Transportation and Electricity Transmission - Energy Policy Analysis: A Conceptual Framework - page 224

The Pacific Northwest-Southwest Intertie is a complicated assembly of several 230, 345, and
500 kV alternating-current, and 750 and 1,000 kV direct-current high-voltage transmission lines
running from Celilo, Oregon, at the Washington border, to Sylmar, California, near Los Angeles.
These lines allow Northwest utilities in California to sell Canada's share of Columbia River
Treaty energy while it continues to be surplus to Canadian and Northwest needs. Canada agreed
to sell and Northwest utilities agreed to buy this energy, initially about 1.4 million kilowatts per
year. Benefits were expected to exceed costs by a ratio of 2.5 to one, with direct dollar benefits to
Northwest utilities of $1 billion, to California utilities of $869 million, and to Arizona and Nevada
utilities of $724 million (Lindseth 1966, 7-8). Completed in 1993, several of these lines often run
parallel with each other in the same transmission corridor, intersecting with other transmission
lines of comparable voltage. Interruption of one or two of these lines is sufficient to destabilize
the grid in California and cause widespread blackouts, especially on a hot summer day when the
network is already stressed by peak air conditioning loads.
In 1967 a large construction crane was driven into three large transmission line towers to de-
stroy them in Louisiana, and a crucial 1,000 kV direct-current line on the Pacific Intertie suffered
at least three attacks near Lovelock, Nevada, in 1970 (Lovins and Lovins 1982, 82). In 1979 and
1980, conservative Minnesota farmers known as “bolt weevils” toppled fifteen towers and caused
$7 million dollars' damage to a direct-current high-voltage line using only a few people and hand
tools. An outbreak of “insulator disease,” commonly ascribed to rifles (or even to sophisticated
slingshots), littered the ground with the remains of more than 8,000 fragile glass insulators. The
aluminum wires, an inch and a half in diameter, proved vulnerable to rifle fire (Casper and Well-
stone 1981, 277, 284, 285). In 1987 guy wires were cut and a transmission line tower was toppled
on a 1,800 MWe, 1,000kV DC Pacific Intertie in California. It took about four days to repair the
damage (U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment 1990, 15). Previous terrorist attacks on
the electric grid have used all available civilian and military firearms up to and including heavy
machine guns, twenty-millimeter cannons, antitank guns, and recoilless rifles. Catalogs of equip-
ment useful to terrorists have been published, much of it available illegally in the United States
(Lovins and Lovins 1982, 79-82).
Electric utilities have long suffered the expense of repairing insulators, transmission lines, and
substations vandalized by frustrated or bored hunters. A trained sniper, armed with any one of
several sniper rifles available (Bushmaster 2011; CZ 2011; Remington 2011) with a good scope
could probably bring down a high-voltage transmission line or two from a single perch and be
gone before law enforcement could arrive. Designed for and used by the U.S. military, these rifles
have a daylight range of 800 yards, nearly half a mile, and are available online, in gun shops, and
at gun shows nationwide. Any of the hundreds of personnel trained as military snipers in the past
ten years would be able to get to a hidden perch, hit a 1,240- to 5,000-millimeter-long high-voltage
transmission line insulator, and get away without being observed. If either snipers or their spotters
(snipers generally work in pairs) (Masterson 2011) had access to a computer simulation model of
a regional transmission grid and could figure out where the weak points are in the transmission
system, they might be able to cause a widespread blackout by knocking out a key transmission
line or substation. They would have adequate time for several shots if the target was located in
a rural area, as are substantial portions of the Pacific Northwest-Southwest Intertie in California
and Nevada and other major lines throughout the country. Potential targets are numerous on high-
voltage bulk electric power networks throughout the United States. This point cannot be made too
forcefully: the situation described is not “someday, maybe” but today, now. It bears repeating that,
as stated above, the United States has already reached the point where a few people can probably
black out most of the country (Lovins and Lovins 1982, 1).