Storms, Cyber, and the Fight to Keep the Lights On with Scott Aaronson

Show Notes

Grid resilience has become a test of whether the U.S. can keep essential systems running through disruption—and recover fast when they don’t. In this episode, Frank Cilluffo talks with Scott Aaronson about how the electric power sector plans for and responds to an “all-hazards” landscape, from major storms to cyber and physical attacks. Aaronson explains why the grid is a “network of networks” with a huge attack surface but few true single points of failure, and how mutual assistance became a national-scale capability. They also dig into interdependencies across “lifeline” sectors, the practical reality of IT/OT differences, and why surging demand—from AI and data centers to EVs and reshoring—raises urgent reliability and supply chain questions.

Main Topics Covered

• Why electricity is consumed the moment it’s produced—and why balance matters.
• How mutual assistance evolved from bilateral help to national-scale response.
• Lessons from severe weather events, including what makes ice storms uniquely hard.
• The IT vs. OT gap, and why operational tech changes the cyber playbook.
• Interdependencies: why adversaries can hit electricity by targeting other sectors.
• Rising demand and the push to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity for grid equipment.

Key Quotes

“Electricity is the only commodity that is consumed at the moment it is produced.” – Scott Aaronson

“[Power companies] are competitive in some ways, but we are completely non-competitive when it comes to security, when it comes to resilience, when it comes to response and recovery.” – Scott Aaronson

“I don’t really care if it is a storm or a pandemic or a cyber or physical attack or the zombie apocalypse… The impact is what matters.” – Scott Aaronson

“The adversary is not attacking the electric sector. They are attacking the United States.” – Scott Aaronson

“The first 72 are on you… Have food, have water, have a plan, be prepared. The cavalry is coming.” – Scott Aaronson

“Regulations are great, but they are a foundational level of security… if you mandate… a 10-foot fence… the adversary brings a 12-foot ladder.” – Scott Aaronson

Relevant Links and Resources

• Edison Electric Institute (EEI)
• Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC)
• CRISP (Cyber Risk Information Sharing Program)
• STEP (Spare Transformer Equipment Program)
• ESF-12 (Emergency Support Function 12 – Energy)

About the Guest

Scott Aaronson is Senior Vice President for Energy Security and Industry Operations at Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and Secretary of the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC), serving as a key industry-government liaison on power-sector security and preparedness.

Transcript

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Scott Aaronson [00:00:00]: Uh, we think about things in terms of industrial sectors, the electricity subsector, the oil and natural gas subsector, the telecommunications sector. The adversary is not attacking the electric sector. They are attacking the United States.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:00:15]: Welcome to Cyber Focus from the McCrary Institute, where we explore the people and ideas shaping and defending our digital world. I’m your host, Frank Cilluffo, and this week we talk all things grid security, grid resilience with Scott Aronson. Nowadays, grid security counts for much more than just keeping the lights on. It’s about economic security, economic competitiveness, national security, and of course, national resilience. And I can think of very few people who are at that intersection or as close to that intersection as Scott is. Scott’s a senior vice president at Edison Electric, EEI, been there for 17 years or almost 17 years and has been at the forefront of these issues for a long time. In that role, he also serves as the secretary for the ESCC, the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council, which is industry’s throughput to all the senior government agencies and the like at the CEO level. Scott, thanks so much for joining us today.

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Scott Aaronson [00:01:18]: Really good to be with you, Frank. Appreciate it.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:01:19]: So we’ve known each other a long time. We’ve been working this issue a long time. There seems to be a lot of change right now and excitement. And I’d be curious, before we jump into some of the details, can you maybe help us unpack and frame what are the few things that everyone should know and understand about the sector?

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Scott Aaronson [00:01:42]: Yeah, about the electric power sector. It’s interesting. I think I take for granted that, you know, what I understand and what the sector understands about the electric power sector, most people don’t. We did some public message testing a few years back and it was interesting. 30% of Americans think electricity comes from the wall. It does, but there’s a lot behind the wall that’s making that happen. And so, we, I, I think one of the most sort of aha moments that I had, light bulb going off over my head, was when it was just said to me in simple terms: electricity is the only commodity that is consumed at the moment it is produced. Think about that, having to keep a system in balance, knowing that your supply has to match your demand at every single moment.

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Scott Aaronson [00:02:25]: So it’s a really extraordinary process, right? And so it’s a really extraordinary process that has to go into that. You know, some things that you said in the intro there, I think critical infrastructure sometimes just is a word that we say or a phrase that we say. We are critical to national security. We are critical to the health and safety of the communities that we are privileged to serve. And that’s not something that we take lightly. And so this culture of resilience, this culture of mutual assistance, and I think people are somewhat familiar with mutual assistance. There’s a storm, there is an earthquake, there is a fire, and bucket trucks from all over North America descend on the affected area. This culture of mutual assistance actually goes back literally to the time of Thomas Edison, where the Edison Illuminating companies, because there were only so many people who knew how to produce and transmit electricity, were in the industry.

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Scott Aaronson [00:03:19]: And so, you know, Boston would have a problem and somebody from West Orange, New Jersey would go up there and help them. This is a sector that it’s one big machine all across North America with thousands of owners and operators. And those companies, those people, those entities have common cause to help each other. We are competitive in some ways, but we are completely non-competitive when it comes to security, when it comes to resilience, when it comes to response and recovery.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:03:45]: When you think about it, it’s, it’s sometimes it’s, it’s one machine, but it’s systems of systems of systems of systems.

