Before the Senate adjourned in December, it passed a bill to secure the nation’s electric power grid from cyberattacks, starting with a pilot program adding analog stopgaps and redundancies, in what the bill’s authors called a “retro” approach to robustness.
The Securing Energy Infrastructure Act was introduced by Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Jim Risch (R-ID), inspired by a 2015 Russian cyberattack which took down much of Ukraine’s energy grid, but didn’t prevent operators from restoring service fairly quickly using human-powered backup measures.
The bill would give the Secretary of Energy $10 million and 180 days to get a pilot program running, in cooperation with the energy industry. It included another $1.5 million for a 10-member working group to assess that partnership’s recommendations, that would include representatives from the departments of Energy, Homeland Security, and Defense, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.