SCADA Systems - Utility 101 Session with Rusty Wiliiams

well good morning everyone thanks for being here in our fourth session in our utility 101 series this has been an opportunity for us to learn more about the utility market utility industry to help us and our daily lives and the product development or sales or whatever it is we do and support the utility market these sessions hopefully will help us understand that market better and be able to help do our jobs better and as we talk and deal with our customers for those that may not know me I'm rusty Williams I am the business development director here at AFL supporting utility industry after spending somewhere between 25 and a hundred years at Southern Company doing telecom and IT work trying to help you guys trying to figure out from a product development angle and a sales perspective how to address the utility market alright and today is a lesson after soliciting feedback from previous attendees about topics for the session today we're going to talk about utility SCADA systems and even before we got started I got one question about what is Skater all right so that's the whole idea for today is to talk about what these systems are why it matters to the utilities and how what we do at AFL will support them as they go by their daily operations business all right good everybody good if you got a question please shout it out and we'll answer it as we go through the slides all right well let's get into the discussion here just as a recap because I know some of you have not been in some of the previous sessions just to kind of think about how the electric grid is put together and how the utilities have to manage these different pieces this really falls into four categories all right you've got the generation piece of the business that's the plants where they generate the power the nuclear plants the coal-fired plants hydro or in today's renewable terms wind farms solar panels or other means of generating power all right and then they're going to connect that power that's being generated through the transmission grid the bulk power high voltage high-capacity grid that transports that power from the generating plants to the different areas around that's being served by the utility companies go through a substation where they will transform that power from a high voltage to a lower voltage then get it into the distribution system which is what you see in your neighborhood the wires that go down your street serving you know your houses or the businesses in your area sometimes they're underground most of the time in this part of the country they are overhead but that's the distribution business the distribution part of the network where you've got the lower voltages to serve the house alright then you've got these the Transformers on the pole outside your house to convert it down even further to in the u.s. terms 120 volts 240 volts to run your appliances and things in your house alright so each of these parts of this electric transportation if you want to call it that has got to be managed by the power companies your local electric utilities so how do they do that how do they manage those how do you think they managed them 50 years ago this is your part of the QA time how do you think the utilities would manage how this grid operates 50 years ago before the days of computers that's one way absolutely they would they would wait until somebody called to say hey my power's out or hey I see your substation on fire or you know the poles are laying in the road or whatever happened to be they would they would wait now some utilities still do that today and that's interesting to see some of that in the press but that's a lot less likely nowadays so what else what other ways but but you know without this without the computers to kind of monitor that it's difficult to understand that right so you know they need that information but what they have people out right they would have people at the generating plants that would have people at the big substations just to monitor what's going on on the wall or look out and physically out in the yard and say hey looks like something's go you know there's a fire or the wires are drooping or you know where the the relays are chattering right there was no way to sit in some kind of central command center and know what was going on so you had to have people stationed in a lot more places than they do today but as the technology is progressed then the utilities have been able to to put in pieces of software to put in some technology out in around the different parts of this grid to understand better what's going on but as you can imagine as with any other business just like with afl's business there are so many data points to manage yes if you take just one thing one substation or one generating plant there's just so many pieces of data that come from that that it's hard to manage even if you had a screen like this sitting in front of you you know how many people does it take looking at this data to be able to make sense out of it but then when you compound that with you don't just have one substation or one plant you've got dozens of plants and hundreds of substations and thousands of line devices that you're trying to monitor and you've got to keep it all in perfect balance or the power is going to go off well the lights are going to do them or you're going to blow up a transformer then it becomes really important to have the technology to be able to do that for you the humans are still involved with it but the technology is getting better and better but you've got to have that data for the for the good decision to make good decisions to run your network as fishes efficiently as possible without the lights going out and without blowing up equipment when you blow up a substation transformer that's hundreds of thousands or millions the dollars that you've just destroyed because you weren't able to manage the network so how do we do that how do they do that today well really it's it's not just a system to monitor that by itself it's part of the full integration of business services for the utility if we kind of follow this this little diagram from from bottom to top you know these