“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.”
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
Today, more than 16 years of space-weather data is publicly available for the first time in history. The data comes from space-weather sensors on board the nation’s GPS satellites.
The newly available data gives researchers a treasure trove of measurements they can use to better understand how space weather works and how best to protect critical infrastructure, such as the nation’s satellites, aircraft, communications networks, navigation systems and electric power grid.
A feature article providing an overview of the data that have been released was published today in Space Weather, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
“Space-weather monitoring instruments developed at Los Alamos have been fielded on GPS satellites for decades,” said Marc Kippen, program manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which developed the space weather sensors. “Today, 23 of the nation’s more than 30 on-orbit GPS satellites carry these instruments. When you multiply the number of satellites collecting data with the number of years they’ve been doing it, it totals more than 167 satellite years. It’s really an unprecedented amount of information.”
An image illustrating the six orbital planes in which GPS satellites (“navigational satellites,” or ns) fly around Earth. This configuration shows the orbits just before the start of this solar cycle’s biggest geomagnetic storm, which occurred on March 17, 2015. The darkest orbital lines indicate the position of the satellites in that moment; the lightest lines indicate where they were 12 hours prior. (Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Extreme space-weather events have the potential to significantly threaten safety and property on Earth, in the air, and in space.
For example, the hazard of increased radiation exposure from charged particles released during a large solar flare could require that flights be diverted away from a polar route.
Similarly, sudden bursts of plasma and magnetic field structures (coronal mass ejections, or CMEs) from the sun’s atmosphere and high-speed solar wind could significantly disable large portions of the electric power grid. The resulting cascading failures could disturb air traffic control, disrupt the water supply, and interfere with life-saving medical devices.
In space, the charged particles measured by the Los Alamos-GPS sensors are the primary limit on how long a satellite can operate in space before succumbing to the damaging effects of radiation.
In extreme events those particles can cause malfunction of satellites or even catastrophic failure of entire satellite systems.
For example, in April 2010, a large magnetic disturbance resulted in a communications failure, causing a satellite to uncontrollably drift in space and presenting a hazard to nearby satellites.
Currently, scientists are unable to predict when these extreme events will occur, how strong they will be, or how severe the effects will be. The release of Los Alamos-GPS data enables new studies that will help answer these questions.
The Los Alamos-GPS sensors continuously measure the energy and intensity of charged particles, mainly electrons and protons, energized and trapped in Earth’s magnetic field. These trapped particles form the Van Allen radiation belts, which are highly dynamic—varying on time scales from minutes to decades. From GPS orbit (roughly 12,600 miles above Earth), satellite-borne sensors probe the largest radiation belt—consisting mainly of energetic electrons.
Each of the 23 sensors in the current GPS constellation makes detailed measurements of the belts every six hours. Together the sensors provide 92 complete measurements of the belts every day. The newly released measurements constitute a nearly continuous global record of the variability in this radiation belt for the past 16 years, including how it responds to solar storms. The data provides an invaluable record for understanding radiation-belt variability that is key to developing effective space-weather forecasting models.
Los Alamos has been anticipating greater awareness of the nation’s vulnerability to space weather since the 1990s, when it began aligning its space-weather research activities with its critical-infrastructure program. “This led to an awareness that we could expand the utility of our space-weather data to programs beyond the specific requirements they were designed for,” said Kippen, a co-author of the feature article.
The public release of GPS energetic-particle data was conducted under the terms of an October 2016 White House Executive Order. It culminates years of work between the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Security Council to coordinate interagency efforts aimed at improved understanding, prediction and preparedness for potentially devastating space-weather events. The specific goal of releasing space-weather data from national-security assets such as GPS satellites is to enable broad scientific community engagement in enhancing space-weather model validation and improvements in space-weather forecasting and situational awareness.
“The US DoD, the Office of Science Technology Policy, and the broader space weather enterprise deserve our support and thanks for this data release,” Delores Knipp, editor-in-chief of Space Weather, wrote in a blog post accompanying the feature article. “This cache of data will likely drive fundamental new developments in geospace research. The data release should be emulated by other nations as they invest in space-based global and regional navigation satellite systems.”
A methane leak at a Southern California Gas (SoCalGas) storage facility has shone a spotlight on how unmanned aerial vehicles can be used to inspect utilities. The massive three-month leak — temporarily plugged on Feb. 12 — chased thousands of Los Angeles residents from their homes.
At least 2 percent of natural gas is wasted through methane leaks at production sites, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
UAVs are already being used for some electrical grid and pipeline inspections, mostly in pilot programs, but their potential for hands-off long-distance monitoring is just starting to be realized.
Along with criminal charges, SoCalGas is facing regulatory mandates to improve air-quality monitoring at its facilities. Nationally, the DOE’s Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy is funding a program to accurately locate and measure methane emissions associated with natural gas production.
Bridger’s proposed leak detector uses lidar in combination with range and gas absorption measurements. (Illustration: Bridger Photonics)
The program has given one company, Bridger Photonics, a $2 million grant to develop a leak detector. Bridger plans to build a mobile methane sensing system capable of surveying a 10 x 10 meter well platform in just over five minutes with precision that exceeds existing technologies used for large-scale monitoring.
Bridger’s detector useslaser beams to generate 3D images that show the distance and concentration of a gas leak, even showing the types and concentration of the hydrocarbons.
Mounted on a UAV, the sensor would give inspectors access to complicated or obscured infrastructures at processing plants, drilling rigs and pipelines. The sensor could also be mounted on a vehicle.
Bridger’s goal is for its devices to be able to service up to 85 sites, and cost $1,400 to $2,220 a year to operate per wellsite. Bridger plans to field test its technology this year and make it available commercially in 2017.
Bridger’s imager
Bridger’s gas imager is a point-scanning lidar sensor that performs simultaneous range and gas absorption measurements, according to Mike Thorpe, chief technology officer of Bridger Photonics. The measurements are combined to derive high-accuracy estimates of the gas concentration.
The measurement beam is scanned around the scene to create 3D topographic images of hard targets overlaid with 2D maps of the gas concentration.
The datasets will be geo-registered using GPS and inertial measurements.
The prototype sensor will have the following performance specs:
1 kpps measurement rate
3-100 m range
1 cm down-range resolution
2 cm cross-range resolution
<3 ppm-m methane detection sensitivity for distances < 30 m
<15 ppm-m methane detection sensitivity for distances < 100 m
Bridger also is developing measurement approaches and algorithms to enable automatic leak detection and leak rate estimation.
