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DECEMBER 2017
POWER PLACE Valley Electric Association’s unassuming control room in Pahrump
same boat. With a push from the federal Rural Electrification Administration, which provided loans to build electrical-distribution systems in underserved parts of the country, those communities came together to form the Valley Electric Association. What began as a way to bring “very basic essentials to the folks in this area,” such as lights and pumping water, has grown into a co-op that services 40,000 members across nearly 7,000 square miles — an area larger than Connecticut. But if you think this is a small-time operation, think again. Husted, VEA’s CEO, is quick to boast that the utility “has a legacy of being one of the most sophisticated, technologically advanced utilities in the United States.” It sounds like hyperbole until you visit the utility’s control room at its Pahrump headquarters, in a building where doors aren’t marked and where sensitive equipment is placed in rooms surrounded on six sides by concrete. A screen in a corridor shows a map of real-time cyber attacks occurring in the United States. It looks like a scene out of WarGames: The U.S. mainline is bombarded by dozens of attacks every second. VEA gets hit with about 8,000 a day — hackers probing for weakness anywhere along the national energy grid. (For security reasons, the VEA declined to address how it thwarts these attacks.) In the control room, technicians calmly monitor a wall filled with 20 huge flat screens, from banks of more than halfa-dozen monitors that curve around. If there are any issues, they can zoom down to see a single power line serving one home anywhere on their network.