A state-sponsored agency in New Mexico aims to jump the queue for wind farms tying into the grid – suggesting it should be the one to lead green power development in the Silver State. But competing projects are crying foul, suggesting that Goldman Sachs money has turned heads and encouraged a bending of the rules for transmission planning.

Among the many paths that hackers take to break into utilities’ enterprise networks, one attack vector is used more frequently than any other. That vector is, ironically, the very set of tools that information technology (IT) professionals use to provide tech support – remote access terminals. Securing these channels requires some commonsense approaches to preventing break-ins and misuse, but it also calls for specialized strategies that maintain the IT support tools that utility workers require.