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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

#231

Post by deanishe »

huijzer wrote: post #203
bramblerose wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The failure mode is much simpler: you don't need to physically break anything, you just need to drop 10GW of production from the grid (send a "turn off" command to all solar inverters) leading to a cascade of failures. Getting the grid back online is a laboreous manual process which will take (a lot of) time. Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_po…

That doesn’t necessarily lead to a failure. In Texas a nuclear plant went down. About 1.2 (or 4 times that) GW ( https://www.keranews.org/news/2023-06-22/with-temperatures-s... ). The grid stayed online. Likely thanks to grid batteries, see aforementioned link.

Four units with a combined capacity of 1.2GW.

That's a far cry from 10GW.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#232

Post by Matumio »

foolfoolz wrote: post #171
ano-ther wrote: post #11

Eye opening for me. One of the arguments for renewable energy (besides emissions) has always been its potential for decentralizing power generation. Makes it more resilient, democratizes the means of production etc. This article shows that we inadvertently introduced new choke points. And of course the global security environment makes it more worrisome.

decentralized solar will never be able to provide power at scale. even the scale of 1 household. only homes with lots of land could afford the amount of panels needed. the average home will always need to consume power generated offsite

energy plus buildings are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy-plus_building

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#233

Post by deanishe »

preisschild wrote: post #178
cesarb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the author is looking at nameplate capacity, which is a completely useless metric for variable electricity production sources For solar panels, the nameplate capacity is usually also the power generated at the peak production time, which is the moment when an attacker turning off all inverters at the same time would have the most impact. That is: for an attack (or any other failure), the most important metric is no…

No. You will definitely not get peak capacity even in the sahara. They got those numbers under perfect conditions in a laboratory, not under real circumstances.

Solar panels don't work as well when they're hot, do they?

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#234

Post by aerostable_slug »

ufocia wrote: post #163
TwiztidK wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect most grids are extremely easy to hack I’d expect the opposite. All companies controlling equipment that is part of the “Bulk Electric System” have to be NERC CIP compliant and are audited regularly with large fines for non-compliance. Doesn't guarantee perfect (or even good security) but it’s more likely to be a priority.

How do fines make things better? They confiscate resources that could be used to improve.

It also perverts incentives such that no utility will communicate perhaps helpful information to other utilities or government when said information can leave them liable for fines.

Until there's some kind of hold-harmless agreement, the various industry & government security information sharing groups can only be of limited effectiveness.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#235

Post by kkfx »

ansgri wrote: post #230
kkfx wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes DC is unsafe because if you get electrocuted instead of being "pushed out" you get "attached" to the conductors, but if you have a p.v. inverter at home you already have a 400V DC line from the module to the inverter, how different can be having the same to the garage? The same to an exterior heat-pump unit (where the DC compressor it's typically located) witch is also insulated by the mere fact you drive i…

Valid points, though for safety I thought less about shock and more about fire: the DC arc is much more stable, thus the switches, breakers and relays have to be more robust. The rated DC voltage of magnetic relays is about 1/10 of AC.

Well... I'm ready to pay 10-time the price of an AC breaker to recharge regularly DC-to-DC and since that's the very same link than stationary 400V LFP batteries being able to use the car battery as a home one when I'm at home.

Try to imaging how well you could run if you have a small battery, as an expensive UPS for the home when you are not there (ventilation, homeservers, fridge(s)/freezer(s) etc) and when you are at home, thanks to a let's say 70kWh battery you can also run your heating in winter in case of a blackout...

In the end it's the very same power circuit, why not? 300€ extras in breakers to run my heat pumps more efficiently? No issue, they'll pay back countless more.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#236

Post by rsync »

mikewarot wrote: post #111

It irks me endlessly that we live in the worst timeline, where the computer equivalent of fuses and circuit breakers are almost completely unknown. Instead we trust code blindly. 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 ou…

A network slug is very much like a data circuit breaker.

https://john.kozubik.com/pub/NetworkSlug/tip.html

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#237

Post by hinkley »

Aachen wrote: post #217
hinkley wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Being sunny everywhere at the same time is not the problem with solar panels, and I think this was already covered up thread so this feels like going in circles.

The problem is what percentage are generally in full sun, and how low that percentage goes. My comment was about assuming that all of the panels are not in sun at the same time. Not whether sunny days exist.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#238

Post by hinkley »

eldaisfish wrote: post #159
hinkley wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

clouds and rain do not behave the same as the sun. What point are you trying to make here?

If you’re not talking about day and night, summer winter cycles, then the sun’s behavior is the inverse of the union of clouds and pollution.

Do you know why microinverters exist? They exist because panels next to each other can see different light, and without the micro inverter the entire chain produces no power at all if one of the panels in series is generating no power. So we use microinverters to rescue power stranded by trees, debris, or partial cloud cover.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#239

Post by huijzer »

automatic6131 wrote: post #220
huijzer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

What makes you think we're in the later stages of the battery S-curve currently? More generally technology-wise, what makes you think energy technology in general is an S-curve? Many situations are stacked S-curves. Global energy consumption, for example, looks like an exponential (no flattening yet) [1] if you plot it starting 1800.

Also, the start of an S-curve can be described by an exponential function, right? So it is an exponential.

My point more generally was to not underestimate processes which increase exponentially. Even if they flatten at some point, they can drastically change the world and fast. For example, iPhones and computer chips took off slowly, but once they started moving they took over the world. (Or do you not have multiple smartphones and computer chips in your house right now?)

And yes your point that it's all an s-curve is theoretically correct. But I think it's a semantic discussion. Next time I'll say "never underestimate the first half of an S-curve."

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#240

Post by titzer »

yetihehe wrote: post #222
titzer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This was custom configuration process tailored specifically for that one client and it was written in a detailed instruction with each step tested and with screenshots. Apparently that instruction was not distributed internally at our client office. So mere existence of instructions is not often enough, you will still get very confusing calls about how to attach toaster to 36V to charge a wallet (when you did not sen…

So yes I sympathize that people didn't read the instructions, but I feel that that is partly out of habit that said instructions don't exist. We could work towards a better status quo where the configuration steps are simple, easy to follow, written out, and it's standard practice to just do them and they work.

The IT world seems to be an endless swamp of special cases and things breaking deep in the stack that require very specific, arcane skills from unwritten textbooks.

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