China Is Studying How to Hack and Crash Our Power Grids

We have been tracking this issue for years

The following article, written by Erika Langerova on LinkedIn, presents some valuable points regarding the Chinese efforts to hack Western grids. This extends beyond this article, and it aligns with my comments to our readers: prepare to survive natural and man-made disasters.

On Energy News Beat’s website, I published on January 12, 2024 Could China Hack Our Electric Grid? – in 4 words – Yes and How Soon? The Real Question – Is Mayorkas in on it?, It got a lot of attention and was updated on February 14th, 2025, with more information. On that site, it is an “evergreen” article, meaning it consistently receives activity and is frequently visited. There were 492 major grid interconnections that the Biden Administration restored to the grid, which had been compromised and could be remotely shut down by Chinese or foreign agents.

We have also had several other key stories on the same topic, and there are real concerns about the wind and solar equipment manufactured in China and their potential for remote control, as well as the presence of transmitters and hacking gear in the electronics.

And tonight, after reading the story from Erika, it was very troublesome. It is below for your information, and I am reaching out to see if she would be willing to come on the podcast.

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All of the Chinese academic articles I examined are scientific, peer-reviewed articles published in impact-factor journals (mostly Western publishers), which go through independent review by at least three independent reviewers before being published. In this case, it is not possible for something to be presented by Chinese merely to incite fear or to confuse us— impacted technical scientific literature simply does not work that way.

What I found is a vast body of technically advanced work. Across dozens of publications, Chinese researchers study how failures propagate through the Western power grids, how critical nodes or links can be identified and targeted, and how to optimize the effectiveness of these attacks. In many cases, simulations are conducted specifically to identify the minimal effort or cost required to trigger a large-scale outage or systemic collapse. Many papers simulate targeted or hybrid attacks, such as node removal, edge overload, or false data injections. Several studies explicitly focus on identifying the most effective attack vectors under constraints such as limited resources, partial system knowledge, or time sensitivity. Some publications models control algorithms that minimize the number of manipulated nodes needed to induce power grid-wide failure.

This research alone would already be cause for concern. But paired with what we know from real-world Chinese cyber operations like Volt, Flax and Salt Typhoon, the picture becomes much more concerning. Over the past years, U.S. officials have confirmed that Chinese hackers have infiltrated American critical infrastructure, and that they were prepositioning for future disruption. Similar concerns regarding infiltration of critical infrastructure are beginning to surface in Europe, although the confirmed intrusions remain less public.

What amplifies this threat even further is how deeply Western energy infrastructure is being built on Chinese-made technologies. From solar inverters to battery energy storage systems, critical components of the green transition increasingly rely on Chinese hardware and software solutions – often with remote access capabilities – to the point where we might as well call it the Red Deal instead of the Green Deal. This growing dependency could serve as a force multiplier for the attacks modeled in these very publications.

The warning signs are clear. Chinese scholars have built a vast body of detailed, simulation-based research on how to destabilize Western power grids, meanwhile Chinese cyber operators have already proven capable of gaining access to the very same real systems. Whether or not they plan to act, the mere existence of such capability demands serious defensive preparation.

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Research That Should Raise Red Flags

My analysis started with the Scopus academic database, filtering for Chinese-authored publications that included the keyword 'power grid' alongside keywords pointing to foreign power grids, such as 'U.S.' or 'Europe'. The numbers alone were telling: 367 publications focused on the U.S. grids, and 166 on the European grids, authored over the last two decades.

To get a clearer picture of the research themes, I used automated tool for bibliometric analysis called VOSViewer to examine the keywords used across the publications. This involved identifying which terms appeared most frequently and which ones commonly occurred together. The goal was to uncover patterns in how Chinese researchers approach the topic of foreign power grids. When I visualized the keyword map, a troubling pattern emerged: terms like “cascading failure,” “outages,” and “vulnerability” were clearly heavily present, see the screenshot below for an example.

While the keyword analysis revealed a worrying trend, the real insight came later through a closer examination of the papers themselves. To move beyond surface-level analysis, I manually reviewed the full text of publications that contained the most concerning keywords—particularly those suggesting an interest in disruption, attacks, failures and vulnerabilities.