devices are the devices that are out in the field all right it could be the meters it's the RT use that are in the substations are out on the on the distribution transmission line it's the device is in the switch house those devices have got to talk back to some central location through a network if you if you've set through some of the previous discussions we've had these sessions we've had we've talked about the criticality of the network because none of these systems work if you can't talk to them if you can't get that data back all right so the networks are key regardless of whether they're fiber or they're Wireless or they're whatever you've got to have that connection back in to your computer systems your SCADA systems your control systems and then ultimately you feed them all the way back up into your business systems because if you're trying to manage your say the power being out in an area it'd be nice to know what customers were out or it'd be nice to know when the customer calls me to tell me that their power's out I can I can relate that to a physical aspect of my electric network and then be able to do some analysis and decide hey I've got a problem if enough people call in a given area I can use the analytical capability of my systems and say you know what based on all these guys calling it looks like it's either this device that's failed or this switch that's opened and be able to manage your workforce a lot more efficiently and send a guy to one place instead of sending 14 people out to try to define you know to find where the power might be out where the trees down or somebody's run into a pole so the integration it's not just a SCADA system by itself and will define what that is in just a second it's not these operation systems by themselves they integrate with everything else that goes on with the business you're building systems cut you know your customer information systems your you know anything that you've got and want to integrate all that together so they can maximize that data that makes sense all right so let's talk about what SCADA is some of you may have never heard the term some of you may have heard it and not knowing what it was skate of the acronym stands for supervisory control and data acquisition alright that's a generic term that you will hear used a lot in different industries that's not just an electric utility industry that's a term that's used in manufacturing it's used in other closed systems you look at the definition here what does it tell us it's a genetic just a generic term referring to some computer system at monitor and controlled industrial infrastructure or facility based processes are just based on that one definition off the cuff what else what other kinds of systems do you think would fall under that you that you could call us the SCADA system what kind of systems could would be managed by having information fed into a computer system to be able to control it anyway not just utilities any any business in the industry any facility you think of something manufacturing control systems is a great example because you know just like this plant I hear this making cable there's a lot of computing capability installed all the different stations along the way and you know that you know material is being fed into the process or the speed that the cable is being pulled and that's all got to be within a certain tolerance and you're going to feed it back and speed up or slow down motors or stop the process if you run materials going into it is a closed process that manages I then that is a SCADA system and we'll talk about that a little bit more just a second maybe maybe kind of I could take a stretch and do that but if you could turn that into the products they make you know and how they make those products there's a few others and we'll go through some more lists but there's a lot of different things that could fit into that category keep thinking about that we'll talk about it more you may have heard the term distribution automation if you've been around the utility business that's just a process by which they go in and put these computer-controlled devices out on the distribution network out where you have your switches and your breakers and capacitor banks so that they can get data from that point and initiate some action to that point through the network rather than having to send a human in a truck to open a switch so they can go over here and close a switch to be able to back feed the power because of you know a drunk car hit a pole and knock the power out in an area they can do it by computer and if you do it by computer it's you know obviously a lot quicker and it can be done in a safe manner and you know you just got much more control over your network you can do the same thing on the transmission network there's just not as many devices and the utilities have done a lot with the transmission grid in the past just because of the criticality of it but there's more devices being installed so you've got more information about the transmission grid and then lastly you may have heard the acronym rtu maybe maybe not remote terminal unit that's basically a computer a processor that you put out in your network to be able to read your day up to set you know your your set points that you want to be able to put into your network and initiate some controls so that's your distributed intelligence that's your computer capability that you're putting in your network again we'll see examples of that in a minute but for me to be able to open and close a switch on an electric distribution network there's got to be some intelligence out there some computer chip that can read the signals translate them and turn it into some action or read from a sensor and feed it back upstream that's all that is is this some distributed computing capability to skate on rtu of the two terms out of this page you need to make sure you remember and will kind of beat it into our heads as we go forward here questions okay now I asked you what it might be used for here's just some examples you may think of more once we you kind of understand a little bit better obviously the electric infrastructure about water and sewage systems I'm gonna give you