Grid security: A modest proposal

When the hacking of America's power grid came to light earlier this year, I just wanted to bang my head against the wall. Simply because it would feel better than watching history repeat itself. I mean, it was only nine years ago that I spent a good part of my (first) internship Y2K-checking the city government's computers. It wasn't a big city, so I don't like to think about how budget-busting it was to have all the extra emergency staff on duty New Year's Eve, waiting for the lights to go out.

Yet here we are, waiting for our old Cold War nemeses to take their pot-shots at our grid, simply because keeping the bloody lights on apparently isn't a top priority. Just like the sacred dictates of the so-called free-market were allowed to trample public welfare in California in the late '90s. In that case, it was only the financial overreaching that brought down Enron--not their criminally sociopathic behavior toward their fellow human beings. So it's not like you can expect folks like this to spend any money on effete trifles like security. That's the government's problem--because, after all, the game's always about privatizing profits and socializing costs.

Trust me--I totally understand the need for putting the power industry's feet to the fire on this issue, and it's one of the few times I can actually imagine the Department of Homeland Security--it just has such a lovely Orwellian ring to it, doesn't it?--justifying its existence. A smart grid is an inevitability, with or without New Deal-like funding. With any networked system, security is not something you hack in after the fact. If it takes the DHS to crack its knuckles and glower the power industry into doing what it should have been doing all along, so be it.

Yet, to spare us any more of Senator Lieberman's hyperventilating, how about a truly consumer-driven approach to fixing the problem? Simply put: For every outage that lasts over five minutes, the electric company is required by law to credit you for ten times what you would have paid for electricity. With a ten dollar minimum, just to cut out the quibblesome bean-counting. Smaller resellers who buy energy off the grids of larger companies are of course entitled to roll those costs upstream (with interest) if the outage was not their doing. Simple little system, right? No need for the taxpayer-consumer to ultimately foot the bill for reams of regulation--or legions of lawyers to suss out the loopholes to subvert the whole thing.

Somehow, though, I doubt that the champions of "deregulation" would line up behind a market that's "free" enough to give those downstream so much influence. Or--horrors!--make those upstream accountable for planning past the next reporting cycle.