Example of a keyword co-occurrence map based on Chinese-affiliated publications referencing the U.S. Power Grid (367 scientific papers, filtered to 167 unique keywords), notice the problematic terms like “cascading failure”, “outages” or “vulnerability” marked in red

Let the Papers Speak

The list "Selected statements from the manually reviewed Chinese academic literature (non-exhaustive)" in the chapter below presents a selection of direct statements from Chinese-authored research papers that I manually reviewed. I chose to include the original statements from these publications so readers can see for themselves what is being studied. The intent behind these studies may be debatable, but the content itself is not.

Many of these studies openly describe how to identify the most critical nodes in the power grid, simulate targeted failures, or inject malicious data to mislead control systems. Others go further, modeling how to trigger cascading blackouts to destroy the power grid. What these papers focus on, how they’re structured, and the language they use make clear that many are systematically analyzing how to crash or destabilize power grids. The most troubling thing is that they are using realistic U.S. and European power grid models as test cases.

Some might argue that these realistic Western power grid models are widely used in the scientific community as standardized benchmarks for testing. That is true. And it makes perfect sense for Western researchers to use them as benchmarks, after all, these systems reflect their own infrastructure and help evaluate how attacks or deterrence methods would perform in real-world conditions. But for Chinese researchers, the same logic doesn’t hold.

China’s power grids are fundamentally different from those in the West—in its physical architecture, grid topology, energy mix, market design, and even regulatory framework. Simulating attacks or cascading failures on Western grid models tells Chinese researchers little about how their own power grid would behave. So, the question remains: why such intense focus on our power grids?

If the intentions were purely theoretical or methodological, one would expect Chinese researchers to apply their simulations to Chinese power grid models, or at least neutral, abstract power grid models. And yes, those generic country-agnostic models exist. Instead, we see repeated use of real-world Western infrastructure.

Deterrence Begins with Recognizing That Capability Outweighs Intent

What makes this research body particularly concerning is not just the technical detail, but the fact that it is being conducted on a scale, over a span of years, and using real Western power grid data from publicly accessible models. It suggests a deliberate and sustained effort to build a playbook for disruption, whether or not it is ever put into practice.

It is important to stress that these are open-source publications, and no direct operational linkage to Chinese state-sponsored activity is implied. However, in the context of confirmed intrusions into Western critical infrastructure by Chinese actors, and ongoing concerns about prepositioning for future disruption, the convergence between academic research and real-world capability cannot be ignored. At the same time, the risk is amplified by the West’s growing dependence on Chinese-made technologies in the energy sector, which increases the attack surface and creates dependencies that may be strategically exploited.

The intent may remain uncertain, but the capability is now well-documented. They look prepared. Are we?

And one last point: this is just the publicly available stuff. Makes you wonder what they're working on behind closed doors.

Note: If you're interested in further details, findings or methodology used in this research; or full text of the studies cited below; feel free to contact me at: erika.langerova@cvut.cz.

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Selected statements from the manually reviewed Chinese academic literature (non-exhaustive)

"Hence, in this paper the several functions to determine the importance of nodes in a complex network were adopted to search for the destructive nodes in a power grid. The node data from Western United States power grid was taken as an example." Source: Selection of the Disruptive Nodes to Destroy Power Grid

In this paper, US power grid with 4941 nodes and 6594 edges is taken as examples. The network is attacked by deleting some percent nodes … The simulation results show that, in view of the largest connected component G and efficiency E, Betweenness Centrality-based attack is most destructive to the network structure than other attacks, and the attack based on Aggregation coefficient is the least destructive. Source: Structural Vulnerability of Power Grid Under Malicious Node-Based Attacks

In this paper, taking the US power grid as an example, by deliberately deleting some percent of edges according to different strategies which represents different attacks apparently, we calculate the collapse degree of the attacked network by three metrics. We found that, under intentional attack on the edges with higher betweenness centrality and the ones with larger multiplication of node betweenness centrality, the US power grid is inferior in invulnerability. The methods used in this paper could be used to identify the vulnerable edges of complex networks, especially for the key infrastructures. Source: Electric Power Grid Invulnerability Under Intentional Edge-Based Attacks