an example of that just a minute just to kind of help beat this into our heads right it's a closed system you got pumps and you got valves and you've got consumers that you've got to control those systems building systems lighting systems HVAC systems particularly in buildings today high-rise buildings hotels a lot of those have systems when think about your home your your air conditioning and your heat in your house that's a good example of a very simple SCADA system you've got a thermostat that reads the temperature you set a desired temperature and then that thermostat which by the way is an AR to you because it's got some intelligence built into it will initiate an action based on the information that it gathers and then the set and the data that you put into it same thing for large buildings manufacturing we mentioned already transit systems think about trains you know Subway's you've got to control those so you want those things running into each other so you've got to know where they are you got to be able to control the tracks you got to be able to communicate with with the trains that's another good example traffic signals the same way so you think of skater generically it could fit any of these but we're going to talk specifically as we go forward through the day about the electric system and I'm gonna give you one water example just to help us here just a second so what does the schedule system do we're going to get data we're going to there data points out there this thing from an electric network what is what was some information you think the electric utilities would be interested in getting about their electric grid their distribution network okay suppose it's a metering data the usage data from the consumers and I'll stop there and see what other kind of suggestions you've got they might want to know power quality right the reactance capacitance you know that in the summer with a lot of air conditioners kick kicks on and then the motor starts spinning it kind of does some goofy things with the reactance and capacitance and the network that's reason capacitor banks are out there to counterbalance that but some more simple things I mean just maybe just kind of thinking going over the simple stuff I want to open power zone or where is it off right so I can do that a lot of different ways with this type of a system with the meters or with the devices I put out there I want to know what the voltage is if it's supposed to be 12 kV on this distribution line I'd like to know that it's actually 12 kV because if you know there's a lot of load on the line and it gets you know one of these days like today when it's going to be a hundred degrees and everybody's got the air conditioners on and everybody's pulling a lot more load than normal guess what the voltage level has a tendency to go down and I want to know what that voltage level is especially if I've got trouble spots and you can kind of do the math and work backwards to the current flow you may be more interested in voltage or current but you can measure both of those so those are very simple things and then you get into more complicated things like the capacitance and reactance and all these you know the balances between the phases you see three phases on your distribution lines whether they need to be balanced for system purposes so I'd like to know if phase a is pretty close to phase C and if it gets really out of balance I need to go out be doing some some changes to the infrastructure that's the kind of information that these systems will provide all right it will give you the instantaneous reading and you can feed it back into your computer systems and you measure that over time and I find out that every July the fourth when July the fourth falls on a Friday that I have a highest usage of any other day of the year I made that one up but that's not it's actually not completely made up because when I started with Southern Company again whatever that was 98 years ago I was in distribution engineering great before all these systems or place and we lives in kind of southeast Alabama kind of rural area but there was a lake a nice big lake people go fish in camp and all that people had lake homes every July 4th we had trouble in that area because of the demand I mean you know any other time there's very few people there you know the loading was very light on the network but when everybody went on a 4th of July I know why 4th of July as opposed to Memorial Day or Labor Day everybody went on 4th of July we had trouble fact we sit crews down there basically and had them on standby so if you've got a system to be able to help you figure that out that would be nice and I would want to do something proactive as opposed to waiting to try to help that out so if I've got that date over time I can do that the inefficiencies and other things and hopefully in the end we were able to do all of this with a lot less people and provide a lot higher quality service and I mentioned earlier before these systems we had people in Mandan substations that's where they went to work every day now there's nobody man's a substation in fact there's some generating facilities that have nobody out now obviously this you know nuclear plant you've got people but at a hydro and a dam there's a lot of those that have nobody there that they're all controlled remotely because of these kind of systems all right so here's your first diagram of the day all right this is this is a water system just kind of think about the this closed-loop system that we talked about earlier and how we can control and look at the different parts right you've got to skate a program running up on the computer you've got these programmable logic controllers or what's another name for those we've already mentioned this morning our to use that's where your intelligence your distributed intelligence or in these these programmable logic controllers we've got a pump you got a storage tank you've got a sensor right there that measures flow of the water you got a sensor right there that measures how much water is in that tank nice simple but closed system meaning there's nothing else that's got influence you can get a backhoe in there and you know dig through