CFC Solutions Cast

Welcome to Solutions Cast: Industry Insights. I’m Brian Sloboda, CFC Director of Utility Research and Policy. Over the past few years, the electric grid has faced no shortage of challenges. Weather, supply chains, workforce constraints, and cyber risk tend to dominate the conversation. But another issue is moving steadily onto the executive agenda: physical security and deterrence, including the emerging role of drones.

Let’s start with a quick grounding in the facts.

Federal reporting shows that physical attacks and deliberate damage to electric infrastructure do occur in the United States, even though most do not result in outages. The U.S. Department of Energy tracks these events through required incident reports and found that utilities reported 163 total incidents in 2022 and roughly 175 in 2023. These are the most recent years that statistics are available. In 2022, roughly 25 of the incidents were classified as direct physical attacks on electric infrastructure. Most incidents involved vandalism, tampering or suspicious activity. The vast majority caused little or no service disruption, but the trend has been consistent enough that federal agencies now treat physical security as a routine reliability issue rather than a remote concern.

One example often cited by federal agencies occurred in 2020, when a modified commercial drone crashed near a substation in Pennsylvania. Investigators later concluded it was likely intended to disrupt equipment but failed before reaching energized assets. No outage occurred, and no one was identified, but it marked the first known attempted drone targeting of U.S. energy infrastructure.

More recently, in 2024, the FBI disrupted a plot in Tennessee involving a plan to attack a substation using a drone. Again, no outage occurred because law enforcement intervened early.

Incidents like these reinforce a key point for co op leaders: the goal is not perfect prevention. The goal is deterrence, delay, and resilience.

Most substations are not meant to be fortresses. Layered security is designed to slow someone down, increase the chance of being seen, and introduce doubt. Even a few minutes of delay can matter---whether it gives law enforcement time to respond or causes someone to abandon the attempt entirely and move on to an easier target.

This is also where technology choices matter. Many co ops have learned firsthand that deer or other large animals can set off intrusion alarms. This can create noise and fatigue if not addressed. The good news is that newer camera systems with improved image recognition can better distinguish wildlife from people, reducing false alarms while still maintaining visibility where it counts. The goal is not to react to everything, but to clearly identify when something actually requires attention.

The Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or E ISAC for short, has been clear that physical threats to the grid are increasing in both volume and sophistication, coming from a mix of criminal, extremist and foreign actors. Their guidance emphasizes treating physical security as a core reliability function, not a secondary one.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency reinforces this framing by stating that it is impossible to prevent every attack. Instead, layered security is meant to reduce the likelihood of success, introduce uncertainty, and buy time. For cooperatives, that means practical measures many already use: fencing, lighting, cameras, intrusion detection, controlled access, signage, and coordination with local law enforcement.

No single measure stops a determined adversary. But collectively, they create friction. And friction is often enough to make someone rethink their plan.

The implications for electric co op leaders are clear:

Deterrence relies on layers, not silver bullets.
Visibility matters, especially when paired with smart monitoring.
Delay can be just as important as denial if it buys time to respond.
And coordination with peers and law enforcement increases the chances that an incident ends quickly or never happens at all.

Doing nothing sends a signal. Thoughtful visibility, planning, and coordination send a different one. And in today’s environment, that difference matters.

That’s all for today. As always, thank you for joining us. Be on the lookout for more industry and technology content at nrucfc.coop/Solutions. We’ll talk with you soon!