Protecting the Power

Michael Legatt’s career defending the electricity grid started in the wake of the 2003 Northeast blackout and now winds its way into the MSES classroom.

For a few minutes in 2003, Michael Legatt thought he might be to blame for what turned out to be the biggest blackout in North America this century. On August 14, he had just popped a quarter in the coin slot of a dryer in his New York City apartment building and hit “Start” when the room went dark.

At the exact moment Legatt was preparing to start the dryer, a tree limb in Ohio came in contact with an electricity transmission line, sparking a fault that, missed by grid operators, cascaded across the Northeast. More than 50 million people in eight states and Ontario, Canada, lost power that day.

In the midst of the chaos, Legatt, then a graduate student pursuing his doctorate in clinical psychology, found his passion.

“When I read the report on what caused the outage, I was really interested in the neuropsychology of visual attention,” Legatt said. “Did technology fail? Not really. Did humans fail? Not really. It was that meshing of the two that was the real failure point.”

Legatt pivoted to apply his background to the energy sector and picked up a second doctorate in energy systems engineering along the way. He spent a decade at ERCOT – the Electric Reliability Council of Texas – as their principal human factors engineer before founding ResilientGrid in October 2016, where he currently is the CEO.

ResilientGrid recognizes the critical role humans play in the grid's reliability and the role of human factors and human performance in their success. The company provides software and services to empower critical grid operators like control room operators and cyber analysts to strengthen situational awareness and decision-making in real-time operations.

Now, Legatt is bringing his accumulated knowledge of power grid reliability and human factors to Northwestern's Master of Science in Energy and Sustainability (MSES) program. MSES is jointly offered by Northwestern Engineering and the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy.

This spring, Legatt will teach Special Topics: Cybersecurity and the Grid for the first time. The course topic is one of growing national concern. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) reported that US power grids have as many as 24,000 weak spots vulnerable to an ever-growing number of increasingly sophisticated cyber criminals. Those access points increase by about 60 every day, according to NERC.

Legatt is building present and future lines of defense against these would-be bad actors.

“What I find really interesting is that we work on the most complex system on the planet built by the most complex creatures on the planet,” he said of the grid and humans, respectively. “The question is, ‘How do we help the everyday heroes who are making sure that the system works, especially considering how practically everything now in society needs reliable electric power?’”

Those everyday heroes are the grid operators and cyber analysts who spend their days and nights in secured control rooms around the country, sitting in front of banks of massive screens monitoring and maneuvering the flow of electrons over lines traversing the nation.

When the people or technology at the foundation of the grid fail, the costs can be massive. Economic losses from the August 2003 Northeast blackout totalled between $7 billion and $14 billion, according to the NERC. The outage was also blamed directly for 90 deaths.

Legatt’s goal with his MSES class is to give students a broad overview of the complexities of the grid as new technology replaces mid-20th century mechanical parts and local microgrids powered by smaller-scale wind and solar arrays become more common, telecommunications and cybersecurity become increasingly important, and artificial intelligence and machine learning changes the way work is done.

“One of the most important things to understand is on a holistic level how these systems, people, and organizations work together to ensure that the lights are on and continue to stay that way,” Legatt said. “Practically every new technology is going to interface with the grid in some way. That recognition can produce some really interesting insights, conversations, and decisions.”