NERC Releases Interim Report on Aug 14th Blackout

will writes "The North American Electric Reliability Council has released four documents concerning the August 14th power outage power outage in the North East. The blackout investigation homepage lists all NERC's documents relating to this event. Press coverage is at The Washington Post, CNN, and CBS News. The take home message: FirstEnergy did it. The are, of course, denying it." The report is also available at reports.energy.gov. Reader stinkydog writes "According to Yahoo News part of the blame for the big fizzle of 2003 lies with a failing SCADA system, GE's XA/21 power management system. 'Not only did the software that controls audible and visual alarms stop working at 2:14 p.m. EDT, but about a half hour later, two servers supporting the emergency system failed, too.' According to the product specs, it is a Unix system with X Windows."

Comments

The XA/21 Did Not Break Down

[Anonymous Coward]

GE's XA/21 system "controls generation and the high voltage transmission network for optimal generation and transmission of power," as provided on GE's corporate web site:

http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/scada_ so ftware/en/xa21.htm

On page 99 of the report the task force states specifically that,"although there were a number of worms and viruses impacting theInternet and Internet-connected systems and networks in North America before and during the outage, the SWG's preliminary analysis provides no indication that worm/virus activity had a significant effect on the power generation and delivery systems."In other words, the power generation and delivery systems (GE's XA/21) running Unix were not affected. SCADA, the alarm monitoring system, however, was affected. SCADA failedto transmit alarm conditions the the monitoring workstations because the Windows platform it was running on was under a denial of service attack. The net result is that the operators were not aware of serious trouble with the grid before it was to late.

First Energy is a horrible corporation

[puppetluva]

Here's a timely link. . .

FirstEnergy used to be CEI. . . a horrible company in Cleveland that allowed a nuclear core failure through negligence and then tried to bully the government of Cleveland into selling its municipal power supply to it thereby granting it monopoly status in the region.

Check out the story here:
http://kucinich.us/powertothepeople.htm

The presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was Mayor of Cleveland at the time and endured a browbeating when he refused to sell the Municipal power company to these scoundrels.

I'm not necessarily pro-Kucinich, but I am VERY anti-FirstEnergy. They have a track record of irresponsibility and dishonesty that should be enough to have the government dismantle them.

Re:SCADA systems are *NOT ALWAYS* DCOM based

[elbarsal]

OK, before everybody gets carried away with what SCADA systems are based on, let me point out - SCADA stands for "Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition". No single company makes SCADA any more than any single company makes any other type of application software.

SCADA systems exist that will run on QNX, Linux (See VSystem), Windows NT/2000, DOS (Yes, DOS - i.e. FactoryLink with DesqView) as well as other older platforms like VAX/VMS and PDP-11.

So, SCADA systems do not necessarily rely on OPC or DCOM - some do, some don't. Some still use DDE (trust me, not the most reliable means of communication).

Industry uses all sorts of SCADA systems, from several vendors - Rockwell Software makes RSView, Wonderware makes InTouch, Siemens makes WinCC, you get the picture. The GE package involved in the systems at First Energy is only one example of SCADA, in the same way that EMACS is only one example of a text editor.

Sorry for the rant, but IAAAE (I am an automation engineer).