Guest commentary: Clear out the rules and protect the substations
Sabotage and attacks threaten central supply facilities. Florian Bieberbach, head of Stadtwerke München, is calling on politicians to reduce bureaucracy and give facility operators more rights.
Recent attacks on substations in Jänschwalde and Bergheim demonstrate that energy and water supplies, telecommunications or public transportation are increasingly targeted by hybrid threats – from cyberattacks to sabotage. Protecting critical infrastructure (Kritis) has become one of the central security tasks of our time. In recent years, Brussels and Berlin have introduced numerous provisions to strengthen the security of critical infrastructure.
These include the European Cybersecurity Directive and the CER Directive, implemented in Germany as the Kritis Umbrella Law. The aim of all these laws is undoubtedly correct. However, they focus too much on documentation, evidence and legal protection, rather than on effective security measures, resulting in excessive double and multiple regulation in practice.
This problem is further exacerbated by new laws affecting companies' protective measures, unfortunately adding more hurdles. The European AI Regulation is particularly relevant. Modern monitoring systems of critical infrastructure locations increasingly contain AI components.
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