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Scott Aaronson [00:03:52]: That’s exactly right.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:03:53]: So this is like engineering times 1,000, right?

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Scott Aaronson [00:03:57]: That’s right. I mean, it’s a network of networks. That’s exactly right. And with that comes some challenges, like you’ve got a lot of different nodes and a really big attack surface, but you also have very few, if any, single points of failure. And so if there is an inherent resilience to the system, and whether we’re talking about cyber or physical, or whether we’re talking about storms or acts of war or acts of God, when something goes wrong, the ability to restore, rebuild, re-engineer in real time, you see it all the time.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:04:26]: And we’ll pull that thread in a little bit. But I think just given that we’re still digging out of ice here in D.C., front and center, Mother Nature reared her head in a very strong way across America recently. And I’d be curious what some of the, everyone looks at it and they look at it at the moment. They don’t have an appreciation for the scale and scope in all of this. So tell me what some of the initial thoughts are there and what lessons we’ve learned from previous natural disasters and the like?

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Scott Aaronson [00:04:58]: So there’s a million different directions we can go with this. So the first thing I would say is, you know, the thing that happens more often than a cyber or physical attack is a storm. And so I think of resilience in an all-hazards way. I don’t really care if it is a storm or a pandemic or a cyber or physical attack or the zombie apocalypse, right? The impact is what matters. And there is the capacity for the industry to come together to respond and recover. So that’s the first thing I would say. The second is every single one of these incidents is an opportunity to learn. The mantra of the industry is better today than we were yesterday, better tomorrow than we are today.

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Scott Aaronson [00:05:33]: And, you know, I talked about that kind of bilateral Edison Illuminating Company mutual assistance that has evolved to—

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Frank Cilluffo [00:05:41]: Extra points for going all the way back to Thomas Edison by the way.

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Scott Aaronson [00:05:42]: All the way to the 1870s, right? And hey, the Edison Electric Institute, it’s our namesake and we’re very proud of the industry. But 140, 150 years of experience and it really has evolved. We have now national mutual assistance. And so, uh, that was sort of came from Superstorm Sandy. I could talk about all the lessons learned out of that. It’s fascinating.

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Scott Aaronson [00:05:58]: And then, you know, I can go through all of these, right? Then it was 2013, we had the Metcalf substation shooting. And then 2017 was a really terrible storm year, Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate. Maria in particular, uh, impactful in Puerto Rico. You get to the pandemic in 2020, and, and so on and so forth, right? I won’t bore you with my litany of storm names that I can rattle off.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:06:17]: And scar tissue and, yeah, yeah, sleepless nights.

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Scott Aaronson [00:06:20]: Rock back and forth a little bit. But what you saw with this most recent storm, with Fern, ice storms are unique for a variety of reasons. First of all, more than about a half an inch of ice on lines can be catastrophic. And in some places we saw 2-plus inches of ice. Ice also hampers, if you think about mutual assistance, it’s the simple way to think about it is you have to access the impacted area, you assess the damage, and then you restore. Those things can happen in parallel, but access is particularly challenged with ice. And Mississippi and northeastern Louisiana and Tennessee have one of these storms maybe once a decade. So of course, they’re not going to have the ice clearing, road clearing, debris clearing capability that you would in the Northeast.

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Scott Aaronson [00:07:06]: So some challenges associated with just getting into theater to do the business of restoration. Once you’ve accessed, then you have to assess what is it, the equipment, what material do I need to get that back up? So these things have to happen really quickly. So the statistics from this storm, about 1 million people total at peak were out, 95% restored within 6 days. There are still some people as we record here today in Mississippi, about 9 days later, who about 20,000 who are still without power. But those are areas that aren’t being restored. They’re literally being rebuilt. That’s exactly right. So the difference between a restoration where you’re just, he said, you know, from the comfort of a studio.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:07:47]: With lights on and cameras rolling.

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Scott Aaronson [00:07:49]: Where you’re just restoring, right? Where you’re just restringing wire, just resetting poles where you have to fully rebuild. That’s going to take a little bit more time. And then there’s going to be some homes that simply can’t take power because of issues they’ve got on the customer side. So a lot of challenges associated with access, with assessing. But what we didn’t have challenges with is getting crews and material and equipment. 65,000 people from 43 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada were responsible for the restoration here. And so that’s something, like I said, this sort of evolution of bilateral mutual assistance between two companies to this-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:08:24]: This is MLAD on steroids, right?

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Scott Aaronson [00:08:26]: Absolute national response to support because whereas I say critical infrastructure, again, critical to life and safety, we are so dependent on electricity as a nation for our economic security, for the health and safety, for keeping people comfortable, for, with more charging infrastructure and electric vehicles, for egress and evacuation from these incidents. And so we really feel the urgency that our customers feel to restore power as quickly as possible.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:08:59]: Very well said. And I do want to get into some of the interdependencies in a little bit because I think we all know that electricity is at the top of the pyramid, but it also depends on other sectors, water and the like. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. But looking at the litany of natural disasters and storms and the like we face, and clearly we are learning from each one of those, but there are differences between a nefarious actor and Mother Nature, right? Because I agree with you, at the end of the day, it’s restoration, it’s getting back online, but storms aren’t intentionally trying to kill people, right? So there are some other factors we need to be looking into there. I’d be curious what the thinking is there. And I would imagine when I look at the electricity subsector and utilities as a whole, they’re further along than probably any other sector when it comes to OT security and physical cyber convergence. You live it every day, right? What thoughts emanate out of that?

