth said.  "That would have been even more important than putting a lot of money in some of these other things like another $16 billion for broadband research."

Furchtgott-Roth, who has also warned extensively about the vulnerability of the U.S. power grid to an attack on the satellites that would disrupt GPS communications, said power station safety needs to become a bigger focus in Congress.

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"The reason this isn't happening is because people who are interested in safety don't have the campaign contributions to go to Congress and say we need to set aside money to make these substations safer or we need money for better GPS," Furchtgott-Roth said.

Mills had a similar assessment. "It always boils down to money," he said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Energy told Fox News Digital the department "takes the security of the nation’s power grid very seriously and will continue to work with law enforcement, interagency partners, and utilities to address any and all interruptions of electric power and threats to our electric system reliability."