Applying the real data of the US power grid, we compare the effects of two different attacks for the network robustness against cascading failures, i.e., removal by either the descending or ascending orders of the loads. … In the case of α < 0.7, our investigation by the numerical simulations leads to a counterintuitive finding on the US power grid that the attack on the nodes with the lowest loads is more harmful than the attack on the ones with the highest loads. Source: Cascading failures of power grids under three attack strategies

We investigate the performance of the power grid of the western United States subject to three intentional attacks. Simulation results show that the effects of different attacks for the network robustness against cascading failures have close relations with the tunable parameter θ. Particularly, the attack on the edges with the lower load in the case of θ<1.4 can result in larger cascading failures than the one on the edges with the higher load. In addition, compared with the other two attacks, a new attack, i.e., removing the edges with the smallest proportion between the total capacities of the neighboring edges of and the capacity of the attacked edge, usually are prone to trigger cascading failures over the US power grid. Source: Robustness of the western United States power grid under edge attack strategies due to cascading failures

Liu et al. first proposed a state attack under the DC model in 2009.The implementation of this attack requires the attacker to obtain the topology and location information of the entire power grid and successfully avoids traditional bad data detection through simulation attacks. The mechanism achieves the purpose of covert attacks. Later, Hug et al. proposed an attack modeling method under the communication model. Due to the difficult conditions for the implementation of this attack, a method based on local area topology and line parameter information is proposed on this basis. In recent years, researchers have further relaxed the degree of information that attackers need to obtain and proposed a method to construct malicious data injection attacks without knowing topology and line parameter information. The core idea is to use the historical measurement constructs an estimated measurement matrix that is equivalent to the real system measurement matrix. The construction method uses principal component analysis. This type of attack is also called a blind online vicious data injection attack [7-9]. In addition, on the basis of state attacks, malicious data injection attack methods for other attack targets are also derived. Based on the characteristics of the power grid, Yuan et al. added reasonable constraints to the attack on the basis of Liu to meet the real scenario, that is, it cannot attack the measurement of the power generation end; the attacker cannot modify the measurement of the zero injection node in the system to ensure concealment; the attacker, the load measurement and the power flow of the transmission line can be modified. Based on this theory, Yuan et al. proposed an attack to increase the load of some load nodes while reducing the load of other nodes without changing the total load of the system, namely load redistribution vicious data injection attack. On this basis, Liu et al. also proposed a load redistribution attack implementation scheme under local information; Kim et al. changed the attack target from an incorrect estimation of the system state to an incorrect estimation of the topology. After the whole network topology and line parameter information, the current system topology is changed through physical attacks, and the state of It is called cyber-physical coordinated attack. Source: Research on power grid planning based on vicious data

Power grids, due to their lack of network redundancy and structural interdependence, are particularly vulnerable to cascading failures, a phenomenon where a few failed nodes-having their loads exceeding their capacities - can trigger a widespread collapse of all nodes. Our analysis encompasses a range of synthetic networks featuring small-world or scale-free properties, as well as real-world network configurations like the IEEE bus systems and the US power grid. Source: Cascading Failures in Power Grids: A Load Capacity Model with Node Centrality

In this brief, we formulate a cost-constrained hybrid attack in power grids, where both nodes and links are targeted with a limited total attack cost. Based on the consequence and cost of removing a component (node or link), we propose an attack centrality metric for components, which can be either local or global depending on the depth of cascading failures. We further propose a greedy hybrid attack and another optimal hybrid attack by applying the attack centrality. Simulation results on IEEE bus test data demonstrate that the optimal attack is more efficient than the greedy one. Furthermore, we find, counterintuitively, that the local centrality-based attack algorithms perform better than the global centrality-based ones when attack cost is a concern. Source: Vulnerability Assessment of Power Grids against Cost-Constrained Hybrid Attacks