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Scott Aaronson [00:10:12]: Yeah, so a few things. First of all, I’m glad you said OT, right? So I think this, one of the things I think people lose sight of you is, you know, information technology versus operational technology, and OT is a very different animal.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:10:24]: Absolutely. It’s been around for years too.

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Scott Aaronson [00:10:25]: It has. And in some cases, these are legacy systems, pieces of equipment that one, can’t be turned off because you have, they must run. So how do you patch these things? But that’s a whole different—

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Frank Cilluffo [00:10:38]: Can cause rolling brownout and other sorts of concerns too.

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Scott Aaronson [00:10:40]: That’s exactly right. And or they just, they have so little bandwidth that you can’t, these are in some ways very dumb pieces of equipment that are just controlling a widget out in the field in the middle of nowhere. And so I think just that, that juxtaposition of people think about cyber and they think about IT and all the things and the good, you know, sort of good hygiene that you do for IT. There are some distinct differences between IT and OT. Speaking of differences, so, right, the difference between maybe an act of war and an act of God or a cyber or physical attack versus a storm, the impact is the same. The power’s out and we have to restore. Where it is different is you might have an intelligent adversary with respect to cyber who is going to obfuscate, who is going to, do I trust the data from my sensors and control systems? Are they, I think something that, we think about things in terms of industrial sectors, the electricity subsector, the oil and natural gas subsector, the telecommunications sector. The adversary is not attacking the electric sector.

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Scott Aaronson [00:11:48]: They are attacking the United States. And, you know, one of the things I say a lot is, yes, we have been called an apex industry, right? Everybody relies on us. But I need water to generate steam or cool a system. I need telecommunications to communicate to crews in the field or to move data from, from a generation station to a substation. I need transportation and pipelines to move fuel. I need financial services to have access to capital markets and to trade the product. And so there are a lot of ways to impact electricity without attacking the electricity sector. And so I do think that we need to be thinking a little bit more holistically as a nation about how we coordinate and protect critical infrastructure.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:12:33]: And that’s very well said. And I couldn’t agree with you more because, because at the end of the day, cyber from a national security standpoint could enable. It’s the cyber effect that could enable something else, as we’ve seen overseas recently and probably we’ll see more of in the days ahead.

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Scott Aaronson [00:12:52]: Well, and I would say, you know, where cyber and storms kind of come together, I get worried about the perceived vulnerability of the United States during a weather event.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:13:04]: Exactly.

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Scott Aaronson [00:13:04]: And so that is actually a time of heightened awareness for our industry on potential cyber threats because now, and I say—

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Frank Cilluffo [00:13:12]: And focus, understandably.

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Scott Aaronson [00:13:13]: And that’s kind of my point is I say perceived vulnerability very purposefully. I think actually we are never more focused on protection as we are when we are also dealing with, you know, potentially catastrophic weather events or what have you.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:13:28]: Yeah, that’s a very good point. And that’s always a window of vulnerability that I think we ought to be thinking. I mean, when you look at restoration, any, for the average citizen who doesn’t understand the complexity and the systems of systems of systems of systems approach, but they want their power, I get it. I would too, heat, cause they need it for survival. What should they be thinking? What’s a big takeaway for them? And any solace for them?

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Scott Aaronson [00:13:56]: Well, yeah, I mean, well, so first, well, the solace is the electric power sector, as I mentioned, has gotten extraordinarily good at responding very quickly. The line workers that go out in the field, the companies that are investing in resilience on the front end, the coordination that happens across sectors and with government at all levels from federal down to local emergency operation centers really has evolved dramatically, particularly in the last, call it 13 years. Superstorm Sandy was this inflection point.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:14:25]: And I want to pull this thread on Superstorm Sandy.

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Scott Aaronson [00:14:26]: We can absolutely talk Sandy. Like I said, it really was an inflection point. But so I think that’s some solace. Maybe something that you wouldn’t expect to hear from somebody representing electric companies is I actually, we were talking before we started rolling here about Brock Long. And he liked to say, the former FEMA administrator, and he liked to say, the first 72 are on you, or 9 meals, the cavalry’s coming, right? And so I do think this idea of resilience is whole-of-community resilience. Electric companies are doing a lot. We are investing, we are improving processes, we are rolling trucks, we are getting 65,000 people from all across North America to help. And we need other sectors, many of whom are also investing, and state and local governments and individuals to be ready for, again, 72 hours.

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Scott Aaronson [00:15:18]: The first 72 are on you. Have food, have water, have a plan, be prepared. The cavalry is coming. But sometimes we have trouble with access. Sometimes the system is so devastated, or sometimes it’ll be a cyberattack. And there might be some uncertainty about the provenance of it, about the trust in the systems that are out there because they’re being manipulated. And we need to make sure that the system is safe before we re-energize.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:15:46]: Very well said. And I’m glad you brought up trust because it really is the coin of the realm, right, to those you serve and, and to society as a whole, not just government. I want to get to your inflection point in Superstorm, Superstorm Sandy. What, what, what, what leapt out most significantly, not about the storm itself, but lessons learned?

