The city council in Calabasas, Calif., said it has approved a joint powers agreement with Los Angeles County - the first step to joining a new community aggregation program offered by the county.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on July 21 directed the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to develop a new supply chain risk management standard that addresses risks to information systems and related bulk electric system assets.
The White House and the government of Canada have released a joint strategy for safeguarding the North American electric grid against various threats, including "against the growing threat from cyberattacks and climate change impacts."
Cyber attackers who hit three electric distribution companies in Ukraine in late December — causing 225,000 outages that lasted for a few hours — had sophisticated knowledge of utility systems that allowed them to take advantage of vulnerabilities in supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, networks, says a March 18 report on the attack.
After detecting suspicious internet traffic that federal officials say has been linked to a Russian campaign tied to recent hacks, Vermont's Burlington Electric Department acted quickly to isolate a single laptop on which the suspicious traffic was detected and reported the discovery to the federal government. The laptop was not connected to the Burlington Electric Department's grid systems and the utility was not hacked, the Burlington Electric Department noted.
While blockchain technology is getting increased attention these days from the power sector and is starting to pop up on the radar screens of U.S. utility regulators, the technology remains largely in the realm of the theoretical when applied to the grid.