“It has been no secret — there are vulnerabilities within the timing and synchronization platforms used by the energy sector,” according to David Wells. Citing well recognized vulnerabilities associated with using signals from GPS, Wells said “…a secure, verifiable, and reliable solution is paramount.”
CAST’s mission is to research, establish and demonstrate best practices for timing within electrical grids.
As part of its efforts, DOE and the Oak Ridge team recently published “Implementing a Terrestrial Timing Solution: Best Practices.” The document is an important complement to the model network CAST has established to demonstrate practices and do further research.
Best practices in the document include discussion of:
equipment needed
various timing sources and transfer methods
the need for environmental stability
IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol
hardware recommendations.
Implementing these best practices and establishing timing networks will be up to grid operators as encouraged by DOE’s Power Marketing Administrations.
Others are already taking notice, though.
Concerned about their ability to maintain land mobile radio networks and other applications when GPS is denied or manipulated, the National Guard, in coordination with Homeland Security advisors and emergency managers, has implemented its own terrestrial timing network across the states and territories. The project, Nationwide Integration of Timing Resiliency for Operations (NITRO), has already been implemented in seven states. Major General William Crane, adjutant general for West Virginia, said that NITRO and CAST are well aligned, and the NITRO team will be working with DOE to ensure that continues to be the case going forward.
Pat Diamond, a member of the President’s Space-based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board and a former consultant to CAST, contributed to the development of the best practices. He is also an on-going participant in timing forums such as the ATIS Sync Committee.
When asked for his view he replied “The CAST best practices lay out the how wide area time synchronization networks should be deployed. There needs to be a concerted effort for DOE jointly with the power generating industry to actually implement an end-to-end time synchronization network demonstrating that these best practices are cost effective, manageable and implementable to solve the technical limitations of GPS dependence within a power generating marketplace.”
In May the President’s PNT Advisory Board heard a presentation about a National Guard project called NITRO. RNT Foundation President, Dana Goward, recently spoke with the project’s leader, Maj. Gen. Richard R. Neely, Adjutant General, Illinois National Guard, to find out more.
Mr. Goward: Thanks for speaking with us, General. Could you start by telling us what NITRO is and why it’s important?
Maj. Gen. Neely: Of course. NITRO is a project to ensure that the National Guard and our state’s first-responder partners can maintain communications and other critical functions even if we lose GPS timing signals.
NITRO is an acronym for Nationwide Integration of Timing Resiliency for Operations. ]You know how we in the military love our acronyms.
Telecoms and most of the rest of America’s critical infrastructure are dependent on timing from GPS. However, GPS signals are weak, highly vulnerable and under threat.
In addition to bad actors who can and do jam and spoof signals, accidental interference happens all the time. Operations at the Dallas and Denver airports were each interrupted by accident for more than a day last year, for example. A couple of years ago, a passenger airliner almost hit a mountain because of interference with GPS.
Q: It sounds like this is a safety of life issue.
A: It is. Right now, if we lost GPS signals and had to respond to a domestic attack, natural disaster, or other contingency, I am confident there would be additional unnecessary casualties. We are building NITRO so that we can save those lives and keep America safe.
Q: So how does NITRO work?
A: In addition to GPS, it gets multiple sources of space-based and terrestrial time from government and commercial providers. NITRO can use any trusted source. It is not provider- or vendor-specific.
Inputs are combined and compared, matched to the nation’s atomic clocks keeping Coordinated Universal Time, and users are sent the best accurate time multiple ways including over fiber, terrestrial broadcast, and resilient wireless networks.
Another great way in which I think it will be useful: NITRO gives us a common operating picture that can help detect and terminate GPS disruptions and anomalies around the country.
Q: Is the National Guard the only user?
A: Absolutely not! This is a state/federal partnership. The states’ Adjutant Generals are working with their Homeland Security Advisors to make it available to state, local, and tribal first responders. In some instances, also to critical infrastructure.
Even though we are in the early stages of implementation, NITRO is being used by seven states and 256 organizations and it is protecting more than 33 million people, including citizens here in Illinois.
Q: Is NITRO a tasking from the President or Congress? Who told you to do this?
A: NITRO helps execute long standing presidential policy and orders, as well as the recently released National Cybersecurity Implementation Plan. It also meets congressional mandates for backups and alternatives to GPS timing.
However, we created NITRO because we identified a serious threat to the National Guard’s mission execution. It closes 11 operational gaps for us, all without changes to end-user equipment.
Q: With what groups are the NITRO team working?
A: All the states are involved through their adjutant generals, homeland security advisors, and emergency managers. The NITRO board I chair is made up of the adjutant generals from six states.
We are also coordinating across the federal government, especially with the Departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Commerce, and Energy.
As part of this we are partnering with the Department of Transportation to establish a NITRO engineering and operational site at Joint Base Cape Cod. This will allow engineers from different organizations to see more easily what we are doing and contribute their expertise.
Q: NITRO is going to provide timing signals in places and at times when GPS is not available. Won’t the National Guard also need navigation information?
A: Positioning and navigation are very important, but not quite as critical as timing. So, we are addressing that problem first. And since wireless location and navigation are often based on timing signals, NITRO will provide a good foundation for services and systems that can augment GPS-based navigation.
Q: So, how is the project going?
A: From a technical and operational standpoint, it’s going great. We have very high satisfaction ratings from NITRO users, and states are eager to be connected as soon as possible.
The technologies used are all mature, reasonably low cost, and most components are commercially available. So, engineering-wise it is low risk.
And our team is doing a great job helping folks move from full dependency on GPS to resilient positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) operations.
Q: Do you have any concerns going forward to full deployment?
