Nov 29, 2025
Why Substations Must Be Hardened in a Dangerous World
As the war in Ukraine has dragged on, we've seen both sides hitting substations belonging to the other. The strategy is fairly straightforward. Knock out the enemy's ability to distribute power and you cripple their ability to make war. What is happening in Ukraine represents just one reason substations need to be hardened against attack.
Even in areas that are not war-torn, there is always the threat of terrorist attacks. The world truly is a dangerous place. And unfortunately, all sorts of bad actors would think nothing of disrupting power by knocking out inadequately hardened substations.
Physically Hardening a Substation
Designing a substation to resist military and terrorist attacks requires multiple levels of planning, design, and engineering. Let's begin with physically hardening equipment via appropriate enclosures.
Concrete and composite blast walls can protect everything from transformers and switchgear to control rooms. A substation perimeter can be equipped with defenses, including anti-vehicle barriers and double fencing. And of course, advanced access control is an absolute must.
The most hardened facilities also take advantage of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) principles that emphasize visibility. With strategic lighting and clear sightlines, approaching a substation with stealth is more difficult.
Hardening Against Electromagnetic and Electronic Attack
An attack designed to take out a substation doesn't have to involve bullets or bombs. Attackers can harness a variety of electromagnetic and electronic tools instead. So how do designers harden against such attacks? They do it primarily through two means:
Conduction Mitigation – Resisting electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and intentional interference (IEMI) attacks is all about mitigating energy conduction. Sensitive equipment is protected through shielding, filtering, and grounding.
Faraday Cages – Tried-and-true Faraday cages and EMI-rated seals protect against high-altitude and localized pulse events. A properly protected substation will continue working flawlessly.
Directed-energy and electromagnetic tactics are not the norm, but they still are a possibility. Engineers must account for them, whether upgrading an existing substation or building a new one.
Threat Detection and Surveillance
Even with the best and most redundant physical systems in place, some attackers will attempt to hit substations anyway. A well-designed substation will therefore be equipped with threat detection and surveillance capabilities.
In terms of hardware, the substation will be equipped with radar motion sensors and thermal cameras. Drones might also be utilized to identify any movement at any time of night or day. Better hardware is enhanced by redundant communications networks that guarantee all alerts can be successfully transmitted.
On the software side, AI monitoring and behavioral analytics can make sense of suspicious behavior around a substation. Where we previously had to wait for a verified breach attempt in order to do something, AI and behavioral analytics warn us that an attack may be imminent. We can be proactive in stopping them.
Just the Starting Point
Deploying physical barriers and digital security solutions is just the starting point for hardening the modern substation against terrorists and military powers. Proper hardening also requires:
Compliance with operational and regulatory frameworks
Integrating cyber and physical architectures for hybrid threat defense
Implementing strategic national resilience measures
Hardening a substation is very comparable to hardening a global computer network. Engineers and designers must work with security experts to anticipate and mitigate every possible attack vector. Once a substation is properly hardened, those same experts have a new job: making sure it stays that way.
The world is a dangerous place. And given our collective hunger for power, taking out substations makes sense to terrorists and military attackers. It goes without saying that our substations need to be hardened against them.
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