A former top national security expert told News4 that Northern Virginia’s concentration of data centers and stressed electrical grid is posing a major national security risk.
The United States is racing to keep up with the data center boom, but a national security expert said the electrical grid is so vulnerable right now that foreign adversaries have an easy way to decimate our way of life.
Robert Liscouski is a former Bush administration appointee who worked at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on protecting critical infrastructure to prevent another 9/11.
“The impact of 9/11, as much as it was a tragedy for the nearly 3,000 people that died, had a tremendously impactful cascading effect on our own infrastructure,” he told News4.
Liscouski says foreign adversaries like China, Iran and Russia could incapacitate the U.S. if they can attack the electrical grid.
When asked in his conversation with News4 if referencing 9/11 was hyperbole, Liscouski said no.
“We may not have the magnitude of death, in fact we may not have any deaths. But it’s not an equivalency to say that just because there are no deaths, there is no significant impact. There would be a very big impact,” he said.
In July, News4 reported on a ripple in the power grid that nearly caused a blackout from Chicago to Boston to Miami. Dominion Energy told News4 a transmission line servicing data centers in Ashburn, Virginia failed. The data centers switched to backup power, and the massive shift of that load created extreme instability across the eastern U.S. on July 22.
“So what happened on the 22nd could have been catastrophic,” Liscouski said. “It wasn’t. That’s fine. But there are scenarios that we can easily design or imagine that that cascading effect from a catastrophic event could have taken out significant power on the east coast.”
Since then, News4 has reported on power problems in Fairfax County Public Schools. The superintendent said there have been 1,400 power interruptions at school facilities since last July.
Dominion Energy said it can’t draw a straight line from those outages to the demand data centers have put on the grid.
Liscouski said the strain on the power grid was a predictable problem.
“There’s been an overdevelopment of data centers and an underdevelopment of the infrastructure that supports them, right? So as a consequence, that problem that occurred was well-known to people before that surge ever existed,” he said.
“We did make it. So that didn’t have to occur,” Liscouski also said. “If we had responsible management in the first place, that surge wouldn’t have occured.”
News4 asked Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger recently about this possible national security threat, and she said her administration is in contact with DHS to develop stronger communications to identify potential threats.
“There is a lot more work to be done in this space,” she said. “I think it also speaks to investments — the need for investments in infrastructure resiliency.”
News4 asked Liscouski if the solution could be as simple as pumping the brakes.
“I think we definitely need to pump the brakes because we haven’t asked the kind of questions that you and I are talking about right now,” he said.
Liscouski lives in Loudoun County — the data center capital of the world — and fully acknowledged the financial benefit data centers have afforded the county and its residents. He said his concern is that the thirst for economic prosperity has overshadowed the responsibility to protect our way of life.
“We can’t turn the clock back, we can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube on the 200 data centers that are already here, but we can at least understand the implications of putting more here, and just to say, ‘there’s already 200 hundred here, what’s a little bit more?’ I think is really irresponsible,” he said.
If the grid is this vulnerable as-is, Liscouski fears an attack could leave the U.S. in the dark at schools, hospitals, banks and business for days or even weeks.