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Scott Aaronson [00:16:08]: So there were several. I’ll give two just to keep it concise. One is it was the first time, and this is shocking to me, but it was the first time that there was private sector representation in the FEMA Interagency Task Force.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:16:21]: Which is shocking if you think about it.

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Scott Aaronson [00:16:23]: Right? In 2012-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:16:24]: Right?

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Scott Aaronson [00:16:25]: How did we not have, so 87% of critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector. Critical infrastructure is critical, as we said over and over. And FEMA was not closely coordinating. And that’s as much on the electric power sector and all the other critical sectors as it is on FEMA. It’s just, well, FEMA was an emergency response coordination function for government. And why would we talk to the private sector? Thank goodness that Sandy was so overwhelming. And one of my old bosses went and sat, slept at the FEMA Interagency Task Force for many days, taking information from impacted companies and feeding it into the FEMA process and taking information from FEMA and feeding it get back out to the companies. And there were some studies done, in fact, by the, uh, by NIAC, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, that provides guidance to the president on critical infrastructure security issues, uh, that that process of having somebody in the task force shaved days off of restoration time.

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Scott Aaronson [00:17:19]: So that was a big deal, and that was a great lesson learned. And now, kind of as a matter of course, through our sector risk management agency, for us, it’s the Department of Energy, we feed into ESF-12, Emergency Support Function 12, which is energy, uh, that feeds into the FEMA Interagency Task Force. And, uh, that really does create this unity of effort and unity of message between industry and government. That’s a really big deal. The second is what I said before about mutual assistance. So we’ll do a history lesson, right? So 1870 to about 1950, it was bilateral mutual assistance. Then people started moving out to the suburbs and the exurbs after World War II, and it became this regional mutual assistance. And that was how it was until 2012.

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Scott Aaronson [00:18:00]: And then what happened in 2012 is the regional mutual assistance groups, there were 9 of them at the time, were overwhelmed. They were fighting over the same resources. These are electric company constructs, these RMAGs. And so what happened was CEOs from the sector said, we cannot be fighting in a time of crisis like that. And so the CEOs told their heads of emergency response, their mutual assistance and operations leaders, figure it out or we’ll figure it out for you. And what happened was we went from this regional construct, which we still have, and we still have bilateral. Like, if it’s a small storm, bilateral is great. If it’s a regional storm, regional is great.

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Scott Aaronson [00:18:38]: But now we have a national capacity, which you see more and more, which is what we call the National Response Event Framework. We are able to call balls and strikes between and among the RMAGs and get crews to the right place at the right time without a lot of that fighting. And, you know, one of the sort of maxims in emergency response is the worst time to exchange a business card-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:19:01]: When the bomb goes off.

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Scott Aaronson [00:19:02]: Is on the tarmac. Right? And so, just the-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:19:04]: You’re the nicer one than me.

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Scott Aaronson [00:19:06]: Or when the bombs are dropping. Either way. But, but what’s happening now is we have annual exercises. We have great relationships between and among the ARMACs. We have better situational awareness, all because Superstorm Sandy happened, overwhelmed the existing framework, the CEOs and leadership of the industry recognized that that was suboptimal, and we have a much better construct as a result.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:19:29]: I want to pull two threads there. One that I think is very applicable to the broader cyber environment we’re witnessing today, and that was plugging industry into FEMA’s response. We’ve been saying here for a long time that we’ve got to move beyond information sharing to operational collaboration. That’s the only, you’re, only if you’re in the same gym at the same time are you going to compete as a team, right? You can’t have, even if you had superstars from the NBA or NCAA or NFL or NHL or whatever it is, if they’ve never played together, it’s not going to be a perfect outcome. One, two, you brought up sort of the ability to take a national approach. Anything you want to talk about in terms of like spare transformers or some of the, some of these things that get tactical. But I had to live in a post-9/11 environment in extremists, so I’d be curious what some thoughts are there.

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Scott Aaronson [00:20:30]: Well, and again, all of these incidents are lessons. Unfortunately, it was 9/11 that was a really big wake-up call. So there was a very significant substation in the basement of the World Trade Center that was destroyed. And again, this was one of those opportunities. Well, if we’re going to lose, and for folks who don’t know, these transformers, so there’s distribution system transformers, which is like the garbage can looking thing that sits on top of the pole or the box that sits out in front of the, in front of your house. The transmission transformers, large power transformers are enormous. The size of a school bus, you know, weighs hundreds of thousands of pounds.

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Scott Aaronson [00:21:08]: And they have very long lead times for building them, in some cases 3 to 5 years.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:21:14]: And they’re not made in the US.

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Scott Aaronson [00:21:16]: For the most part, they are not made in the US. That’s right. And so what we are trying to do more of, well, so because of 9/11, we formed an organization or an agreement called the Spare Transformer Equipment Program. And so companies that are party to STEP, got to have a good acronym, Spare Transformer Equipment Program are obligated to have a certain number of spares. So N minus one minus one, so that they can take damage to their system, lose something, and still have enough transformers to share with somebody else. This has been-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:21:49]: That’s powerful.

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Scott Aaronson [00:21:50]: It is really powerful, pun fully intended. And it has, it has been exercised.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:21:54]: I didn’t even mean that.

