Admittedly, the news is quite varied and intense at the moment, so some of you may have missed the story about avian flu causing an egg shortage, which in turn, logically, has caused egg prices to rise. I wasn’t paying attention to that story so much due to the other things making headlines, but my youngest daughter had heard about it and approached me a few weeks ago about the idea of stockpiling our eggs. This both alerted me to the situation and gave me the opportunity to give my daughter a mini-lecture about the dangers of hoarding (flashbacks to toilet paper + COVID anyone?).

While the nation is focused on the thousands of federal department and agency workforce now, too few people in this country know or care about what happens behind the scenes in Congress, but everyone should understand it. I say that unequivocally having been on the other side for the past 24 years, advocating primarily for the electric sector in front of Congress and several federal agencies. Members of Congress are, by design, more responsive to the needs of their constituents, whether individuals, groups, or companies/businesses. The federal agencies, regardless of who’s in charge, are removed from that pressure, being only indirectly impacted by it via the oversight and funding roles of Congress. The Judicial branch is the most removed, having limited interaction with Congress beyond judicial nominations flowing through the Senate, some oversight, and funding provided by Congress for its operations.

In preparing for the last several editions of this newsletter, my plan for a topic has been waylaid by events. Such is the case today, in the aftermath of the horrific mid-air collision of an American Airlines flight from Wichita with an Army Black Hawk helicopter within view of Reagan National Airport. Like everyone in the D.C.-area who did not have family or friends aboard, I am both relieved and yet heartsick for those who lost loved ones.

During this debate and others related to the LA fires, I hope another point of context beyond historical understanding is also at the forefront. That is the need for extensive resilient infrastructure buildouts in our country. These needed buildouts have been acknowledged on both sides of the aisle via Biden-supported legislation like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. While the details will be debated, of course, the urgency has become more acute in recent months with ever-increasing forecasts for electricity demand from AI/data center usage and electrification of transportation and buildings. Manufacturing infrastructure in the U.S. is needed to meet this demand, among other needs. In the case of additional electric infrastructure in forested areas, there can be risks, which are increasingly being managed, for example, via early warning signals from technology deployments to detect fire before it impacts the infrastructure. This innovative technology could potentially be used to help land managers, fire agencies, and others to gather data and extend their situational awareness. Language in the Fix Our Forests Act could spur some of this collaboration.

On November 13, this newsletter and my consulting firm hosted a conversation about the risks and rewards of innovation in critical infrastructure (CI) sectors. We’ve all heard about cost-benefit analysis -- while the terms “risk and reward” are similar, in my mind at least, the latter combination enables a broader view, beyond financial costs and benefits, which the former often implies.

Since 9/11, and with the advent of the now pervasive cybersecurity threat to mostly privately owned CI, the lines have blurred between what’s in the military’s purview versus what’s handled by these CI owners and operators. Of course, the DIB (that it, the network of organizations, facilities, and resources that provides the government with defense-related materials, products, and services) has been deeply interwoven with the military since the 1950s, but, with a few exceptions, the rest of CI has been mostly at arms’ length until these last 20 years.  As with almost everything, this evolving relationship has both challenges and opportunities for both.

The last couple of newsletters have focused on hurricane response, given the two major hurricanes that have made landfall in the U.S. over the last month and a half. It’s also been exactly 12 years since Superstorm Sandy hit New York and the mid-Atlantic. The good news is that we are just a month away from the end of hurricane season in the U.S., which officially goes from June 1-November 30. Let’s all hope that we have seen the last of the major storms this year.

2) Local charities and churches, including local chapters of national groups, have jumped into the breach to provide help, even staging help as close as possible to impacted areas while roads were closed.

According to Wikipedia, this hurricane “left between 6,000 and 12,000 fatalities in the United States; the number most cited in official reports is 8,000.” This is even more jaw-dropping when put in the context of the total population of Galveston, which was just 38,000 at the time. This hurricane was subsequently categorized as a 4, with no warning and a devastating water surge.

