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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

#51

Post by delroth »

> 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).

Looking at actual yearly energy generation data, this is more like 1.5 times the generation of an average nuclear power plant (NL solar production in 2023: 21TWh, US nuclear production in 2021: 778TWh by 54 plants).

Which maybe puts more into perspective the actual risks involved here. I'm not saying there shouldn't be more regulations and significantly better security practices, but otoh you could likely drive a big truck into the right power poles and cause a similar sized outage.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#52

Post by wmf »

Nextgrid wrote: post #7
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…

The cloud can operate as a dumb TURN relay relaying E2E-encrypted traffic. Then the worst the cloud can do is deny service to remote management (and even then, local management would still work), but it wouldn't be able to send direct control commands to the equipment since they don't have the authentication nor encryption keys. This also makes it simpler from a programming point of view - instead of having separate…

I don't think E2E is simpler to program if you want to get it right. There are entire companies whose raison d'être is actually managing keys properly (e.g. Signal, Tailscale).

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#53

Post by Spivak »

m463 wrote: post #35
dathos wrote: post #6

I live off-grid, power and water wise, and it really irked me that the monitoring coming with my inverter is only available online. Even when there is a network available the app will not work. I fixed this by getting a raspberry pi connected and reading it from there, but if I disconnect the inverter from the internet it will create a new network so now there is always an open network in the middle of nowhere with n…

why can't people just make stuff and sell it?

Because humans are an ongoing cost and no one has figured how to sell non-consumable slowly depreciating goods as one-off purchases and keep paying your employees once you saturate your market.

Option 1: Artificially sell the thing as an ongoing cost.

Option 2: Artificially make the depreciation cycle faster. Get consumers to regularly replace it anyway with upgrades or trend changes.

Option 3: Make ongoing money from the item via a side-channel (tvs are great at this one)

Option 4: Manufacture and sell a huge number of different goods across market segments and weather the slow depreciation cycle (Oxo does this).

Option 5: Sell some consumable good you can get recurring revenue from along side the item (Coffee pods, printer ink)

Option 6: Make up the money on maintenance, repairs, and financing. Become a bank.

Option 7: Make your money in some other sustainable profitable business and drop the product once you've gotten what you can for it.

All of these kinda suck and option 1 is easy to implement.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#54

Post by bjornsing »

SnorkelTan wrote: post #49

If solar panels can be turned off, why are utility companies having to sell excess power at a loss? Why can’t they tell the solar farms to reduce their output by the required amount?

As I understand it: because the incentives are wrong.

Owners of small scale solar panel installations are payed a fixed price per kWh in many EU countries, regardless of the market price. The taxpayers pick up the tab I guess.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#55

Post by ezfe »

paxys wrote: post #26
panki27 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, almost like what happend to the internet... the idea being "everything is decentralized", but now +80% of traffic passes through Cloudflare and over 90% of mails come from 2 providers!

Cloudflare absolutely does not control 80% of internet traffic. I have no idea where you got that number from.

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

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#56

Post by epistasis »

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…

You are talking about energy, which is not the same thing as power. TWh == energy, GW == power.

The distinction is important, especially in the Netherlands, which has a capacity factor of only about 10%-15%, whereas most of the US will be at least 20%-25%, which is twice as high.

I'm not sure of the typical number of reactors in the Netherlands, but using the US average of 1.6/power plant may not be the most representative comparison.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#57

Post by toast0 »

lucianbr wrote: post #28
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…

What's the reasoning for not allowing both control paths, via cloud but also locally? So that people who can and want to, will use the local control.

The real answer is it's more than twice the work to have both paths, and there's not enough demand for it.

That said, Apple Homekit integration is local network based, so products that do that and the typical manufacturer cloud system have done both paths.

Homekit is a pain to use without Apple hardware/software, but there you go. (There's a plugin for HomeAssistant, but I'm still classifying that as a pain)

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#58

Post by wmf »

MostlyStable wrote: post #46
yetihehe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheapness. It would require to be at least semi secure, application on phone would need to find those devices locally and it should be synchronized with cloud anyway, synchronization is error prone and we had problems with devices sometimes responding twice or very slowly through local interface (through cloud was much faster, no idea why, not our firmware). Also not enough people requesting that feature, most don't…

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 m…

In some areas like cameras there are a decent number of cloud-free alternatives. Hopefully as the IOT market grows we'll get cloud-free versions of everything.

I think you're too optimistic about costs though. Providing any support at all, even one-time during the install, is expensive and cloud-free IOT is going to require support due to home networks being broken.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#59

Post by 1053r »

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…

For the purposes of information security, the nameplate capacity is the correct number to consider for a very simple reason: we must defend as if hackers will pick the absolute worst moment to attack the grid. That is the moment when the sun is shining and it's absolutely cloudless across Netherlands, California, Germany, or wherever their target grid is.

At that moment, the attacker will not only blast the grid with the full output of the solar panels, but they will also put any attached batteries into full discharge mode as well, bypassing any safeties built into the firmware with new firmware. We must consider the worst case, which is that the attacker is trying to not only physically break the inverters, but the batteries, solar panels, blow fuses, and burn out substations. (Consider that if the inverters burn out and start fires, that's a feature for the attacker rather than a bug!)

So yes, not only is it 25 medium sized nuclear power plants, it's probably much higher than that! And worse, that number is growing exponentially with each year of the renewable transition.

This was probably the scariest security expose in a long time. It's much much worse than some zero-day for iphones.

A bad iPhone bug might kill a few people who can't call emergency services, and cause a couple billion of diffuse economic damage across the world. This set of bugs might kill tens of thousands by blowing up substations and causing outages at thousands to millions of homes, businesses, and factories during a heat wave. And the economic damage will not only be much higher, it will be concentrated.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#60

Post by eldaisfish »

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…

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".

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