the pipe but other than that there's nothing else influencing that okay so pretty simple all right and when you think about the different piece parts well break it into just four components but you think about what is you got to get the data the data acquisition part so you've got to have a sensor out there or relay to be able to get that information back I want to know in that previous example and we'll show it again how much water is flowing through a pipe or for distribution electrical systems I want to know how much currents flowing through a particular part of my network or I want to know how fast the cables running through the production line you've got to have a sensor there some kind of device that's going to give you that kind of information right I mean that's been done for a long time I mean you know again you know in the early days of some of these systems it was very kind of rudimentary you know for some of these networks you know some of the AT&T and Verizon sites that the network services guys go in you know they when you open the door there's an alarm you go in you want to know how hot it is or cold it is inside the building it gets too hot the equipment starts dying you know that's the kind of information that these guys are needing but you've got to have those sensors to be able to do that got the art to use I mentioned earlier to be able to collect that data from the sensors you got to have the network to communicate that data back upstream and then you've got to have these SCADA masters to do something with the data once you get it having the data is just part of the battle the other is what are you going to make what are you going to do with it how do you make sense out of that data all right so let's take that back to this diagram and see if we can figure out the piece part so we already decided where they are to use were right what about the sensors where the sensors we've got that one and we've got that right we will know how much water is in the tank want to know how much is flowing through and you've got a valve over there I didn't point that out earlier that you can open and close depending on what your needs are okay so that's the first part that's where you're going to get the data all right we said those were the are to use in this example this is the network we're not dwelling on what that is and whether that's in the same room or whether that's across a state whether it's fiber optic network or whether it's a wireless network it's just a connection back from that rtu back to your computer system and then that's your Skater master that's what's going to take all that data and try to make sense out of it present it to you the human in a form that I can digest it and then do something about it okay now does that make sense sort of simple sort of knife you don't think about it but you kind of see you know kind of the essence here of these systems if you think about the art to use and again this is getting a little a little bit lower level here but you know again to make sure you kind of understand as I was mentioning earlier to the example for the network services guys under in the networks you've got all these contact closures to know when somebody's open the door you've got the the sensors to know what the temperatures are you got the alarms coming from the equipment that you're going to feed it into this rtu of some sort this is just one I found a picture of it you know helped us kind of look through this and you're going to feed it through these interfaces in the back of that are to you however it's presented to you could just be you know a pair of wires for contact closure it could be an Ethernet connection coming from some piece of equipment it could be one of several formats that you would run those wire back into this device for it to then again this is the art to you so it's got its intelligence manipulate that data and send it back upstream for you all right so think about that just a little bit that makes sense but you've got that kind of a device out there and again it's in these locations if we've went if we've installed fiber with a utility or a carrier into a hut on the side of a highway or to a fiber region site you've got one of these devices in there there's something like that in that building in that cabinet so that they know what's going on I'm getting a lot of blank looks okay anybody can see that and again it could be a lot of different protocols a lot of different physical connections but the idea is you've got you've got to get from those sensors into the arc to you somehow and that's kind of the back view of one of those arc to use to be able to do that all right so let's start thinking about it from the electrical side just a little bit again this is a different view of what we just looked at with a water example but you've got that SCADA system setting somewhere where is that probably setting for electric utility where's that SCADA master probably setting where's it physically located and an Operations Center a control center a distribution facility of some sort could be a data center probably not it's probably in operation it's kind of a center where that where those computers are located and then you've got to get out from that control center operation center out into the world and how we're going to do that that Network that cloud we talked about earlier it could be radio could be cellular could be fiber optics could be one of several technologies it doesn't matter which one you use as long as you've got the right connection so why would a why would a if we're talk about utilities why would a utility pick a fiber connection versus a cellular connection what would be the difference while you think would make them go one way versus the other any thoughts about that well that's two good points speed is was one of his points how many of these things do I have and oh by the way do I have cameras out there where I need to see video that's a lot more bandwidth I gotta have reliability is going to be one of them which one do you think would be more reliable ooh that's a good debate all right so if what if I wanted to use say AT&T cellular to make for that connection from my substation or my skated devices