UPDATE: BY AN ELECTRICIAN/ USA TODAY obtained news about our Nation's power grid. If this information is true, how have we avoided a blackout?

UPDATE: THIS IS AN UPDATE FROM AN ELECTRICAL SUPERINTENDENT OF A BIG MILL:
What people call the GRID is a collaboration of all power companies tied to each other that forms a National Grid.

If one power company for instance is doing maintenance on one of their generation plants, they will be buying power from another power company.

Consumers don't realize that their power could be coming from a thousand miles away. The power companies also have the ability to disconnect from the GRID.

If you say one of CON-ED'S main power producers has a major fault and goes down, they will pull a lot of power from say DUKE ENERGY or GEORGIA POWER, which will then put a strain on those two. So they have to have a way to disconnect that major power puller before their voltage drops too low.
This is called a BROWN-OUT.

The power companies have the means to disconnect from the GRID before they, too, experience a black-out due to excess pull.

These breakers that can disconnect or connect to the GRID are now automated where it used to be human operators had to watch the power pull constantly and had to manually disconnect.

That could be either good or bad depending on who has access to the programs that operate these main breakers now.

It is possible that a hacker could get into the big power companies' logic controllers and cause havoc.




[link to www.usatoday.com]

USA TODAY has obtained through the Freedom of Information Act dire news about ongoing cyber attacks within the Department of Energy.

The cyber attacks have enabled a breach of information, but most dire of all is the hacker obtains the ability to do anything within the Department of Energy.

The Power Grid is a sitting duck, and we have to accept we could lose everything due to this fact. It could happen anytime, and we can only imagine what our world will be like. For those of you off the grid, you should be proud of yourselves, and please pray for those of us still in the system.

What I do not understand is how have we avoided a Nationwide blackout thus far...that is if it can happen so easily?

LINK: Cyber attackers successfully compromised the security of U.S. Department of Energy computer systems more than 150 times between 2010 and 2014, according to a review of federal records obtained by USA TODAY.

Incident reports submitted by federal officials and contractors since late 2010 to the Energy Department's Joint Cybersecurity Coordination Center shows a near-consistent barrage of attempts to breach the security of critical information systems that contain sensitive data about the nation's power grid, nuclear weapons stockpile and energy labs.

The records, obtained by USA TODAY through the Freedom of Information Act, show DOE components reported a total of 1,131 cyberattacks over a 48-month period ending in October 2014. Of those attempted cyber intrusions, 159 were successful