Don’t wire foreign enemies into America’s power grid

Excerpt The U.S. is racing to build infrastructure that will power artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and the next generation of economic growth. Electricity demand is surging for the first time in decades, and utilities are scrambling to keep up. But in the rush to modernize the grid, policymakers risk overlooking a simple question: Are we building new vulnerabilities into the very systems America will depend on most? Between the two of us, we have spent decades working on these issues from different perspectives. One of us served in Congress and helped build many of the cybersecurity institutions the federal government now relies on to protect critical infrastructure. The other spent years leading one of America’s largest energy companies and helping coordinate the electric sector’s response to cyber and physical threats. Over that time, we have seen the same mistake play out again and again: America focuses on cost and convenience until dependence on foreign technology suddenly becomes a national security problem. By then, fixing it is far more difficult than preventing it in the first place. After years of allowing the purchase of cheap Chinese telecommunications devices, for example, the Federal Communications Commission estimated it would cost more than $5 billion to remove and replace them with more secure equipment. Jim Langevin is a former U.S. representative from Rhode Island. Tom Fanning is the former chairman and CEO of Southern Company. Both serve on the advisory board of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.