On a cloudy Friday in early December, Jeremy Crahan stood inside a federal courthouse in Tacoma, Washington, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for attacking two of Tacoma Power’s substations. His accomplice, Matthew Greenwood, was sentenced to a year confined to his home and three years of probation.
About 30,000 people lost power when the two men knocked out the substations on Christmas Day 2022.
“These defendants launched a scheme that left thousands of people in the cold and dark in the middle of winter, a scheme that was dangerous—for them and for the workers that had to make repairs to the high voltage equipment,” Acting U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman said inside the U.S. District Court building.
Substations are critical nodes in the power grid, acting as the off-ramps of the grid’s highway system. Without exits, trucks and cars could still travel along the freeway, but drivers would have no way to deliver goods or get home. Distribution substations take the power from transmission lines—high-voltage lines that allow power to travel long distances—lower the voltage and deliver it to distribution lines that supply power to homes and businesses.
That makes them critically important to power grid operation. If a substation goes out for any reason, thousands of people can be left in the dark.
“It’s fundamentally a reliability issue,” says Steve Wright, former head of the Bonneville Power Administration and general manager of Chelan County Public Utility District in Washington.
For that reason, utilities design substations to be resistant and grids to be resilient. Substations are made to endure extreme events, such as wildfires and ice storms.
The power grid is designed so a single substation going out shouldn’t put hundreds of thousands of customers in the dark. In cities and suburbs, that usually means being able to route power through other substations, just like if one freeway exit is closed, drivers can get off at another exit.
However, it is harder to have redundancy for substations toward the end of a utility’s service area, such as the two attacked by Jeremy and Matthew.
Because of their critical role in the energy grid, the country’s nearly 80,000 substations are the grid’s most vulnerable pieces. While only a small number of attacks have occurred, experts agree that the potential threat is very real.
One of the first substation attacks was in 2013, when a sniper shot at a facility in Coyote, California, near San Jose in the Santa Clara Valley. Energy grid officials rerouted power through other substation equipment, averting any major blackouts.
“Remote substations are harder to monitor (for an attack), but also, they serve fewer people,” Steve says.
Electricity rates would skyrocket if every substation were designed to be impregnable from any event that could take it down. As with many spending decisions in the electric power industry, utilities try to strike a balance between affordability and reliability.
Steve says utilities weigh the probability of an event and the potential consequences. For example, a utility in Montana will design every substation to withstand cold temperatures, while a utility in Hawaii would not.
While the industry has decades of experience designing and operating substations in all types of weather, the idea of a person deliberately attacking a substation has only recently grabbed the industry’s attention. Federal authorities and the electric power industry are working closely to make the grid more resilient.
Tacoma Power has stepped up security at its substations following the 2022 attacks, says Transmission and Distribution Manager Joe Wilson. Utilities are tight-lipped about security measures, and Joe only spoke in general terms about Tacoma Power’s security measures.
Despite the increase in attacks, “I don’t think a lot of utilities have mitigated the risk on their transformers,” Joe says.
Larger utilities, such as Tacoma Power, have mobile resources that allow them—to varying degrees—to fill gaps in the grid, but smaller utilities just don’t have that equipment, Joe says.
“It’s harder to have resiliency at the edge of the grid (such as at rural utilities),” he says.
Several companies sell products to defend against attacks, such as bulletproof enclosures for transformers.
Following the attack on Tacoma Power’s substations, which were among its smallest ones, FBI special agents showed Joe documents seized from other cases that outlined how to attack the electrical grid.
“They looked professionally done,” Joe says. “We’re just going to have to get more serious about the security measures that we’re taking.”
Substation Safety Tips
Everyone can play a role in substation safety. Substations are fenced off to keep people a safe distance from high-voltage equipment. Here are ways the public can play an active role in keeping the community safe and a local source of reliable power flowing.
If you see something, say something. Keep local substations safe by reporting suspicious activity or anything that looks out of the ordinary to your utility. If you see someone inside who does not look like they belong there, contact your utility.
Stay away from substations. Never go near a substation.
Educate children about the dangers of electricity. Teach them to stay away from a substation and never climb its fence.
If a personal item ends up inside the fence, contact your utility for help retrieving it. Kites, drones or other toys should not be played with near a substation.
If a fire starts inside a substation, do not try to put out the fire yourself. Water and electricity don’t mix. Call 911 to report it.