Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This research explores policy responses to disturbances on the U.S. electric infrastructure, including incidents caused by weather events, technical failures, and targeted attacks. The research seeks to first understand how widespread and how often intentional physical attacks occur against U.S. electricity infrastructure, as well as attacker motivations and methods. The second part of the research expands upon the findings from the first by adding cyber, technical, and weather-caused outage data from the year 2000 to 2016 to the physical attack database. The data added in the second part does not include all outages during this time period, but rather only outages classified as “unusual” by the U.S. Department of Energy. Overall, this research can help better assess the metrics of attacks on electricity infrastructure in the U.S., the policy response, and explore further what vulnerable aspects might be left unaddressed and potential targets in more sophisticated future attacks, such as cyberattacks.

Whether the context is grid resiliency and reliability or national security relating to critical electricity infrastructure, it follows that unusual disturbances on the grid should result in policy interventions, in terms of both funding and allocations, as well as actual implemented policies. Therefore, this section of the research focuses on the following questions: will the funding allocations occur more often and in greater amounts after an intentional attack on the grid, rather than a disturbance caused by weather or technical failures? Or will the amount of time the disturbance lasted, the number of customers without power, or the geographic region of the incident impact funding response? These questions center on how policymakers consider the characteristics and the causal nature of the incident when proposing and implementing budget and allocations at the state and federal levels.

With the creation of the database on physical attacks against U.S. electricity infrastructure, my research provides insights on how and why infrastructure has been targeted in the past. The subsequent sections of my research explore policy response to known incidents and outages, and further investigates today’s policy goals and outcomes aimed at strengthening the U.S. electric grid. This research and its methods can be applied to other critical sectors of infrastructure, such as medical and telecommunications infrastructure. It can also be applied to assess infrastructure security and threats in other countries as well. The overarching goal of this research is to assess how policy interventions, including budgeting and funding by federal agencies and state governments, to harden the U.S. electricity infrastructure are influenced by disturbances and outages on the grid. In particular, do the specific characteristics from the cause of the disturbances impact the policies relating to the grid? Is there a difference in policy response with the incident is related to a confirmed or suspected attack versus a weather-related outage?