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Scott Aaronson [00:21:55]: I know. Well, I took it. It has been exercised. And when I go through the size of these things, the other part that we’ve done is worked with the railroads and trucking and rigging organizations, because just moving these things is-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:22:10]: Massive.

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Scott Aaronson [00:22:11]: It’s a massive undertaking. So it’s been just, that’s extraordinary. So that’s STEP. But from that has evolved other sort of sharing programs, something that we call Spare Connect.

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Scott Aaronson [00:22:19]: I used to call it Match.com for, for, for transformers and not just transformers. All of this kind of-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:22:24]: Other critical-

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Scott Aaronson [00:22:26]: Switchgear and relays and things that you might need. What it is is just a database of asset managers from across the industry, and you’re like, all right, I am so-and-so company in this region. I need a, you know, 500 step-down 230 kV transformer. In this area. Who has it in my location? You’ll get a name, you’ll get the asset manager, you create an agreement with each other and you ship the thing. And again, these are processes that have now not just been theoretical, but have been utilized.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:22:55]: Which is essential. You said just the database, but it’s really important. I mean, if you look back in history, both militarily and from a disaster response and homeland security standpoint, There’s an old adage, Marine Corps adage, amateurs talk strategy, professionals logistics. But logistics really matters. And the, the point in time you realize you don’t have something, that’s a pretty bad day, right?

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Scott Aaronson [00:23:20]: I love that saying and I agree. And it has been fascinating to watch the industry evolve with the risk and with the urgency, right? So expectations are changing, expectations from customers, you know, it used to be like 50 years ago when I was growing up, like you’d be without power and it was kind of romantic. Oh, without power, you light some candles and whatever, you know, a few months, you know, 9 months later, babies would be born because there was always a baby boom after these significant outages. It’s very funny. Then you’d go from that to, you know, in the early 2000s, it was just, it was getting inconvenient. As we said earlier, it’s downright dangerous to be without power for an extended period of time.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:23:58]: Our dependency has just grown exponentially.

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Scott Aaronson [00:23:59]: For so many reasons. Right? And so, again, national security, you know, egress and safety and evacuation and just, you know, when it’s really cold, people are relying on heat pumps and other things. And so we don’t have the luxury of being out of power for extended periods of time. And the industry is doing a lot, both logistically, tactically, and strategically developing relationships to be prepared for those days.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:24:25]: So sort of before looking a little bit ahead, I’d also be curious, Volt Typhoon shouldn’t have shocked us, but it is still shocking in terms of the potential implications. Any, any big takeaways from the industry’s perspective there you’d like to share?

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Scott Aaronson [00:24:42]: Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing I would say is since 2017, 2018 timeframe, the Worldwide Threat Assessment from the Director of National Intelligence has included a line in there that, and this is the unclassified annex, right? So, you know, that there is real good intelligence behind it, that China, Russia, and other near-peer nation states are looking to hold the United States at risk at a time of their choosing. We know that. So in that regard, it was not at all surprising. Now, I think what we are learning about the typhoons and sort of the scope of them is alarming. But I will also say I’m really impressed by and proud of the practitioners in this industry. And we’ve got, again, a lot of these partnerships.

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Scott Aaronson [00:25:27]: There’s something called the Cyber Risk Information Sharing Program or CRISP. We have the Energy Threat Analysis Center or ETAC. As most industries have, we have our Information Sharing and Analysis Center. We have any number of other programs that are doing really interesting things to take the smart people who have hands on keyboards and real operational expertise and inform government about, hey, if you see something in your intelligence gathering on this, it really matters. Also, as government kind of comes to us and says, oh, we found this and it’s a big deal, and the operator’s like, ah, we don’t really care about that. Really bringing that operational expertise to intelligence and bringing the intelligence perspective to operations, that coordination is, again, as we have seen this evolution over the last 13 to 15 years, as we’ve seen the expectations grow, as we’ve seen the threat grow, the industry’s capabilities and maturity have grown with it.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:26:22]: And their ability to absorb, because in some cases you can have exquisite information or intelligence and it might not be of great value if you don’t know how to absorb it. I think that is certainly all boats have risen there. And for transparency, we do a lot of work with the Department of Energy and have some capabilities in the Southeast region, SERC3 in particular, and very proud of the work there. But I would also be curious in terms of that IT/OT convergence, who’s doing that well?

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Scott Aaronson [00:26:59]: Well, I mean, I think our sector is.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:27:01]: As a whole, it’s probably the only sector, maybe manufacturing through DIB.

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Scott Aaronson [00:27:07]: Yeah, I, so I will not speak because I can’t speak knowledgeably on advanced manufacturing or really some of the other OT-heavy sectors. But one of the things I talk about in our sector, that IT/OT sort of bright line, like, first of all, there’s no such thing as, you know, total air gaps or anything like that. And anybody who says that there is is full of it. That said, we do have, and it’s something we’re proud of and it sort of surprises people as a heavily regulated industry that we like our regulations, but we-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:27:34]: As long as they’re smart, tight-traded regulators.

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Scott Aaronson [00:27:36]: They have to be smart. And in a lot of ways they are. What’s interesting about our sector, so without getting super wonky, you know, there is the bulk electric system that is the transmission and generation of, you know, so for folks who don’t know, generate electrons spin something big and it creates electron. You transmit it over long distances. That’s like the interstate highway system of, of, of the electric power sector. Then you distribute it out to customers. The distribution level is regulated largely, almost exclusively by states. These are, you know, economic regulators.