as opposed to installing fiber optic cable which one do you think would be more reliable hey you know probably 98 you know eight percent of the time both of them are going to be working but you know the cellular companies particularly in the US it's a different debate in fact this is the debate going on in Washington and has been going on for a long time with regulators about you know how reliable exactly are the cellular companies what happens when the ice storm hits and the power's out for ten days you know a lot of times the Sailor sites lose the power they don't have generators they're if their network spells they have a physical problem with a hurricane or a tornado you know their order of priority might not be the same order priority as the utilities when they need to get their power back so there's reasons to do it but there are cost implications with mentioned cost earlier you know there's pluses and minuses capital cost versus operating cost there's a lot of you know things to think about when a utility has to decide on a network and honestly there's no one answer there's no right answer we want them to always buy fiber cable right but you know that's not always the answer if I'm installing a a metering system a new ami metering system I'm not going to go in and put fiber I mean that's you know we look at it from a cost perspective and logistical perspective you can't really justify building fiber all the way to every meter just to read the meter but if I wanted to do video or I wanted to do internet you know if I want to provide triple play bundle services like some utilities do I'm not going to do it over Saylor I'm going to have to get fiber in there so it's just going to depend and then lastly on this chart kind of gets you out to that rtu and to those devices out in their network all right a little bit more common type of a diagram again that's nothing is it simple right that's not a simple straight line and two end points it's it's much more complicated than that and I'm not going to go through this whole thing but just kind of kind of help you understand that these networks are a lot more complicated than just getting a piece of fiber from point A to point B I mean you will have a lot of utilities have an optical network you've got a ring built out there and I'm if I put in opgw then I've got that fiber into all of my substations because that's I'm going along the transmission line and I've got my fiber at the substation or at a generating plant great you know opportunity there to pull that data send it across the fiber network but I've got to reach out to those edge devices somehow this particular example is just kind of showing I'm a wireless kind of a connection but it's somehow I've got to touch all those devices out there and be able to control them and get the data from them and and know by the way I've got to talk to wind farms that I've never had to worry about before and I've got to worry about solar farms and I've got to worry about manufacturing plants that's got their own generation and I've got all these things that I've never had to worry about that we talked about in our last session that I've now got to manage as a part of the delivery of the Electric Power all right so here's there's a few examples I asked you early what you thought they got so we'll see how many of these we mentioned earlier the kind of basic things I know we did mention we want to know what the voltage is we don't know what the current is we don't know what the reactance or capacitance is we want to know about all these devices out there these switches and breakers and rhe closures and all these devices we want to know what are they open are they closed while they're working or they not you know the capacitor banks online offline we've got to know all of that customer devices today we don't talk to transformers we talked about anything in smart grid session last time but I think there won't be too far in the future where the utilities will need to talk to the Transformers hanging on the pole they'll need to talk to streetlights now just for one plug from the foes of you that were in that session we mentioned hey we utilities may want to talk to streetlights about a month ago Chattanooga's Electric Power Board may you know they've been real big on fiber the home and providing you know internet capabilities to all their people in the city and all that well they made an announcement three or four weeks ago that they're going to go in and replace all of their streetlights in the city 1 they're putting in LED lights for energy conservation purposes but most of those streetlights that they're putting in are going to have communications capabilities so that's that's a real example of a city really wanting to talk to streetlights and now if I'm just I'm talking to a hundred blind devices that's one thing but if I'm talking to a hundred thousand streetlights that's a completely different network I got to worry about it just compounds itself to the question of why fiber there's just so many of these devices that it's just going to drive the usage of bandwidth way up metering we talked about how these data we talked about I'm going to mention that one thing we haven't talked about I called it 60 cycle waveform it's just probably a better generic term is just analytical data the utilities never want the power to go out we as customers don't want it to go out for sure I mean you know our life depends around electricity we can't cook or watch TV or you know get on the computer or whatever unless we have power the the utilities can get in a position where they can see problems before they cause an outage that would be a much better state than we're in today so if they can measure at these sensors we were talking about if you measure voltage and all but let me see what that that 60 cycle waveform actually looks like on you know on a analyzer and I watch it over days and I take up reading every five minutes for days and weeks and months then I know what it's supposed to look like at this point on that pole all of a sudden something happens and it gets out of Tolerance not an outage but to the waveform gets gets goofy that's a technical term goofy then that would set