Posted by Joe Weiss:

Many people feel that green technologies such as wind and solar will minimize the
cyber threat to the grid. I believe they are wrong.

This just in from our friends at ARC. While Wurldtech may be getting its ducks in a row to lead on cybersecurity for the smart grid, that could be an overnight success several years in the making.

According to ARC, in a release dated today:

Check out this post. Wurldtech is expanding its footprint into the power gen industry and the smart grid. 

Getting Walt to take a vacation is not an easy thing. But he's been good this time. Have hardly heard from him at all. I expect Mrs. Walt issued some fairly severe threats. So this morning when an email from him popped up in my mailbox with the brief note, "This is big" attached, I thought I'd better take notice.

This news release from Argonne National Labs just showed up in my mailbox. Argonne has just hosted a workshop on "the need for new methods to simulate the national power grid by modeling the creation and flow of electric power as well as the grid's connection to other critical infrastructures, such as transportation, gas, water and communications.

Gotta stop reading news on the Innerwebs. The amount of goofy stuff going on in the world is making my head hurt. This morning, before my second cup of coffee, I found this online.

Over on "Unfettered" Joe Weiss reports that FERC has played Solomon with the NERC CIPs and the recommendations from people like the SP99 committee. Solomon, you will recall, determined who the mother of a baby was by threatening to cut it in half. Since neither side in the NERC CIP equation blinked, FERC decided to accept the NERC CIPs "as amended" in a way that ne...

Transpara has just announced version 3.0 of Visual KPI. In the press release, reproduced below, they note that AEP is now implementing Visual KPI. Transpara also noted that one of the uses of Visual KPI is Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

It is clear from even the demo that Transpara has posted online that, in the deregulated power industry, Visual KPI is an extremely easy tool with which to determine when a fleet has either excess power or not. This is already being used by some of Transpara's comp...

The following showed up in my email box yesterday courtesy of Industrial Defender. It may be a worst-case scenario kind of thing, and cynical me always wonders about who benefits when such scary stories are released on the public that little understands exactly what the implications of such a hacker attack really are, but at the same time, it doesn't hurt to be reminded that we live in dangerous times and have to plan accordingly. The security measures that worked at granddad's power plant just...