Defending the Invisible Grid

Case Introduction

In late 2025, a senior executive team at Dominion Energy—one of the largest electric and gas utilities in the United States—faced a decision that would shape the resilience of the Mid‑Atlantic energy system for decades.

After a series of escalating cyber and physical threats linked to foreign and domestic actors, the company had developed a proposal for a major “AI‑enabled Grid Resilience Program” across its electric transmission and distribution network in Virginia and the Carolinas. The proposal combined new control room software, expanded sensor deployments, AI‑driven anomaly detection, and a reconfiguration of critical substations and data flows.

On paper, the program promised faster detection of intrusions, better prediction of equipment failures, and more flexible response to storms and attacks. In practice, it would also:

• Centralize more operational control in a few digital platforms
• Increase dependence on third‑party vendors and cloud providers
• Trigger new regulatory scrutiny and public expectations
• Require billions of dollars of capital over the next decade, with unclear cost recovery

At the same time, senior leaders knew that doing nothing—or doing too little—could leave the company exposed to an evolving threat landscape that no longer respected national borders, sector boundaries, or traditional risk models.

The core question was no longer just technical:
How should Dominion Energy design and govern its next wave of grid modernization under intensifying geopolitical, cyber, and physical threats—while maintaining public trust and regulatory legitimacy?

Background: Dominion Energy and the Regional Context

Dominion Energy supplies electricity and natural gas to millions of customers, with a particularly dense footprint in Virginia, including service to data centers, defense installations, and key elements of U.S. federal government infrastructure around the Washington, D.C. region.

Over the past decade, Dominion has:

• Retired and repurposed coal assets while expanding natural gas and renewables
• Invested heavily in transmission and distribution upgrades
• Become a critical supplier to one of the world’s largest clusters of cloud and data‑center capacity in Northern Virginia

This positioning—serving both ordinary households and some of the most data‑intensive and security‑sensitive loads in the world—made Dominion simultaneously a regional power company and a quiet backbone of the digital economy.

Rising Threats: Cyber, Physical, and Geopolitical

By 2024–2025, U.S. government briefings and public reports highlighted that adversary actors—state‑linked and criminal—were increasingly probing U.S. critical infrastructure:

• Cyber intrusions against power utilities, pipelines, and water systems had shifted from opportunistic ransomware to more targeted reconnaissance on operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS).
• Physical attacks on substations, including vandalism and more sophisticated shootings, underscored how relatively low‑tech assaults could cause high‑impact outages.
• Geopolitical tensions with Russia, China, Iran, and other actors increased the perceived likelihood that cyber tools could be used as instruments of coercion or deterrence against the U.S. and its allies.
• Domestic extremism raised additional concern that critical infrastructure could also be targeted from within U.S. borders.

For Dominion, the risk picture changed along three dimensions:

1. Scale of potential impact
   High‑value loads—such as hyperscale data centers and federal facilities—meant that a localized outage could have outsized economic and national‑security implications.

2. Speed of propagation
   Digitalization and interconnection of control systems meant that misconfigurations, malware, or erroneous data could propagate more quickly than traditional, manually operated systems.

3. Visibility and accountability
   Media scrutiny, social media amplification, and regulatory expectations meant that any major incident would be dissected in real time, with blame quickly assigned.

The company’s board began asking sharper questions: Was Dominion’s current grid architecture fit for a world in which infrastructure itself was part of geopolitical competition?