As reported by the Wall Street Journal, a well-coordinated and efficient attack, by a team of snipers, on a PG&E electrical sub-station near San Jose, CA on April 16, 2013 could be a warning of even worse to come. The assailants have never been apprehended, and there appear to be few leads.
As reported: the attack was "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred" in the U.S., said Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time...To some, the Metcalf incident has lifted the discussion of serious U.S. grid attacks beyond the theoretical. "The breadth and depth of the attack was unprecedented" in the U.S., said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute. The motivation, he said, "appears to be preparation for an act of war." Military experts regarded the attack as a professional job.
The entire incident has been largely hushed up ever since, apparently in an attempt to not inspire copy cat attacks, and perhaps also in order to not reveal how very vulnerable the U.S. electric grid is to such attacks.
However, Wellinghoff took it upon himself, while still chairing FERC, and even after the leaving the agency and returning to the private sector, to try to warn other federal agencies about the potentially catastrophic implications of a coordinated attack taking a large portion of the U.S. electric grid down, perhaps for a prolonged period of time.
Not mentioned in the article is the nightmare scenario of what could happen at nuclear power plants, if such a prolonged loss of the electric grid were to occur. The grid is the primary source of alternating current (AC) electricity for running safety and cooling systems at atomic reactors and high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) storage pools.
Although emergency diesel generators (EDG) can provide AC power to reactor cooling systems, such back ups are not required on HLRW storage pools. However, the amount of fuel for EDGs stored on-site is limited, so a prolonged loss of the grid would require delivery of more. In the 1990s, the direct hit by Hurrican Andrew on the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in south Florida required the diversion of diesel fuel from hospitals to the atomic reactor, to keep the EDGs running.
It is also critical to ensure that EDGs don't themselves fail to start, or break down. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has documented 74 instances, over about a decade, where EDGs did not work when called upon, or else malfunctioned after a time, including an especially serious near-miss in June 1998 at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio, after a direct hit by a tornado that took down the electric grid for days.
The Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan has shown what can occur when both the electric grid and EDGs are lost at operating atomic reactors.