off a flag and the guys in the ops center could go instead of responding to an outage they go well something's going on at this place causing a problem what what might it be it could be a tree limb brushing against the line you know the trees have gotten maybe the limit broken or just grown into it might have been a squirrel you know running across through there that caused the waveform to kind of you know act goofy for for a little bit but if it's something like a tree or it's getting overloaded then they can go do something cut the trees back you know shift some of the load around before it cause an outage it's that's real analytical aspects of this that the software really hadn't caught up with the hardware here yet but you're going to see more that as we go on and then the substation switch houses everything is is computerized everything's got an Ethernet connection and they want to talk to every switch and relay and meter and everything in a switch house alright so what does that mean to me as a consumer you know I'm the electric customer well one is the power company now can remotely control a lot of these devices so they don't have to wait for some guy to leave home in the middle of the night go get his truck go to the warehouse get us a material go you know get in position go look for where the outage is they can control all these breakers and switches and all automatically and remotely in fact like if they would allow them the computers could manage it all by themselves and then tell the humans what they've already done now lot of utilities are scared of that but why do you think there's there's some concern about just letting the computers handle it well I mean possibly you know the job situation you know I contend personally that the jobs don't go away they just change but there that could be part of it but there's a real concern that some utilities have it yeah yeah there's their safety that's the reasons you hear a lot is you know you'd like for a human to just say okay let's do this before the you know the computers automatically do it because you could have a situation where you know a line across a school bus or you know you just imagine something like that happening and the bad press that would come along with that but those systems are capable of that today and we'll only get more so be able to automatically you know turn your own turn you off without having to send somebody in is another thing they can do billing your power quality we mentioned so there's a lot of these things asset management I didn't mention explicitly but it's nice to know where your transformers are where your warrior poles are where all the different pieces of equipment or if you're doing an engineering job you go a transformer to substation I think it's this brand but I might be this brand or maybe this size but I'm not sitting on your computer call it up just find exactly what it is before you go about doing what it is you want to do all right so that's kind of the the kind of the network view of that but there's one thing that's really bothering a lot of regulators in particular about giving this kind of capability to these systems we stand by the way you guys are trying to read that sorry what happens to anything that's connected to a network to the Internet it automatically becomes vulnerable to people hacking into it so systems that have never had that kind of capability in the past that are critical to us like power systems now listen we've got to worry about some guy in China hacking into the system and doing something I mean what could they do if somebody hacked into these these SCADA systems that control water or electricity or sewage or other things just shut it completely down what else could they do blow it up that would be a lot worse than shutting it down it would be a pain in the rear - for somebody to hack in and turn my lights off but if they figured out a way to work through the system and get into a nuclear plant and blow up something in a nuclear plant that's probably not a good thing and that is you know when you provide more capability than the possibility that comes a long way and in you know not too long ago at Southern companies this is an example when this issue first started coming up with higher firms to come in there are firms out in the world that make their job you know make their money coming in hacking into your systems legally not illegal doing it legally we had one of the best security experts and on staff at southern so the first time we did this we told him we turned him loose and said hey go see what you can get into sitting in his office go see what you can get into and what he brought back was scary places you never thought you could get he would take a screenshot whenever he got in to those calm places he'd just take a screenshot to prove that he was there and it came back and you're going what the heck you know can can can you really do that and the answer is yes if you don't take the right precautions they can be protected just like protecting your identity was you know cellphones and credit cards and all that you've got to be smart about it and there's there's ways to do it for SCADA systems as well okay but again this is a new phenomenon for the electric business and we've been providing power for almost 150 years and these we haven't had these scheduled systems and what we've had over the last 20-30 years has not been interconnected to where you could get into it so now all of us say we've got to worry about this and we talked about it earlier about what can they do but here's this you know physical threats you know can they you know bring a bomb in you know I don't know but a schedule system I could help if I've got video surveillance I know when people open doors insider threats they've always been there you got disgruntled employees they can do whatever they want to do incompetence people just stupid you know and do stupid things but guess why that happens even with SCADA systems that which we're when when was the Northeast blackout 2003 it was started in Ohio and went all the way through New York City and is it that long ago 2003's what's coming in my mind that started in first Energy's territory in Ohio with a tree