Cyberattacks on the grid are a real threat. Can green tech help?

The US electrical grid—which is really just a patchwork of interconnected regional grids—has a lot of vulnerabilities: It’s struggling to satisfy rising energy demand, is prone to outages, and at times gets overloaded by excess renewable energy. And on top of all that, local, state, and federal power authorities are constantly fighting off cyber threats on the grid’s stability.

A House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing this week discussed what Congress can do to combat grid hacking from foreign adversaries that aim ever-evolving threats at the US electric supply. Hearing witnesses and Democratic representatives positioned renewables, batteries, and virtual power plants as secret weapons against hacking threats, as they can incorporate cybersecurity software.

“Our grid was established with a few large-scale fossil-based energy generators pushing out energy to customers,” Representative Kathy Castor (D-FL) said during the hearing. “We can replace our outdated energy systems with software-enabled clean energy technologies, modern tools that allow the grid to recover more readily when harmed by a hurricane or a hacker.”

It’s the grid’s “aging infrastructure” that makes it so vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to hearing witness Harry Krejsa, the director of studies at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Strategy & Technology. In his testimony, he urged Congress to embrace “modernization from top to bottom” when it comes to grid infrastructure.

“The energy technologies powering this transition—from on-site generation and battery storage to smart inverters and virtual power plants—were designed from the ground up with software at their core, enabling modern cybersecurity features and the ability to update and evolve in response to emerging threats,” Krejsa said. “We should treat these modern energy technologies the way we now treat semiconductors: as critical industries requiring greater visibility, investment, and control by the United States and our allies.”

But Krejsa and Democratic representatives said large-scale grid modernization can’t happen without the infrastructure to do so, including clean energy tax credits, only some of which were retained in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and an adequate federal workforce. Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ) called out the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency for stripping the Department of Energy of employees and funding.

“[Modernization is] not going to work, essentially, unless DOE is the agency that’s properly staffed and has the resources to fulfill its mission,” Pallone said. “We need to ensure that we have sufficient staff working on the issue of cybersecurity, and that they get the resources at DOE and the funding that they need.”