Missed the live session on September 30? Watch the full recording below. Scott Hooper, Director of Cybersecurity at Clearway, shares five years of lessons from building an OT cyber risk program across a renewable fleet, from a first device inventory to quarterly reporting for leadership and insurers.
When Scott Hooper joined Clearway five and a half years ago, the company ran about 60 wind and solar sites across the US. He asked where the OT asset inventory was. Nobody had one.
In this session, Scott and Kevin Hamman, Product Delivery Manager at DeNexus, walk through what came next: the tooling, the first financial risk baseline, and the reporting habits that keep the program funded year after year.
Clearway deployed network monitoring at every plant and fed switch traffic into a central inventory. The count came back at almost 10,000 devices, against an internal estimate of 6,000 to 7,000. Scott's team made that number manageable by grouping assets by site type (large wind, small wind, solar) and by OEM, then assessing risk one slice at a time.
With a fleet-wide baseline in dollars, Clearway could test projects before committing budget. Replacing every out-of-date switch at one plant would have cost around $1.5 million, a request Scott knew the business would decline. Modeling next-generation firewalls showed risk dropping across every site, which gave him the case to replace firewalls fleet-wide.
Not every result matched expectations. Privileged access management moved the number less than Scott predicted. His read: PAM is a layer on top, and without segmentation underneath, the network is still Swiss cheese.
Clearway's quarterly cybersecurity steering committee now sees OT risk as financial impact, alongside what each fix would cost. That makes some decisions easy. If replacing switches on 100 turbines costs more than the exposure it removes, the team monitors and threat hunts instead, and leadership signs off on that call with the numbers in front of them.
The same story pays off at insurance renewal. Showing brokers and underwriters a program that matures every year has supported lower premiums for four consecutive years, while Clearway also increased its coverage.
Kevin frames the approach as four steps: baseline, prioritize, track, report. Clearway runs it quarterly, and each cycle's feedback reshapes the next set of priorities. The loop also gives Clearway a starting point for every wind farm it acquires, where the network diagram may be six years out of date.
Watch the full session above for Scott's take on AI for defenders, the contractor connection still pulling data three years after its contract ended, and why a wind turbine and a refinery can't share a patching schedule.
Want to see what your own OT risk looks like in dollars? Fill out the form below to book a live demo with the DeNexus team. We'll walk you through how a fleet-wide baseline, what-if project modeling, and board-ready reporting would work for your sites.