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Scott Aaronson [00:28:06]: Transmission and generation at the federal level, because you protect diamonds like diamonds and you protect pencils like pencils, and the transmission system and, you know, the bulk electric system of the United States are the diamonds. And so the regulations that we have are the CIP standards, critical infrastructure protection standards, and there’s 14-plus of them, and they’ve evolved over time, and, and, and. Those standards help to govern that OT layer to ensure a reliable electric power system. And what I like to tell people is regulations are great, but they are a foundational level of security. They are not the answer in and of themselves. And the really simple way to explain why is if you mandate with a standard that I put a 10-foot fence around everything, the adversary brings a 12-foot ladder. So you’re telegraphing your defenses, but you’re making them bring that 12-foot ladder. I don’t want the adversary to have to, I don’t want to make it easy for them.

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Scott Aaronson [00:29:06]: Like, I want to make them bring their A or their B game.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:29:08]: It’s displacing risk, right? At the end of the day, you’re managing, you’re never removing risk.

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Scott Aaronson [00:29:13]: And as you know, from security in general, a lot of these tend to be crimes of opportunity. Where is the soft underbelly? And what we are trying to do in the electric power sector, and I think in particular focusing on bulk electric, focusing on OT, is to remove that soft underbelly from the most critical nodes of the electric power sector.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:29:30]: Very, very well said. And when I think of sort of OT historically, it tends to be more public safety, emergency response than it does security. And IT has sort of grown up in the other direction. But I do think the utilities are probably further along than, than most of our other so-called 16 designated critical infrastructure sectors. And I have a hard time differentiating IT from OT today. I mean, we tend to look at the world through our boxes and org charts. To your point earlier, the enemy doesn’t. And increasingly, OT devices are netted by IoT devices and boom, you’ve just expanded your attack surface by many orders of magnitude.

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Scott Aaronson [00:30:14]: I completely agree with that. And I do think some of that convergence is troubling in some ways, but I’ll also say one of the interesting things about the electric power sector is, again, we’re kind of going historical here, but we operated the grid for the better part of the last, the better part of the 20th century without digital overlay. And there is still, right, pistol grip handles, you know, people doing, you know, math with slide rules and communicating from, you know, from Central Station out to the field. And we’re increasingly looking at that as a resilience strategy. We’ve called it a bunch of different things.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:30:50]: Senator Angus King would be very happy to hear this.

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Scott Aaronson [00:30:52]: I know that. And Tom Fanning, who I know you know well and former chair, we like to call it the MacGyver Project. We’ve since sort of dubbed it Supplemental Operating Strategies or SOS. But what you need is-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:31:05]: It’s redundancy.

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Scott Aaronson [00:31:06]: It is redundancy. It’s a fallback plan. Is it pretty? No. But are we providing electricity to the most critical nodes? First responders, the military, hospitals, gas stations, and supermarkets.

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Scott Aaronson [00:31:20]: Can we, can we kind of hold the system together for the purposes of security, you know, in extraordinary times? And the answer is largely yes, but there are certain capabilities that we need to make sure we don’t lose. The ability to operate degraded, the ability to operate without digital overlay, the people who know how to do it, so the training, and the ability to communicate from Central Station out to the field. And so that goes to interdependencies, that goes to a more resilient communications infrastructure and things like that.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:31:51]: You teed up the segue perfectly. Let’s talk interdependencies because we often talk about sort of water, transportation, fuel, I would also throw PNT in there, position, navigation, timing. Clocks rule the world. I don’t want to bore everyone here.

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Scott Aaronson [00:32:06]: I agree. GPS is a big deal.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:32:08]: GPS is pretty much, are we there yet? So, but tell me what that looks like and how you’re trying to get your arms around that. And are you integrating with the other sectors enough? And I know that’s an unfair question.

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Scott Aaronson [00:32:23]: Enough? No, it can always be better. Right. It’s never enough. I agree with that. Journey without a destination. We’re going to keep doing better. I will say the short answer is yes, we are increasingly integrating with other sectors.

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Scott Aaronson [00:32:35]: You named a few. We sort of think of them as lifeline sectors, the ones that are truly critical to life, health, safety. I would also say there are constructs like the tri-sector working group, which is electric, finance, and telecommunications. I think the three probably most sophisticated, from a lifeline perspective. And that center of gravity of three really significant sectors, I think, are really moving the needle. Some things we talked about before with respect to interdependency, I do think government is not, and by government, I mean the agencies, and I also mean Congress, are not particularly well set up for this. There’s not a Department of Infrastructure.

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Scott Aaronson [00:33:12]: It sort of feeds into Treasury, into Commerce, into Energy. DHS has its role. They have a whole bunch of sectors. And so if everybody’s in charge, nobody’s in charge.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:33:24]: Oversight is a challenge still to this day.

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Scott Aaronson [00:33:27]: And that’s troubling to me. Yeah.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:33:27]: No, very, very well said. Anything else on interdependencies you’d just like our viewers and listeners to know.

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Scott Aaronson [00:33:31]: No, I mean, I think, we have to do better.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:33:34]: Awesome. Awesome. Looking ahead a little bit, and for years demand of electricity has been relatively flat. It’s suddenly, it’s looking like, we were talking astronauts earlier and you work for Senator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut, it’s going in that direction, isn’t it?