A: The only thing I worry about is continued funding. Over the next five years we need something less than the cost of one GPS satellite. You would think that would be easy to find for an important effort like this, but it is a state/federal partnership, not a Department of Defense project. So, it falls into a kind of bureaucratic and budgetary no man’s land.
Q: What’s the solution for funding?
A: That’s not our call. The folks at the White House are exploring several alternatives, and I know several members of Congress are also concerned. We see a possibility of this fitting nicely with the recent infrastructure funding bill.
Q: It sounds like NITRO is something America really needs. Let’s hope they find a solution to the funding challenge, and quickly, to keep you on track. Thank you very much for your time!
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has released an implementation plan outlining the steps it and others will need to take to enable advanced air mobility (AAM) operations safely. The plan, called Innovate28, includes various components and a timeline for their implementation to hopefully be completed by 2028.
This plan serves as a foundation for making entry into service routine and predictable by maximizing the use of existing procedures and infrastructure. It addresses how the agency and partners will certify aircraft and pilots, manage airspace access, ensure pilot training, develop infrastructure, maintain security and engage communities.
The plan also includes a planning guide that can be applied to any site, laying out key integration objectives and sequences.
Among the entities that play a role in this plan include: the FAA; the advanced air mobility industry; labor partners, NASA; United States Department of Homeland Security; United States Department of Energy; power industry; and state, local and tribal communities.
Pilots will be able to fly the new advanced mobility aircraft to and from multiple locations at the sites, using predetermined flight schedules with pilots aboard.
Advanced air mobility aircraft likely will operate up to 4,000 feet altitude in urban and metropolitan areas, using existing or modified low altitude visual flight rules (VFR) routes where possible within controlled Class B and C airspace around major airports.
Infrastructure
Operators, manufacturers, state and local governments, and other stakeholders will be responsible for planning, developing and enabling heliport/vertiport infrastructure.
Advanced air mobility will initially operate at existing heliports, commercial service airports and general aviation airports. Modifications may be necessary to install charging stations, parking zones and taxiing space.
Power Grid
The electrical power grid may require upgrades to serve advanced air mobility operations.
The FAA has an interagency agreement with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab to determine how aircraft electrification affects a vertiport, heliport or airport’s electrical grid.
Security
The Department of Homeland Security will determine what type of security is necessary.
The Transportation Security Administration and FAA are evaluating the need for expanded cybersecurity requirements due to the use of advanced technology and operational protocols.
Environment
The FAA will consider the environmental impacts of advanced air mobility operations, including factors such as noise, air quality, visual disturbances and disruption to wildlife.
Community Engagement
The FAA will engage with airports, and local, state, and tribal communities to better understand community concerns about advanced air mobility operations, including noise and mitigations.
Many other stakeholders, such as advanced air mobility operators and airport and vertiport operators will have important roles in community engagement.
On March 24, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released information about a program designed to provide resilient timing to the electrical grid by fiber.
More than just an academic center for research, CAST is building a network of atomic master clocks and methods of time delivery by fiber that will ensure power grids always have failsafe and resilient time.
Timing is essential to a wide variety of equipment and network functions essential to electrical grids. Most of these use time signals that come directly from, or can be traced back to, signals from GPS.
Electrical-grid timing dependent equipment and networks
Transmission-line fault detection
Frequency measurement
Synchrophasors/phasor measurement units
Internet-based market transactions
Substation control/resynchronization
Disturbance monitoring event recorders
Protective relays
Bulk metering
SCADA networks
Synchrophasor networks
An industry expert once observed, “Electrical grids won’t fail without accurate time signals, but they are impossible to manage. And who wants an unmanageable grid?”
According to David Wells, program leader for CAST at DOE headquarters, “It has been no secret there are vulnerabilities within the timing and synchronizations platforms used by the energy sector.” Wells said that for grid timing “a secure, verifiable, and reliable solution is paramount.”
He sees CAST as a necessary part of tech evolution for electrical grids and service. “The sector has been going through a transition from analog to digital and then from digital to internet protocol (IP). Technologies have been bolted on, but with each bolt-on added, access vulnerabilities are added as well. Embedded stratum timing systems based through digital carriers allowed our networks to be closed-loop (zero-trust) for 50 years. During the age of IP conversion, the ability to provide timing via stratum was lost, so the sector moved to GPS and NTP, which provided precision at the locations, but lack security, validation and true wide-area synchronization.”
CAST’s goal is to establish “true closed-loop (zero-trust) with secure bi-direction timing validation and synchronization over IP networks,” with multiple clocking sources, according to Wells. The system, he said, will be able to reach all power substations and remote locations.
While Wells, his office and ORNL are the primary players, a whole cast of other organizations contributes to the effort. These include DOE’s Office of Electricity; its Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response; Savannah River National Laboratory; Sandia National Laboratory; and industry partners.
CAST will not be creating new infrastructure, but rather leveraging fiber already in place. “This is not a dedicated fiber network for timing,” said Wells. “CAST uses existing fiber in the form of dark fiber (underutilized fiber), commercial fiber and optical ground wire, and works with wireless technologies to extend secure timing and synchronization to users.”
While CAST is narrowly focused on electrical grids and fiber, some see a potential for it to be the basis of a wider national security effort.
Marc Weiss is a timing expert and consultant who served for more than 40 years as a theoretical physicist for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “CAST could be part of the foundation of an architecture that benefits all sectors and citizens, not just power grids,” he said. “The Department of Transportation has identified the need for Americans to have access to timing signals from space, from terrestrial wireless transmitters, and via fiber to have the kind of resilience they need. So, CAST is certainly a big step in the right direction.”
DOE’s DarkNet initiative is a joint initiative by the Office of Electricity and the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER). Additional information on DarkNet and CAST can be found at https://darknet.ornl.gov