Despite these complicated and daunting challenges, natural gas serves so many beneficial needs for our economy that, in my opinion, we have no choice but to address them. While technological innovations will help to enable other solutions on the power side, the gap between now and then is deep and wide. At the same time, the oil & gas and power sectors have both embraced exploration of low-GHG emission hydrogen-powered electricity enabled by natural gas (such hydrogen efforts are also being explored for other fuel sources), which has the benefit of using much of the existing natural gas transportation infrastructure. However, the widespread and practical application of this innovation is likely years away.

But what about other types of subterranean infrastructure like oil and gas wells, mines, foundations for bridges and buildings? For oil and gas, both onshore and offshore wells have been developed here in the U.S. and can range in subsurface depth from a few hundred feet to up to 30,000 feet, which is close to six miles below the surface – close to the cruising altitude of commercial airplanes.

What about the money needed to keep things humming, much less to pay for extra chocolate croissants in the morning and champagne at night? The financial services sector’s vigilance is always impressive, and, in this case, I would guess that their focus is on cybersecurity as much or more than physical security to ensure online financial transactions are seamless at these games.

In the last 14 months in this newsletter, I’ve reviewed all 17 critical infrastructure sectors that underpin our modern way of life (16 designated as such by the Department of Homeland Security, plus the mining sector, which I see as an unacceptable omission from that list) and have begun to delve into some of the overarching policy matters impacting all these sectors.

Given our celebration this week of the 248th year since the passage of the Declaration of Independence, I’m taking a brief break from discussing overlapping policies impacting critical infrastructure to take a dip into the past…again. I love history.

In researching this newsletter, I quickly realized that we’re up to our eyeballs in permits. As individuals, we need permission from various government jurisdictions to drive, to operate boats and other machinery, to teach, to access certain protected land, etc., etc., etc. Besides driving and going to a national park, my personal experience with permits has been related to renovating my house a number of years ago. After working with our builder to get building permits from the county, we then had to have the completed project (in our case, a kitchen) inspected. The inspector could not have been more condescending, but he did approve the project without modification, thankfully.

In the vein of complete transparency, sometimes I’ve been “less than excited” about sitting down to write these, especially when such writing had to be done in the middle of the night because I procrastinated. Other times, it’s been easier to both get into the mindset and to find the time. I guess that’s why they call these types of things “labors of love.” It turns out that what I’ve loved most is twofold -- getting feedback from my friends and colleagues that they are reading The Essentials and even enjoying it and educating myself about some of the details and history that I had not taken the time to fully understand before.

Assessing the pros and cons of digital technology deployment for CI operators, therefore, is not at this point about whether it is a good or bad thing overarchingly – that ship has sailed. Rather, companies, utilities, and regulators must now assess how to deploy such technologies, which ones to deploy, when to deploy them, and how to pay for them.

In my experience, the decision “to regulate or not to regulate” in the cybersecurity arena does not always fall along traditional party lines. For example, generally speaking, most Republicans are typically more skeptical of regulations and most Democrats are more comfortable with such mandates. Not so much with cyber. Both sides of the aisle align more toward some level of regulation on cybersecurity, at least at the federal level. Digging into this a bit, I want to be clear that, so far, most CI sectors are relatively lightly regulated on cybersecurity, if you look across the sectors. But the national policy focus on cybersecurity that began two decades ago and continues today has involved a bipartisan mix of Members of Congress calling for higher levels of regulation and with many states also looking toward or standing up their own rules and regulations.

In the past 11 months, I’ve focused on each critical infrastructure (CI) sector in relation to the electric sector because electricity – which began to be deployed as a service close to 150 years ago – has enabled the progress, convenience, and abundance that are hallmarks of modern life. I’m now moving on to discuss in more detail the policy-related matters that I touched on at the end of each of the previous editions. I’ve identified nine of them, but there may be others that become obvious along the way.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met at a local computer group and agreed to partner when Steve Wozniak’s prototype computer was rejected by the established company Hewlett-Packard. The two instead developed Apple Computer together in the 1970s and into the ‘80s. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, which was a hit (our family bought one in 1987) and launched Apple into the stratosphere.

In the mid-1990s, what was then known as the World Wide Web began to be built out and its functionality improved. Websites were created with HTML, a primitive online coding language (I created one for my boss in Congress at the time!). Computers got smaller and smaller, and the release of the Palm Pilot in 1998, followed by the BlackBerry ushered in the era of handheld computer devices.