Show Notes
In February, severe winter storms and an electricity generation failure left almost 5 million people in Texas without power, leading to hundreds of deaths, and a shortage of heat, food and water. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the flow of electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers. How did the massive power failure happen? What does this power outage suggest about the resilience of our critical infrastructure?
Beth Garza, former director of ERCOT and senior fellow at the R Street Institute, answers these questions and more. Over the course of her 35-year career in the electric utility industry, Beth Garza has held a variety of leadership roles in generation and transmission planning, system operations, regulatory affairs and market design for both regulated and competitive entities.
More from Hack the Plant
“There is so much tech in our food and agriculture industry now that is touching our food on some level… we are creating the potential for a foodborne illness to happen from a cyber attack that may not be noted.” – Kristin King
“Securing critical infrastructure is not one person’s job. You bring multiple people, multiple teams with different expertise to come together.” – Adam Robbie
“Security is not convenient. Nobody likes change. But at the same time, we have to be secure. Finding that middle ground is the challenge in my position.” - Andrea Haddad
“The fundamentals of cybersecurity are the fundamentals of good engineering and operations.” - Andrew Ohrt
“I think it really opened my eyes to how tightly coupled our system is and how vulnerable we are to these cascading failures.” - Natalie Sullivan