Infrastructure Threat

The Oklahoma attorney general's office and a frequent critic of smart meters both took issue Wednesday with a plan by Public Service Co. of Oklahoma to charge extra to customers opting out of the new electric meters. …The utility wants to charge a one-time fee of $183 and monthly charges of $28 to opt out of its smart meter program. Assistant Attorney General Dara Derryberry told the commission those fees were excessive, both when compared to smart meter opt-out programs in 11 other states and in a recent proposal by Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co. The average one-time fee was $56, while the average monthly fee was $11, she said.…

…Even before last spring’s rains, the Lewisville Dam was listed by the Corps as the eighth-most-hazardous in the country. Recent rains have made it worse, the Corps says.

The dam is so unstable now that the Fort Worth District is considering asking Corps headquarters to upgrade its risk classification to the highest: “critically near failure” — that is, “almost certain to fail under normal operations … within a few years without intervention,” according to a Corps document.…

On Monday, September 14, unknown suspects cut backbone fiber optic Internet cables in Livermore California in what appears to be the fourteenth attack on critical communications infrastructure in a region of the U.S. that is a primary target for economic and cyber warfare.…

…These undersea cables are easy to forget, since they are well out of sight and mind. But without them, the world as we know it would cease to exist… 99 percent of all transoceanic data traffic goes through undersea cables, and that includes Internet usage, phone calls and text messages. This route is also faster than satellite transmissions, by up to eight-fold. …

…isolating the key control systems of our critical infrastructure from the Internet should be a national goal. But the trend is in the opposite direction.

When the FBI deactivated a ticking device on a gas line found around 11 Wednesday morning they got the gas line turned off and evacuated about 25 residents living a half mile from the danger zone. ... a crude explosive with batteries attached. The timer was set at 2. ... may have been waterlogged from the overnight storms....

Distributed and intermittent electricity generation, such as wind power, is rapidly expanding, new smart meters are giving consumers more control over their energy usage, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles may someday radically increase the overall demand for electricity. The evolution of America's energy needs has forced scientists and engineers to re-examine the operations, efficiency and security of the national power grid. The creation of a more secure and efficient national power grid requires significant innovations in the way we transmit electricity and monitor its use.