How Southern Co. intends to survive a digital Apocalypse

We knew this in advance, in part because of a New York Times article to that effect. It was published last Friday, quoting unnamed intelligence sources. But we were also prepared because, a few days before the Times article saw the light of day, the CEO of the Southern Co. had told a roomful of metro Atlanta business leaders much the same thing.

National secrets can be like that. Knowable only through leaks in Washington, but discussed openly among Rotarians in Atlanta.

“We are under the biggest threat that has never been reported, ever,” began Tom Fanning, who heads up the South’s largest producer of energy — a company whose subsidiaries include Georgia Power. “They want to take you down. They want to interrupt our way of life — American commerce. And there are real threats to that.”

“They” are Russians, Chinese, Iranians and maybe North Koreans. There was no mention of a 400-pound hacker living in his mother’s basement.

Fanning, who was part of that New York cyber summit on Tuesday, told his Atlanta audience that he would speak “elliptically” to avoid breaching confidences. “Unless you are deeply in the know, you can’t talk about it. And so, people say stuff. And you see them on the crazy talk shows, you see them testify in front of Congress,” Fanning said. “I’m telling you right now — you don’t know, and I can’t tell you the real story. I will tell you some of the story.”

Claims of exclusivity when it comes to apocalyptic knowledge should always raise a warning flag. And many of you will no doubt suspect that talking about the vulnerability of our electrical grid might be an effort to divert us from a topic that Donald Trump would rather not talk about — i.e., Russian efforts to penetrate our vulnerable electoral grid.

But it is also true that the tactics of one war often provide clues to the nature of the next. For instance, the American Civil War was a precursor to the industrialized trench warfare of World War I.

And when the Russians invaded Ukraine, one of the first things they did was inject a Trojan Horse virus into the computers that operated the target country’s power system. The result was the first successful, publicly acknowledged cyber-attack on an electrical grid.

“They used a piece of malware called Black Energy,” Fanning said. “They couldn’t do a darned thing to stop them. They were in.”

Fanning said major energy producers in the U.S. had been informed by the Obama administration of the Black Energy danger two years before the Russians crossed the Ukraine border and laid claim to Crimea — and so already had defenses in place.

But ever since then, the CEO said, existential digital threats to his company, which equals Australia in the production of electricity, have been on his mind.

“The crown jewels to the bad guys would be our energy management system,” Fanning said. “We have ours located in a non-disclosed place in Birmingham, Ala. We have another one in Georgia. And they operate within milliseconds of each other.

“So if Birmingham goes down, we have a way to back it up. Within milliseconds. You wouldn’t know if that happened,” he said.

This was comforting to hear. Humans will be in charge of defending us from the digital Apocalypse, and humans have been known to make mistakes. For instance, beneath a major Atlanta airport, humans once put controls for a main power system in the same tunnel with its backup.

Way back in 2017, a single accidental fire destroyed them both, and shut this particular airport down. But that’s a distraction from the current conversation. To continue:

If Southern Co.’s crown jewels of energy management in Alabama and Georgia are compromised, Operation Spare Tire would begin, Fanning said. He didn’t offer technical specifics.

“We’ll be able to run the system with maybe 70 percent of the capability. The lights will flicker, we may have some temporary brownouts,” Fanning said. “You couldn’t run a financial market, but we’ll be able to keep your way of life intact.”

And then he got down to a last fallback: Project McGyver. Yeah, it's named after the resourceful TV/movie character.

“We’re going to completely separate from the digital age. We’re going to eliminate any reliance on the internet or on the digital grid,” Fanning said. “We used to run the system that way, right? In the 1950s. We could run the system manually.”

Workers would be moved to substations, but Fanning’s planners have identified two hitches. Telecommunications would be non-existent. Your smart phone would be fried by then, or turned against you.

And then there’s training. “Everybody that did that in the ‘50s are dead,” Fanning said. Their knowledge needs to be resuscitated. But come the digital Apocalypse, everything old will be new again.

“Did you know,” the Southern executive asked, “At the U.S. Naval Academy, they’re teaching midshipmen how to operate their ships with sextants?” Global positioning systems will be gone, too.

One thing missing from Fanning’s address was any mention of how a digital meltdown might affect operations at the Plant Vogtle nuclear plant that Georgia Power is in the process of expanding.

However, in a question-and-answer period, the Southern CEO said nuclear power — like wind and solar – were part of his company’s “resiliency” formula.

It was an interesting 25 minutes. And while some of you might have trouble getting to sleep tonight, the optimist in me actually found solace in Fanning’s remarks, which can be boiled down to this: Regardless of how bad you think things are now, they could be much, much worse.