The investigation of the Wall Street Journal story also noted that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission might not have adequate safeguards in place to protect classified information regarding the grid that could impact national security.
"This was a dangerous leak of highly sensitive information that should have been classified and closely guarded," Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Senator Lisa Murkowski said in a statement.
In order to protect the grid’s security the Department of Homeland Security has devised smart grid incentives to ensure the security of the nation’s energy.
The resilient electric grid is an effort to “keep the lights on” in the event of a power outage by allowing distribution level power substations to share power with one another.
The primary goal of REG is to develop and demonstrate an inherently fault current limiting, high-temperature, superconducting cable for increased electric grid resiliency.
It is also working on a project called the recovery transformer, which will enable rapid recovery and resiliency of electrical power said to be critical to the security and national economy.
The program is developing a prototype, RecX, to enable recovery within days instead of months.
According to the DHS website it also launched an investigation named the JASONS study to “assess the current state of the smart grid concept for the electric power grid, as well as specific technologies needed to achieve the DHS end-state goal of ensuring smart grid security and resiliency”