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Scott Aaronson [00:33:50]: It’s going to the moon.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:33:51]: And lots of reasons for that surge, which I’d like to hear from you because you’re probably better informed than I am in all of this. But what does that mean?

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Scott Aaronson [00:34:00]: So for folks who don’t know, right, we had flat or declining growth in the electric power sector for basically the last 30 years. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. Some is just efficiency. People were like, everything that we were doing on the electric power sector side and on the customer side was becoming more efficient. Great. Like, if people are like, wait, you want to sell less of the product that you have? Actually, the answer is yes, because the least expensive way to build a new power plant, for example, is to not have to build it. And so efficiency actually has a lot of value to the power sector.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:34:32]: And it’s infrastructure. It takes years.

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Scott Aaronson [00:34:33]: Years. Real quick aside, real quick aside, just because I love this framing, somebody once told me, like, people who build software, people who build hardware for a living think people who build software are idiots. People who build infrastructure for a living think people who build hardware, right? You just, you don’t fully appreciate. And a really quick, another quick aside, we were talking to one of the hyperscalers. I asked him like, what’s a long-term investment for you? And he’s like, ah, like 5 to 6 years. So for us it’s like 5 to 6 decades. I mean, there are things that are out in the field that have been around for literally, you know, 60, 70 years.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:35:05]: Yep, yep.

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Scott Aaronson [00:35:05]: So anyway, that’s, that’s one sort of perspective on it. But now because of, yes, hyperscalers and data centers and AI, but also repatriation of manufacturing, also charging infrastructure, not just for personal electric vehicles but for fleets, as we’re seeing a growth in demand in the winters because of heat pumps and things like that, a lot of different things are conspiring to create much more demand on the electric power sector.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:35:32]: How do we do that without compromising reliability? Because the dependency is so important.

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Scott Aaronson [00:35:37]: Yeah. So there’s a couple of things there, right? So the first is, and I very ironically borrow a Chinese proverb when I talk about this. So the Chinese proverb is the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago. The second best time is today.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:35:49]: Today.

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Scott Aaronson [00:35:50]: The best time to combat Chinese industrial policy was 30 years ago. The second best time is today. We need to nearshore, friendshore, onshore manufacturing capacity for the material and equipment that we need so that we are not reliant on on certainly adversaries, but even just globally, like we want to bring more of this back to our, at least our hemisphere. And there’s a really good example recently. We had a shortage of distribution transformers. Those things I said were the little garbage can that sits on top of utility poles. And they, this is a crazy statistic. There are 80,000 SKUs for distribution transformers in the United States.

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Scott Aaronson [00:36:29]: Now, I’m not an engineer. I don’t know what the right number is, but I know it’s not 80,000. There also was a shortage, and there was this demand signal that we had to send to the manufacturers here. But the reason I go through that is there are a lot of, there are a lot of synergies between us and manufacturers. First of all, the product from the United States is better. Second, it’s closer to the end user, so travel time is not as big a deal. Third, we have more control over that.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:36:52]: Especially in time of need.

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Scott Aaronson [00:36:54]: From a, time of need and from a security standpoint. And fourth, those manufacturers are customers of ours. So there is a very profound urgency for us, I think, as the United States to build more capacity here at home. So that’s one sort of-

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Frank Cilluffo [00:37:11]: And I couldn’t agree more. I mean, the reality is you cannot be AI dominant, and that’s where growth is going, without being energy dominant.

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Scott Aaronson [00:37:23]: You need both.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:37:26]: One cannot be done without the other.

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Scott Aaronson [00:37:28]: This administration has been really laser-focused on that, and I appreciate that. And, you know, AI needs data centers. Data centers need electricity, and electricity needs infrastructure. And so we’ve got to build. And so now the other thing I would say, though, is yes, the demand is going up, you know, the hockey stick, whether 40 gigawatts in the next 5 years or 140 gigawatts in the next 5 years, it doesn’t really matter.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:37:52]: It’s going up.

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Scott Aaronson [00:37:53]: It’s going up. And the other thing I would say about, to your question about reliability, one of the things I think people don’t fully appreciate about the grid is it’s actually built to meet capacity on the worst day.

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Scott Aaronson [00:38:05]: So it’s like the 10 hours a year where there is so much demand, and that is what it’s built to. So on most blue sky days, there is the ability to, we have enough electricity, but we need to build, we need to build more quickly. There’s a great statistic. So California, about 3 years ago, so theirs is a 55-gigawatt system. They had 60-plus gigawatts of demand one day, and it was a summer heat wave in like late August ’23, I believe. And because of demand response, because companies were able to signal to customers, hey, maybe turn up the thermostat a little bit. Maybe don’t charge your electric vehicle right now. Maybe don’t do X, Y, Z.

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Scott Aaronson [00:38:46]: Commercial and industrial companies, or, or customers, hey, maybe ratchet down your use right now. They were able to keep the system in balance. That is not optimal. That is not what we want to do is curtail people’s usage. But my point is there is the ability to do that. The second statistic I will give is that China has a 200% capacity factor. What I mean by that is they have double the amount of electricity capacity that they need on any given day.

