The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

This results in almost all of the situations threads here address.

In a better timeline, everyone has stable and secure OSs on all their devices, and the default is for everything to be locally networked, with optional monitoring from the outside via a data diode.

To put it more simply: if the phase is wrong, the effect is the same as a short circuit, which fuses and circuit breakers protect against. If the frequency is wrong, the phase will become wrong after a number of cycles.

> There isn't really any practical way to prevent overvoltage though. So a rogue controller in charge of all the solar systems in a street might be able to do quite a lot of damage to consumer devices.

There is, it's called a surge protector or surge protective device (SPD). It converts any overvoltage above a certain level into a short to ground, which then trips the fuse or circuit breaker. It's often used as a protection against lightning-induced currents.

> A problem from the utility point of view is that they can no longer guarantee that the 240 V side of the distribution system is safe to work on just by tripping a breaker on either side of the distribution transformer. So all work on the 240 V distribution system has to be done with the assumption that the system is live.

From what I've seen, the utility workers usually ground the wiring when working on it (they have a special-purpose device for that). Once it's safely connected to ground, it's no longer live.

Too much from production the frequency skyrocket, little production the frequency plunge.

Now classic grids are designed on large areas to average the load for big power plants, this way those plant see small instantaneous change in their output demand, let's say a 50MW power plant see 100-300kW instantaneous change, that's something they can handle quick enough. With massive p.v., eolic etc grid demand might change MUCH more for big power plant, like a 50MW P.P. need to scale back or power up of 10MW suddenly and that's way too much to sustain. When this happen if the demand is too much the frequency plunge, grid dispatcher operators have to cut off large areas to lower the demand (so called rolling blackouts), when the demand drop too quickly the frequency skyrocket and large PP can't scale back fast enough so they simply disconnect. Disconnecting the generation fall and the frequency stabilize, unfortunately most p.v. is grid tied, if a p.p. disconnect most p.v. inverters who have seen the frequency spike disconnect as well creating a cascading effect of quickly alternating too low and too high frequency causing vast area blackouts.

Long story short a potential attack is simply planting a command "at solar noon of 26 June stop injecting to the grid, keep not injecting till solar noon + 5'", with just "1 second or so" (due to eventual time sync issues) all inverters of a certain brand might stop injecting, making the generation fall, a bit of rolling blackouts and large pp compensate quickly. Than the 5' counter stop, all inverters restart injecting en-masse, while the large pp are full power as well, the frequency skyrocket, large pp disconnect causing most grid-tied inverter to follow them, there are large change an entire geographic segment of a grid fall. Interconnection operators in such little time do not know what to do and quickly the blackout might became even larger with almost all interconnection going down to protect active parts of the grid, causing more frequency instability and so more blackouts.

Such attack might led to some days without power.

That's why instead of pushing self consumption and semi-autonomous systems we push grid-tied and cloud-ties crap, to be tied to someone else service, slave of that. It's the "in 2030 you'll own nothing" already a reality in modern cars, connected to the OEM with a much higher access than the formal owner, much modern IoT and cloud+mobile crap. People do not even understand they do now own, until it's too late.

Another simple example: in most of the world banks between them have open standard to automatic exchange transaction, in EU that's OpenBank APIs, with signed XML and JSON feeds. There is NO REASON to block customers for directly use such APIs from a personal desktop client. All banks I know block such usage. So you do not have all your transactions signed by the bank on your iron, you have NOTHING in hand. In case of "serious issues" you have nothing to prove what you have on your bank, what you have done with your money. In the past we have had paper stuff to prove, we now have signed XML/JSON witch is even better than paper being much harder to falsify, but no, we miss because 99% must own nothing.

We have connected cars with a SIM inside, but instead of having the car offering APIs and a client or perhaps even a WebUI, directly to their formal owner we have to pass through their OEM, the real substantial owner. And we can't even disconnect the car. In the EU it's even illegal for new car to be disconnected since the emergency e-call service must be active on all new cars.

And so on.