falling on a transmission line and a guy sitting in first Energy's control center not acting properly on the information that was presented to him through his SCADA system and then it started snowballing because the grids interconnected and was you know this is one of those days I remember I was a hot summer day and this and that and all of a sudden this line tripped and another line tripped and it just started snowing snowing on him and it everything was dark from there all the way up through Canada and through the Northeast Corridor so you know I put in confidence in there just because that can happen but you can't get viruses you mean you could if you've got a network connected smart computer a computerized device somebody could put a virus in there hmm hackers denial of service attack so if you guys have ever follow IT security or anything but one of the most prominent ways that that the evildoers as President Bush called them try to wreak havoc on the the internet targeted at you know a certain business or a certain group is what is called a denial of service attack or basically they just flood request into your web server millions and millions and millions of requests over a very very short period of time and basically just bog your network down that happens all right you know but there's ways to fix it but now so we could do that with a SCADA system what I finally found out a way to hack into your SCADA system as a utility and then launch the denial of service attack and you have to shut your SCADA system down until you can get it fixed and now I have no visibility into my network that's not a good thing oh you see the other things there as we said it's everywhere now it's not just one piece of it through the whole network as we put it in across the infrastructure and then most of these we got earlier you got blackouts you got damaged you can lose data you know losing data would be an inconvenience you lose metering data then that's the loss of revenue so there's things that can happen and it is real I mean you know we see things going on in the cable market with the Chinese but you know that's a passive device that's just a piece of cable when you think about electronics there's a lot of debate in the industry now about data networking equipment routers and switches coming from China having code embedded in the in the memory that would actually have some of these viruses are actually more specifically just kind of sitting there collecting data that it can feed back to the mothership wherever that happened to be at some given time and it'd be done in a way that was undetectable so what if that's done on the electric grid what if I put a router in my electric grid as a part of these scheduled systems that's got that kind of like kind of bug in it then they all of a sudden know where everything is and the electric network they know how are things put together they know how to get into the different pieces and at some time you know whether it's a war or some kind of political upheaval somebody might decide to do something with it so if you read I mean it's interesting reading if you if you get to looking at some of that and are interested in that just a visual example of what we just talked about this this is just a tad blurry but I like this diagram now blow through this right quick and see if you got any more questions all right for this diagram generating plants transmission facilities distribution facilities customers and control centers okay generation transmission distribution customers control center all right so for the first time ever now all of these devices will be connected so you've got a connection over to your transmission from your control center you've got connections into your distribution devices you've got connections to the customers so if anybody wanted to you know start hacking into it if they could get into any piece of it then they've got the capability of going through so again well I showed you that distribution metering of the customers in the control center so what if I wanted to figure out a way to worm my way through this there's a lot of people concerned that the most vulnerable link is on the meter each side so what if I figured out a way to hack into my meter at home if I've got one of those smart meters and then worked my way back upstream into these SCADA systems and then back out into these generating plants so there's there's ways to do that we've never had to worry about that before all right but the bottom line is this kind of capability is going to stay there they're not going to go in and completely disconnect these they're going to find ways to protect them for people you know for companies that are making equipment for their networks then I've got to figure out a way to be able to do that for them secure securely again for us for cabling that's a pretty passive device so there's not a whole lot we can do with the companies that make the electronics the art to use the routers all of that that's a big challenge and the federal government is really pounding on the utilities to figure out a way to fix this so again I encourage you to read some of that if you read any of the information coming out of Washington about things that are going on at FERC the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission there's a lot of activity related to this today the federal government doesn't think that the electric infrastructure is secure and if the utilities can't figure out a way to prove that it is then the federal government and all its glory is going to figure out a way to do it for the utilities and we never want that right all right questions about that I mean the whole idea is to keep the lights on right that's the whole goal of all of this is to understand the healthy Network and be able to keep the lights on all right so what did I confuse you about now blow through it something too quick for you sure what so what does it mean the FL is the question from a security perspective I don't know that there's much a FL can do okay when you're looking at that but when you look at it from a network perspective how can I help the utility connect all these devices together to be able to bring all this information