| | JUNE 201919E ERGYTech ReviewProtecting the Grid from CollapsingWith most Puerto Ricans going into month three without power, and recent reports about Russian and Chinese cyber activities in North America, let us then pause for a moment and talk about collapse. It is on everyone's minds even if we're all not actually talking about it. While the role of energy CIO has a lot to do with new gadgets for customers and smooth operating automated distribution equipment and analytics tools, there is ultimately--for me--a much more compelling public compact: CIOs are ultimately leading the information technology evolution to keep the power on at all times. Embedded in signing up as energy CIO, you are signing up for committing to ensure public health, welfare, and safety through delivery of electricity--a critical public good and service. So how do you address outages, cyber attacks, natural disasters? These are the moments when there is only a thin veneer of civilization. When the lights go out, the "Fear of Missing Out" often becomes purely fear for your customers, and stress for your operators. The only thing ensuring electricity quality and reliability is control room and field and system operators maintaining information technology on the grid. "Society's uptime", if you will. The weakness is when your control centers lose connection to the precious IT assets they maintain.Control Rooms have largely been configured to Eisenhower Administration era technology, while the rest of the world has gone digital. Of the thousands of control rooms that are impacting and impacted by the grid today, the majority of them have one-lines and wholesale markets, SCADA data, and Operations and fleet information. But the truth is, that is a silo - the grid touches everything - everything. Our gas infrastructure, our water infrastructure, our highways, our homes, our hospitals, and even our phones. In fact, our very way of life as Americans. The current control room setup is designed to see 0-1% and 99-100% of the grid, but no low-, mid-, and high- level data and collaboration across those operators. Speaking for By Andrew Johnston, Chief Evangelist, ResilientGrid and Associate Director, Navigant Consultingthe IT part of this equation: This simply does not set the operator up to succeed.One of the greatest simple problems to solve in our industry is also a wildly political and behavioral one: namely, the human factors of technology have not been designed to the benefit of control room operators to be able to see what's happening on the grid. That leads to collapse. The most devastating intersection of challenges come when technology overloads across organizations and their people. Operators falling or having things they used to control automated, so that operators are "out of the loop". This is the impact that rapidly changing technology is having on the role and responsibilities of Energy CIO today--IT makes it evermore paramount to keep the human at the center of the grid. IT will not get your grid back up, but humans collaborating together and set up to succeed will.Unless you lived through it, you may not vividly recall August 4th, 2003: The Big East Coast Blackout. This particular system failure was rooted not in technology nor operations--it was caused by human factors. First, a lack of situational awareness left operators unaware of the need to re-distribute power after the overloaded lines triggered a manageable blackout. Second, CIO INSIGHTS
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