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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

#241

Post by automatic6131 »

huijzer wrote: post #239
automatic6131 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're taking exponential improvements for granted. Only one human endeavour (ever) has made exponential gains for a long period, that of silicon lithography. And even that ended in the last decade.

The reason I say "always underestimate" is the obvious one. The easy problems are solved first, then the harder ones take longer because they're harder.

So that's fantastic that battery production scaled up. Only a fool would expect - would plan on - it continuing like that.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#242

Post by crazygringo »

bilbo0s wrote: post #160
crazygringo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, your point was clearly stated: > But the security argument? Yeah, that ship has sailed. Total war, means total war. Those are your words. I'm saying, focusing on total war is irresponsible and leads you to draw false conclusions. In the real world, limited conflicts are what we're dealing with 99.9+% of the time, thank goodness. And now in your new comment, for some reason you're focusing on "plausible deniabilit…

The security argument against cloud based monitoring has sailed. With or without cloud based monitoring, our power grids can be disrupted. That's the commonly accepted meaning of "that ship has sailed" as a colloquialism with respect to cloud based monitoring. Also, you, yourself, brought up the idea of cold war style confrontation. The basis of most actions against proxy supporters in cold war style conflicts is pla…

> Also, you, yourself, brought up the idea of cold war style confrontation.

No, I didn't.

I think it's clear that China shutting down Europe's power grid would not be a cold war scenario. That would be quite hot. But also clearly not total war either.

Since you don't want to converse any more I won't make any further points, but please don't claim I said things that I clearly didn't.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#243

Post by huijzer »

automatic6131 wrote: post #241
huijzer wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're taking exponential improvements for granted. Only one human endeavour (ever) has made exponential gains for a long period, that of silicon lithography. And even that ended in the last decade. The reason I say "always underestimate" is the obvious one. The easy problems are solved first, then the harder ones take longer because they're harder. So that's fantastic that battery production scaled up. Only a fool w…

That’s not true. Exponentials are everywhere. They can often go for a long time. Even silicon is still going strong if you focus on FLOPS per dollar.

Other examples are cruise ship sizes, US GDP per capita, or Microsoft stock price.

The point really is this: go back in time to some of these things a few decades years ago. You would say: “How is this even possible? This is crazy. This will probably plateau soon. This can’t continue.”

But it did. Cruise ships went from 20, to 100, to 200 and now 365 meters in length.

And the same will probably happen for batteries. People say “ah well this is crazy. It will probably plateau soon”. My point is maybe it won’t. Once these exponentials (starts of s-curves) go, they go. Standing at the bottom of an s-curve and predicting the plateau soon can lead to a massive misprediction. Like the IBM CEO who said there will never be a market for more than 10 computers. He was off by about a billion.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#244

Post by applied_heat »

jpc0 wrote: post #224
applied_heat wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any transformer over about 5 MVA will probably be equipped with a low oil level switch that de-energizes it

If all you wantes was to kill the power I don't see the difference... Sure the repair is easier/quicker but the economic damage was already done...

The lead time on a transformer that size is probably a year, so a year long outage has a lot more damage than a 2 week outage

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#245

Post by shermantanktop »

applied_heat wrote: post #169
shermantanktop wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the rest of the tech industry, what you did to get your diploma gives you about 18 months of momentum. If you haven’t learned multiple new technologies by that point, you’re in trouble. Success in this industry means perpetually redeveloping your own skills, and liking it. How someone would wave a 20 year old piece of paper as evidence that they know how to use solar tech that was developed last year, I don’t know…

I mean, electrical engineering teaches you a lot of the math,physics,and control systems theory, and power systems that guides the design and operating characteristic of power systems devices like inverters. Sure EE doesn’t help with cybersecurity per se, but inverters and solar panels existed 20 years ago so I feel like my 20 year old electrical engineering degree is pretty darn relevant

This article is about IT security for power systems. Ohm’s Law won’t help.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#246

Post by lucianbr »

Aachen wrote: post #218
lucianbr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

The Netherlands covers 41,850 km2. I don't agree this size is small enough to cause the weather to be likely the same everywhere. Whatever qualifier and quantifier juggling you're trying to do is beside the point.

> When it is sunny in the netherlands, it is likely sunny everywhere in NL because of how small the country is.

Nowhere there is the qualifier "a fair number of hours every late summer month". If you add arbitrary conditions of course you can get a different meaning.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#247

Post by lucianbr »

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

> "it can be sunny virtually everywhere at the same time in a small country"

> When it is sunny in the netherlands, it is likely sunny everywhere in NL because of how small the country is.

These statements are not the same. They're quite different, actually. One talks about most sunny days, one talks about one sunny day.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#248

Post by BlueTemplar »

leymed wrote: post #215
BlueTemplar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why for a short time ? And this sounds reckless if most of your load flow is PV ?

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#249

Post by franga2000 »

delroth wrote: post #51

> In the Netherlands alone, these solar panels generate a power output equivalent to at least 25 medium sized nuclear power plants. Since this didn't pass the smell test: the author is looking at nameplate capacity, which is a completely useless metric for variable electricity production sources (a solar panel in my sunless basement has the same nameplate capacity as the same panel installed in the Sahara desert). Lo…

> but otoh you could likely drive a big truck into the right power poles and cause a similar sized outage

I get your comparison and the following is probably obvious to most people, but I feel like it really needs to be said: this requires being there, having a truck and the willingness to risk almost certain jail time, whereas taking down all SolarEdge installations on the planet could probably be done by an anonymous teenager in a foreign country with nothing but a computer and TOR client.

(I mention SolarEdge because I just had to deal with one of their systems and it pissed me off, I don't actually know of any vulns)

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#250

Post by leymed »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #248
leymed wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why for a short time ? And this sounds reckless if most of your load flow is PV ?

Those are actually good questions.

Engineering grid and PV installations acknowledge that the generation may be lost, so you are having contingency plan by means of transferring or picking the load. You're going to lose power for short time if you didn't do this properly.

Actually due to the nature of PV generation, no sun no generation, it is reckless to just rely on PV. If sun is shining that is great, there'll be generation. However, daily peak consumption coincides with less day light. So during planning the target is the extreme cases (statistically estimating demand), in other words you do load flow studies for extreme cases. This helps to see your capacity limits.

In parallel to this you should consider electric grid as a layered system. PV generation at house is the lowest level, so less impact. So when it is lost, or neighborhood or town lose PV generation it will impact nearby station, which is couple MW if not kW. So when you lose PV generation and you planned your system for extreme case, higher level of generation or substation will take control of it.

Losing GW solar does not mean you're losing that amount power in small geographical region. You have to divide that into so many small parts. Also, PV generation at GW level is too high for small region.

Hope this explanation helps. It is because how power flows, governed by rules of physics. Bottom line, if hacker wants to affect a grid they should target higher level of grid, PV panels on the rooftops will not help their cause, they are end of line.

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