back that we're going to have a big play in that again that's a different conversation for a different day but you know when you look at the networks that are probably going to offer the utilities that are evolving there's going to be an optical component to it these are just the core of the high speed high-capacity core is going to be optical those rings I think it's going to go further out into the network again I personally believe that connection to that end device to that switch or that sensor is probably going to be Wireless for most companies unless you're doing fiber of the home kind of a network it's probably going to be a wireless connection but what we need to do is help the utilities figure out a way to get that fiber as close to that wireless device as we can much like the the 4G build-out for the carriers that the network services guys are doing they're building fiber all the way to the cell side now as they convert to 4G because of the capacity requirements we'd love to be able to do that for these SCADA systems because you've got a wireless transmitter somewhere that's going to talk to all these meters or all these line devices so as we get fiber out into their network if we can get it all the way to that transmitting device I think that's that's the best we can do from a network from a cable perspective my physical cable and accessories perspective the other part is we've looked at the capability of providing full network solutions for the utilities a lot of these guys have small staffs and don't know how to put this stuff together if we've got the capability of sitting at the table with them and bringing other partners to the table or other capabilities to figure out how to put an optical network together with a wireless network and have a complete network solution for them I think that's an opportunity what I miss Unwin doing anything else as I missed and there are a lot of a lot of utilities that are asking just that they're you know it's interesting I've been a little surprised you know still being relatively new that the lot of smaller utilities will call the agent or call AFL because they know we make cable and go how won't I want cable but they don't know what else they're going to do they don't know what they're going to put on it they don't know and so when we get involved on going to nine and the others other utility sales guys getting involved first thing we do is sit at the table with them and so what are you trying to do what applications you're going to run are you're going to do metering are you going to do distribution automation are you're going to do all these other things and then help them select the network architecture that's going to help them accomplish their business objectives I think that's kind of value-add kind of capability to be able to almost a consultative kind of a capability to help them understand the implications of their business decisions it's not hey let's go bill fiber it's here's what I want to do from a business perspective now let's figure out a way to do that technically and you always figure out a way to do it and hopefully it'll always involve our optic cable and accessories and test equipment the other things that we do we know our conversation don't go very far if it doesn't involve cable now we have had a few of those conversations that's fine we'll go find the next customer you have to have securities in place yeah yeah the question is what is not doing for from the regulatory perspective is there mandates and timelines the short answer is yes it's referred to as you've heard the phrase Newark sip NERC CIP critical infrastructure protection regulations where they are you following the regulations from a federal perspective that the utilities are supposed to adhere to their up to Rev five I think rev five of that is now in place working on rev six and it's a ever evolving more and more stringent as each step goes along but in good federal habits the rules are not black and white it's like reading the IRS tax guides right the the utilities have room for interpretation even what they classify as a critical asset you know different utilities some want to be very very conservative and we'll have more some utilities don't you know they'll be push the envelope a little bit and won't declare a lot of things that are you know would that would be critical somewhere else critical but it is a a FERC Federal Energy Regulatory Commission oversight from the federal government and then Newark it's real confusing Newark with an N is the North American Electric Reliability Council who is the group that's responsible for operating the grid and creating these regulations and making sure the utilities mandate Oh it'll be ever-evolving for our lifetime anyway and even if they thought they got it secure somebody would come up with something tricky or smarter or whatever they'd have to figure out a way to fix so who are the skate of vendors there I would say in times past a lot of them were homegrown but today that's they're too complicated to do that GE Harris was probably one of the ones you see Bo most often Siemens makes a system as well those are the two I see more than the others right so if we go back to this simple diagram the the GES and the Siemens will make this system the software to make it all work they may or may not provide like the are to use maybe some standards-based solution where you can buy anybody's art to you but you got to do it in a way that that meets the requirements of that software in that system and they'll they'll talk about what kind of connections and speeds and all that kind of stuff you know other questions all right well thanks for being here if you do think of something later when I ask just shoot me an email to be glad to talk to you about it if you've got another topic you'd like to see at some point in time just shoot it to me and be glad to do it you guys have a great day

Channel: AFL

Views: 113,155

Rating: 4.8441558 out of 5

Keywords: SCADA, electric, transmission, systems, rusty williams, AFL, power, infrastructure, distribution, Utility (Literature Subject)

Id: vv2CoTiaWPI

Length: 56min 16sec (3376 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 12 2012