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The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

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Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#211

Post by DoctorOetker »

mikewarot wrote: post #204
DoctorOetker wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's incredibly hard to implement a data diode for PV systems, enemy satellites can modulate light (like a TV remote, but lower baudrate to stay below the noise floor) and an inverter could decode it and respond accordingly. They measure the PV panels anyway for MPPT.

Sunlight is about 1000 watts/meter^2 on the ground. Do you have any idea how much power you'd have to send to get through a Jewish Space Laser(tm) to even have a -40 db s/(s+n) signal to pull out of the noise through a side-channel attack? It would be interesting to use a solar panel as a sensor for moonbounce of an IR laser, though. You'd have to try at the almost new moon, with a window of a few hours/month ;-)

You send the instructions at night.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#212

Post by ansgri »

kkfx wrote: post #61
yetihehe wrote: post #5

>The owner of the panels and inverters can meanwhile establish a connection with that manufacturer using an app or website, and via the manufacturer see how their own panels are doing > It wasn’t necessary from a technical standpoint to let everything run through the manufacturer’s servers, but it was chosen to do it this way. (emphasis from article) I'm working on IoT cloud system. It was chosen to be done this way…

Victron (to cite an NL vendor) actually can perfectly operate in LAN only via MQTT and ModBUS also offering a (bad) WebUI locally for settings pretty anything, including a display for the said WebUI in a framebuffer with an embedded mini-keyboard. It's up to the installer decide to go with their cloud offer or not. The sole remark I have against them (beside the not so good software quality it's the impossibility for…

I'm not a pro in these systems (yet, I hope), but my understanding is that, beside lack of demand, HVDC is a safety nightmare compared to AC, and inverters are getting more efficient each year. So, even given the choice, I'd keep AC home-wide distribution and set up inverters in key places, with exactly the highest required voltage.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#213

Post by cesarb »

msandford wrote: post #205
kortilla wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Months isn’t correct. Unless there was damage it could be recovered within a day.

Would love to know more about this. How would that happen? What's the process to bring it back up so fast? The video has a lot of good info and seems compelling. During the Texas freeze many power company officials said the exact same thing, if the Texas grid went down it would have taken weeks to bring everything back online.

> What's the process to bring it back up so fast?

It's called black start (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start), and power companies plan for it, and the necessary components are regularly tested. It's not a fast process, it can take many hours to bring most of the grid back up. We had last year a large-scale blackout here in Brazil, and a area larger than Texas lost power; most of it was back in less than a day.

> if the Texas grid went down it would have taken weeks to bring everything back online.

The trick word here is "everything". Every time there's a large-scale blackout, there's some small parts of the grid which fail to come back and need repairs. What actually matters is how long it takes for most of the grid to come back online.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#214

Post by titzer »

yetihehe wrote: post #190
titzer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People gonna be people. It's up to engineers and product designers to make things user friendly but also safe-by-default. If something needs to be configured, then provide instructions on how to configure it. Instead of pretending that it's society's fault (can't be arsed ), maybe ask why the IT industry can't make instructions that are written out--explicit, fairly standard, and easy to follow--like the manual for p…

> fairly standard, and easy to follow--like the manual for putting together a piece of furniture. And people still have problems following that instructions. We gave a lot of instructions, but some people just don't read them. Or can't understand and follow them. Example from this week: Yeah, main support guy for our client is on holidays this week and only a girl from sales is available and she doesn't know why our…

> no one told her she needs to message us

Did you have that written down somewhere? In instructions, which was my point.

Sorry for the snark, but I think "no one knows how to do anything" coupled with "Oh, the idiot didn't know to discombulate the canooter valve before inserting into the tinklerater--it's so obvious we didn't write it down" supports the point I'm making.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#215

Post by leymed »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #189
leymed wrote: post #118

Reading through comments I saw a lot of comments confusing cloud security with electrical safety of a system. Electrical protections are completely separate from communication line/ internet, has to be hard wired. As the size of plant/substation increases the automation and control system (again completely different thing from electrical protection) has its own internet system. Burning down substation, exploding tran…

You're the one that seem to be missing something, we're not talking about local electrical safety, but about the global grid stability, with a hacker potentially hijacking software controlling tens of GW, spread out over many personal home installations of solar panels.

My point is hacking into home PV inverters doesn’t affect grid stability, you can’t penetrate into grid in that way. At worst we’re talking about losing power for a short time at those homes. When the demand is planned for a region you specifically exclude PV for load flow studies.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#216

Post by carapace »

outsomnia wrote: post #177
DoctorOetker wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPS can provide the coherent reference, if you mean transmitting signal (say sound) while the panel is illuminated by the sun theres youtube videos of people doing that, with a laser pointer, but in sunlight and without information theoretic justified modulation scheme. Nothing prevents the satellite to transmit the commands at night, if that feels more convincing to you. Ask yourself what is the active area of a pho…

This is just FUD.

I thought so to at first but no, this person is not wrong. The situation is FUBAR.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#217

Post by Aachen »

hinkley wrote: post #79
eldaisfish wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are splitting hairs about the wrong issue. When it is sunny in the netherlands, it is likely sunny everywhere in NL because of how small the country is. This is the situation where having so much solar power capacity (kW) is dangerous. The risk scales with energy output but it would not term nameplate capacity a "completely useless metric".

I dunno. I lived next to a small inland sea most of my adult life. The number of times someone on the other side of town asserted it was raining when in fact it was not was quite high. Every adult in Seattle eventually has to learn that if you have an activity planned on the other side of town, if you cancel it because it’s raining at your house you’re not going to get anything done. You have to phone a friend or jus…

"Sometimes it rained in a part of town only" does not disprove the person saying "it can be sunny virtually everywhere at the same time in a small country"

For a simple demonstration, https://www.buienradar.nl/nederland/zon-en-wolken/wolkenrada... has been showing cloudless hours pretty regularly in the last month. Someone meaning malice can certainly keep an eye on that for a few days to find a good moment

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#218

Post by Aachen »

lucianbr wrote: post #101
eldaisfish wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are splitting hairs about the wrong issue. When it is sunny in the netherlands, it is likely sunny everywhere in NL because of how small the country is. This is the situation where having so much solar power capacity (kW) is dangerous. The risk scales with energy output but it would not term nameplate capacity a "completely useless metric".

> When it is sunny in the netherlands, it is likely sunny everywhere in NL because of how small the country is. Often friends of mine who live in my city report rain when I see none, or no rain when it's raining outside my window. That's to say nothing of a location 30km away, where basically anything can happen. Do we live on the same planet?

On which planet does the regular occurrence of one phenomenon disprove the regular occurrence of another?

It can both be true that weather is locally different on most days but coincides to be universally cloudless on a fair number of hours every late-summer month (easily within a reasonable waiting time for an attacker)

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#219

Post by Aachen »

paxys wrote: post #89
ezfe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article says 80% of known websites, which are 19% of all websites. Probably where it came from. https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cn-cloudflare

That's still the number of websites, not their traffic. A personal blog hosted on Cloudflare and google.com are not both the same.

Probably that just skews it worse though. Most people aren't cf customers but many of the big targets seek protection

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#220

Post by automatic6131 »

huijzer wrote: post #207
ale42 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, those batteries are not there (yet)...

Don’t underestimate exponentials. Tesla produced 6.5 GWh of battery storage in 2022, 14.7 GWh in 2023, and will probably double again in 2024. And other battery manufacturers such as BYD grow fast too.

Always underestimate exponentials: none exist in nature, they're just an early phase of an S curve (sigmoid, if you want the $10 word)
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