The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

> It’s also possible that the manufacturer gets hacked, and subsequently sends out attacker controlled and wrong software updates to the inverters, with possibly dire consequences.

Idaho National Lab is one of those places that researches this. https://inl.gov - their domains are energy (primarily nuclear and integrated) and national security ... and securing the grid is the intersection of that.

And some time back... https://www.wired.com/story/how-30-lines-of-code-blew-up-27-... ( https://web.archive.org/web/20201101002448/https://www.wired... ) . The story is from 2020. The event is from 2007.

The test footage linked in the article is on YouTube - https://youtu.be/LM8kLaJ2NDU

The wikipedia article on the test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Generator_Test

From the wired article the key part of how it broke:

> A protective relay attached to that generator was designed to prevent it from connecting to the rest of the power system without first syncing to that exact rhythm: 60 hertz. But Assante’s hacker in Idaho Falls had just reprogrammed that safeguard device, flipping its logic on its head.

> At 11:33 am and 23 seconds, the protective relay observed that the generator was perfectly synced. But then its corrupted brain did the opposite of what it was meant to do: It opened a circuit breaker to disconnect the machine.

> When the generator was detached from the larger circuit of Idaho National Laboratory’s electrical grid and relieved of the burden of sharing its energy with that vast system, it instantly began to accelerate, spinning faster, like a pack of horses that had been let loose from its carriage. As soon as the protective relay observed that the generator’s rotation had sped up to be fully out of sync with the rest of the grid, its maliciously flipped logic immediately reconnected it to the grid’s machinery.

You're thinking about this right, just at a utility scale.

The "plants" in this context are homes and businesses. The junction points between plants and grid are the inverters sold by the panel manufacturers.

Why not offer an either/or rather than both? Some people (I am one of them) actively do not want these kinds of things to be managed through the cloud servers. I don't want it to sync, I want to fully turn that off. I want to locally host, and I'm willing to take responsibility for that feature, including when it breaks. All I want is access to whatever the data reporting and control APIs are.

I get that I'm a tiny minority, and that very few customers want what I want. But A) it seems like giving me what I want should be very cheap (i.e should not entail ongoing customer support costs beyond normal, and in fact would get rid of the small cloud hosting cost) and B) I'd be willing to pay a premium to get it.

That's why my system (Victron + Fronius) is offline, monitored with HA, BYD battery if there is no secret in-hw backdoor in my home server can't reach the internet as well. HA can, via wireguard, to act/monitor when I'm outside my home witch might be a serious threat but it's pretty easy to cut it off if needed.

There is a more important part, while with p.v. we still can go offline, with car's we can't. My car is connected and I can't do NOTHING to manage it, it's managed by it OEM behind me and that's a much bigger threat since single cars can paralyze the nation if properly blocked in critical points of the road network.

At a largest scale that's the reason we can't have a national smart grid but only individual smart microgrid, meaning p.v. should be used only for self-consumption NOT grid-tied like in California.

Does anyone know of an inverter manufacturer that doesn't require this? Ideally, one that offers micro inverters for each panel.