Finding the key nodes in the network plays a decisive role in network cascading failure and fault repair. This paper aims to establish a method for controlling cascade failures driven by nonlinear data in complex power grids. The focus is on minimizing the input nodes of the control system. The model is applied to the simulation network ER, SF and the real network topology of the US Powergrid to verify that it achieves the largest cascading failure of the network under the least node control, so as to effectively predict the cascading failure of the reverse protection network, and effectively quickly repair cascading failures before the system completely crashes. Source: A Nonlinear Model Based on Data-Driven Control for Cascading Failure in Power Grids

This paper proposes a novel nonlinear model of cascade failure in weighted complex networks considering overloaded edges to describe the redundant capacity for edges and capture the interaction strength of nodes …. Finally, the cascading invulnerability is simulated in several typical network models and the US power grid. The results show that the model is a feasible and reasonable change of weight parameters, capacity coefficient, distribution coefficient, and overload coefficient can significantly improve the destructiveness of complex networks against cascade failure. Source: Nonlinear model of cascade failure in weighted complex networks considering overloaded edges

The iterative process of a cascading failure on scale-free networks is analysed by removing one edge. We find that the proposed new model can control the spread of cascading failure more significantly. To make our conclusions more convincing, we have explored the performance of new models in real network by the power grid of the western United States. Source: Cascading failure model for the mitigating edge failure of scale-free networks

Functionally identical coupled networks are derived from the power grid of the United States, which consists of many independent grids. Many power transmission lines are planned to interconnect those grids and, therefore, the study of the robustness of functionally identical coupled networks becomes important. In this paper, we find that functionally identical coupled networks are more robust than single networks under random attack. Source: Study of robustness in functionally identical coupled networks against cascading failures

In this paper we try to analyze the measures of importance of the nodes in a power grid under cascading failure. Moreover, we introduce the notion of degree correlation for the case where only the statistical information of a power grid is known. Mean field theory is used for our analysis. With these efforts, we can distinguish the most vulnerable nodes and protect them, improving the safety of the power grid. Source: An efficient method of robustness analysis for power grid under cascading failure

Applying the real data of the US power grid, we compare the effects of two different attacks for the network robustness against cascading failures. Source: Cascade-based attack vulnerability on the US power grid

The proposed CFG is able to effectively reveal the mechanism of fault propagation in a transmission network by transforming an electrical network with spatial information into a fault propagation graph with temporal information, thus providing a better way for transmission network vulnerability assessment. Numerical results on IEEE 39-, 118-bus systems and French grid demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Source: A Novel Cascading Faults Graph Based Transmission Network Vulnerability Assessment Method

We investigate the structural vulnerability of complex networks under different edge-based attacks. The simulations demonstrate that, the edges with higher product of betweenness centrality of the two endpoints of one edge connected are more important for SF network, ER random network, autonomous system network (AS), Italy power grid and US airport networks, but the edges with higher edge betweenness centrality are more important for WS networks. Source: Structural vulnerability of complex networks under multiple edge-based attacks

We investigate the vulnerability of complex networks under different node-based attacks. The networks considered include scale-free network (SF), WS small-world network model, ER network and two real-world networks (autonomous system network and Italy power grid). The attacks are induced by removing the nodes in the descending order of the four kinds of weights defined in this paper. Source: Vulnerability of complex networks under multiple node-based attacks

This paper defines, starting from the extended metric for efficiency named as net-ability, an extended betweenness and proposes a joint method of extended betweenness and net-ability to rank the most critical lines and buses in an electrical power grid. The method is illustrated in the IEEE-118-bus, IEEE-300-bus test systems as well as the Italian power grid. Source: Structural vulnerability of power systems: A topological approach

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As I posted yesterday, this week was an excellent dry run for a couple of my homes, where we experienced a power outage due to storms. I was able to fix the issue and restore power, then run on propane or batteries until the power was restored later in the day. Please take a moment to review your basic survival plan for storms, natural, and man-made disasters. Be able to be a support system for your neighbors, and yes, even those you're not fond of; help them out because that’s what American neighbors do.

I, for one, am very grateful to be in the United States, where we take electricity for granted, and feel that it is our right to have health care and power. And there are billions of people who would love to have even a part of the American Dream.