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Scott Aaronson [00:39:11]: They’re using data centers as off-takers of electricity when there is a surplus. I’m not saying we need to be like China. I think 200% is absurd, but it’s amazing what you can do with, you know, slave labor and no regard for environmental rules. So that’s what they’re doing over there. What I think we need to be doing is recognizing that we’ve spent the last 30 years prioritizing efficiency and we need to now be spending some, spending some time and effort to build the infrastructure.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:39:40]: Infrastructure. It’s needed, right? And that could take multimodality, right? I mean, any thoughts on small modular nukes and the like, or nuclear?

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Scott Aaronson [00:39:50]: Nuclear in general, I love. My perspective, all of the above, or every megawatt we can possibly get, that’s gonna be from nuclear. That’s gonna be from traditional baseload, whether that’s, you know, coal or gas or you name it. That’s gonna be from renewable sources. That’s gonna be from batteries. That’s going to be from, I hate this because I think it’s gimmicky to call them virtual power plants, but taking distributed resources, whether it is a small or micro reactor supporting one customer and kind of banding a bunch of those things together for broader grid benefit. I’ll give a quick story.

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Scott Aaronson [00:40:24]: So the military about 30 years ago had land and they had demand and like, oh, we’ll get in the utility business, we’ll build our own, we’ll build our own power plants. And about 5 years later, they’re like, oh, this is terrible. It’s hard to do. You have to balance your own demand and supply at the same time. And as a small installation or even a large installation, that is a really difficult thing to do. And then when something breaks, so one of the things I say is having a distributed resource not connected to the grid is like having a computer not connected to the internet. You’re not getting the full value of that asset if you’re not part of that broader ecosystem. So I go through all that to say we need every megawatt from every source, whether distributed or owned by electric companies, central station or virtual, knit together as a, both for demand, but also as a resilience construct so that when something goes wrong, you can isolate the issues.

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Scott Aaronson [00:41:18]: You don’t have single points of failure and you get power to the people who need it.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:41:21]: Really well said. One big takeaway you would like an American citizen, the, a member of Congress, what’s one big takeaway and one, if you could have that magic wand, what would be the one thing you would have them zero in on?

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Scott Aaronson [00:41:37]: So I think the magic wand answer is what we were talking about with respect to better coordination between and among agencies and congressional oversight for all hazards, all critical sector resilience. We need to look at this holistically because the adversary is. I recognize I need to—

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Frank Cilluffo [00:41:59]: Takes a network to defeat networks too.

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Scott Aaronson [00:42:00]: There you go. I recognize I need a magic wand for that. Like, that is really wishful thinking, but I really think that that is the direction that we need to go if we are going to be appropriately positioned to deal with adversaries who, as we saw with the typhoons, as we know from the Worldwide Threat Assessment, are absolutely—

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Frank Cilluffo [00:42:18]: They made very clear their intentions.

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Scott Aaronson [00:42:19]: To target US critical infrastructure because critical infrastructure is the backbone of our safety and security. That’s exactly right. And then, you know, the takeaway is that the electric power sector is really good at this. And again, I sort of gave that trajectory from the 1870s to today. It really is this, this constantly improving capability with some really extraordinary people, whether they are on the front lines as line workers, you know, doing restoration after things like Winter Storm Fern, whether they’re part of the Cyber Mutual Assistance Program and who are helping to protect and respond when things happen from a cyber perspective. This is a sector that takes its national security responsibility seriously. And back to my wish, we can’t do it alone. And so the more coordination and support we can get from all those critical sectors, from all of our government partners, from the general public, from our regulators, it would be really appreciated.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:43:13]: That was incredibly well articulated. And not to throw another history, but then General Eisenhower, one of my favorite quotes was, in preparation for battle, I’ve often found plans to be useless but planning to be indispensable. And the planning phase may not be sexy, but it’s really important. That’s when, make the big mistakes in the practice field, not Main Street USA, right?

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Scott Aaronson [00:43:37]: First of all, it’s one of my favorite quotes. I use it all the time, and I always use it with the Mike Tyson quote. Everybody’s got to plan until they get punched in the mouth.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:43:43]: Until they punched in the get mouth.

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Scott Aaronson [00:43:44]: Anytime you can invoke both—

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Frank Cilluffo [00:43:46]: You gotta use his voice though.

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Scott Aaronson [00:43:47]: I can’t possibly. No, I’m not going to try, but I will say—

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Frank Cilluffo [00:43:49]: That would go viral.

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Scott Aaronson [00:43:50]: That would be amazing. But I will say, I think every one of these exercises and incidents is an opportunity to learn. And that’s the point, is how do we take those learnings and apply them? And that’s something that this sector is particularly good at.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:44:03]: Scott, any questions I didn’t ask that I should have?

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Scott Aaronson [00:44:06]: No, this was a really fun discussion, and I’m glad that you are helping people understand the electric power sector and critical infrastructure generally. And it’s been a privilege to work with you, so I really appreciate that.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:44:16]: Most importantly, thank you for spending so much time with us today. Thank you for being in this fight for as many years as you have, it really is important and you are making a difference. So without further ado, I’m going to leave you with a token figuratively and literally of appreciation, our coin, and appreciate it. Thank you, Scott.

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Scott Aaronson [00:44:34]: Thanks, Frank.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:44:35]: Awesome. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Cyber Focus. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing. Your ratings and reviews help us reach more listeners. Drop us a line if you have any ideas in terms of topics, themes, or individuals you’d like for us to host. Until next time, stay safe, stay informed, and stay curious.