Podcast: Shots Fired at Hells Canyon Dam

Logan Finney, Idaho Reports: An Idaho man was arrested last Friday, following early morning reports of gunshots fired at power substations at the Hells Canyon and Brownlee Dams, known collectively as the Hells Canyon Complex and operated by Idaho Power. According to reports by KTVB and the Idaho Statesman, Washington County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched around 12:30 a.m. last Friday and located a man on a white motorcycle who matched the description of the suspect.

According to law enforcement, he accelerated and sped up to 80 mph through a 25-mph zone in Cambridge, ID. After finally stopping the motorcycle on the highway, deputies arrested the man and found a gun case with two rifles, as well as two tire repair cans that are used to hold compressed air but smelled of gasoline.

The Meridian resident faces three felony charges for malicious injury to property, attempting to flee from law enforcement, and possession of destructive devices. A news release from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office also noted that law enforcement worked with the FBI to execute a search warrant on the man’s home in Meridian.

Idaho Power provided us with the following written statement over email:

Idaho Power: “It’s an ongoing investigation and law enforcement is handling that part of it. Nobody was injured, thankfully, and we did not experience any customer outages as a result of the incident. Repairs to the damaged equipment at Hells Canyon have been made and both plants are online and generating power.”

IR: Hells Canyon Road over one of the dams is undergoing temporary closures this month, as crews use a crane to clear vegetation from the dam face and to install equipment to test the sluice gates. An Idaho Power spokesperson told Idaho Reports that those closures are part of scheduled routine maintenance and are not related to last week’s incident.

After reports of similar power substation attacks across the country early in the year, Idaho Reports spoke in January with director Will Hart from the Idaho Consumer Owned Utilities Association about grid security and what the industry is doing to ensure the grid stays on.

Hart: Grid security is always of primary importance. And now, you know, it continues to be and has always been Mother Nature which is the main threat to the grid security, mitigating against wildfire and preparing for severe storm sand then safely and quickly repairing those outages, and keeping the lights on has just always been and continues to be our paramount mission in the electric industry.

Now, new threats have emerged, cybersecurity and physical security. There’s been an uptick in those threats, and that’s something that we’re continuously monitoring, assessing, and reevaluating our readiness plans in light of those relatively new or at least more frequent threats to the grid. It involves everything from the regular cyber housekeeping that that all businesses and all utilities should be involved with on a regular basis. Implementing new technologies, whether that is within the grid for hardening of our systems, and on the cybersecurity side as well, upgrading systems to prevent access to our utilities that then could go move on to another place on the grid. Those are all things that we incorporate in the industry on a daily basis, and are even higher priority now with the uptick in events that we’ve seen happening over the last few months.

We do have some unique challenges. The terrain. Often times, the rural nature of where a critical infrastructure is located. So we’re having to reassess and update and really get back into our emergency preparedness plans on how we more specifically, what additional things we can do to protect our system. The rural electric co-ops and the municipal power companies that I represent primarily serve in rural parts of the state where, you know, our customers, we have a lot longer distance and our customers per mile. Often our critical infrastructure is located outside population areas. And quite frankly, we have smaller staffs and smaller budgets to work with.

But as a whole, we’re coordinating as an industry and despite the challenges we’ve been talking about, Idaho does have a lot of resources available. The industry is currently working with the Idaho Office of Energy and Mineral Resources on specific funding for grid resilience and reliability. Those moneys, our first round, is going out on the ground right now. So there’s shovel-ready projects across the state on grid security being done right now.

IR: I spoke on Thursday with Richard Stover, director of the Governor’s Office of Energy and Mineral Resources, to get more details about what resources are available to ensure grid resilience. That includes federal funding under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (sometimes called the bipartisan infrastructure bill), as well as some state funding provided by a past legislature.

Stover: Under the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, there is a program for states called Preventing Outages and Enhancing the Resilience of the Electric Grid, and this is formula funding available to state energy offices such as the Idaho Governor’s Office of Energy and Mineral Resources to make sub grants for long term strategic investments into resiliency and modernization efforts into the electric gridu nder this program. Our office will receive approximately $25 million over the course of next five years, which we will then sub grant to Idaho’s utilities, subject to particular matching requirements from those utilities for grid resiliency projects.

In addition to that program, the legislature two years ago funded a big state energy resilience grant program that we’ve designed to not only essentially mirror the federal program so that we can utilize that fund to help certain utilities that may need some additional support, but also to structure it more specific to some of the unique Idaho needs and that we can direct those funds.

Under the state energy resilience grant program, what we look for is for projects that offered a high level of impact towards the goal of grid resilience, and that were able to be initiated during the 2022 calendar year. And the eligible recipients were Idaho’s three investor-owned utilities and Idaho’s 22 public utility providers. And the metrics that we utilized were based on feedback from these industry folks and other experts, and essentially with the guidance that we understand is the goal for the federal Preventing Outages and Enhancing Resiliency of the Grid program. And that’s particularly related to weatherization technologies, monitoring and control technologies, vegetation management and wildfire mitigation or resilience efforts.

Under the state program, we do have some flexibility to address some security-related improvements. Under the federal program, those guidelines were not set in contemplation of a vandalism issue. So the first round of state funding that we put out last year didn’t specifically target security issues. It was primarily grid resilience efforts such as undergrounding transmission and distribution lines, doing some satellite-based vegetation management program in areas that are prone to wildfire.

Last year, the governor did make a recommendation to fund a program here at the Office of Energy and Mineral Resources that was designed to help bolster our grid resiliency investments by promoting some energy resilience and efficiency technologies for critical facilities like police stations and fire departments and hospitals, evacuation centers. Unfortunately, I was not able to get that funding through. So we’ll take a look and see whether we have another opportunity to bolster our investments.

You know, the governor has made it known that he’s very keen on making strategic investments in Idaho’s infrastructure, and with the events that are currently happening around the country and now here in Idaho, it’s more important than ever that we make sure that our grid infrastructure is secure and quite resilient.

IR: Idaho Reports will continue to follow this story as it develops. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next week.