A recent NERC Lessons Learned event discussed where a combined cycle power plant in Florida suffered significant load oscillations because a sensor provided erroneous input to the steam turbine controller. The controller reacted by cycling the turbine resulting in 200MW load swings (see Max 737 plane crashes). These oscillations caused a 0.25Hz impact on the entire Eastern Interconnect and resulted in a 50 MW load swing in New England (local failure affects entire interconnected systems similar to Colonial Pipelines). Like the 2008 Florida outage, there was no mention of the event being a cyber incident. There is no cyber security, authentication, or cyber logging in the sensor. Moreover, process sensors are out-of-scope for the NERC CIPs and NERC Supply Chain issues. The lack of process sensor authentication is also key to being able to address the Chinese transformers with hardware backdoors.
Process sensor issues continue to be ignored and are placing the country at extreme risk
