S 2975 Introduced – FY 2019 EWR Spending Bill

Last month Sen. Alexander introduced S 2975, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2019. Like HR 5895, the bill’s counterpart in the House, S 2975 includes the “Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response” (CESER) reporting category. This version, however, includes a much larger amount of spending on that category; $260 million vs $146 million.

CESER

Since this is a new spending category, it is clear that the two appropriations committees have different ideas on what should be included in the category. The House version only shows three line items; cybersecurity for energy delivery systems, infrastructure security and energy restoration, and program direction. The Senate Report shows those same categories plus (pg 117) from the ‘old’ Electricity Delivery category:

• Transmission reliability;

• Resilient distribution systems;

• Energy storage;

• Transformer resilience and advanced components; and

• Transmission permitting and technical assistance;

The Senate allocation of funds for each of the line items is significantly less than provided in the House bill. For example, the ‘cybersecurity for energy delivery systems’ line item draws only $80.8 million in S 2975 versus $116.5 million in HR 5895. The only reason that the CESER funding is higher is because of the additional line items.

There is a little more cybersecurity detail in the comments portion of the Senate report. For instance, they note that the “Committee recommends $10,000,000 for the DarkNet project to explore opportunities for getting the Nation’s critical infrastructure off the Internet and shielding the Nation’s electricity infrastructure from disruptive cyber penetration” (pg 78).

There is also an interesting comment about grid security research. The Report notes (pgs 80-1):

“The Committee supports the establishment of an EMP/GMD testing facility that can, without posing risk to the existing grid, replicate EMP/GMD events and cyber-attacks on a real-world configuration of critical grid components and systems. Such a facility is necessary to expose entire substations, including devices such as Extra High Voltage Transformers and subsystem components, to the combined effects of the complete composite EMP Waveform for early stage research and development, as well as testing and validation purposes at both the transmission and distribution levels.”

Moving Forward

This bill was reported favorably by Committee with just one vote in opposition. This type of bipartisan support is necessary for a bill this important to move forward to the floor of the Senate. Actually, the Senate will probably not take up this bill. Usually the Senate takes up the House version of the bill (HR 5895 in this case) and immediately substitutes the language from this bill for the House passed language.

The two different versions of the bill that come out of this process will be cleaned up by a conference committee. One of the important things coming out of this year’s committee will be a determination of which line item will end up being reported under the CESER heading in subsequent years.