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The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

berthub.eu

61–70 of 258 posts

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#61
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 individual owners to do offline updates, we can upgrade via VRM portal but not downloading fw and flash it locally even if the needed device is on sale, because they offer fw files only to registered vendors.

Fronius (to remain in the EU) have a local WebUI witch need a connection only for fw updates, even if differently from Victron it's not a Debian based system with sources available but a closed source one, they unfortunately offer only a very limited REST API and a very slow ModBUS but still anything con be do locally.

I'm not sure, since I haven't any myself by SMA (Germany) and Enphase (USA) seems to been able to operate offline as well.

Stated that, yes, you are damn very right in saying most installers have no competence, thankfully where I live self-installation is allowed (at least so far), but that's simply demand better UIs and training for them perhaps avoiding the current state of the industry with an immense amount of CRAP at OEM level, with most "state of art" systems not at all designed to be used in good ways (see below) and absurdly high prices to the customer at a level it's not interesting installing p.v... 4 years ago I paid my system 11.500€ for 5kWp/8kWh LFP, the smallest offer to have it designed and built by someone else was ~30.000€ the most expensive ~50.000€ and all the 6 offers I tried shows some unpleasant issues and incompetence.

About OEMs just observe how ABSURD is that there is no damn DC-to-DC direct car charger. Most EVs now have 400V batteries, the same of stationary batteries, with equal BMS comms. Why the hell not sell an MPPT-to-CSS combo direct solution? Ok, we do not ONLY charge from the Sun, than it's perfectly possible have a compo charging station with DC for p.v. and AC for the grid, switching from one to another as needed. It's ~30% energy lost in double conversion.

Why no DC-to-DC high power appliance who still run DC internally (A/C, hot-water heat-pump heaters etc)?

Why not a modern standard protocol for integration of anything instead of building walled gardens?

Long story short OEMs have choose the cloud model partially because most installers are electricians able to use desktop holding the mouse with one hand and clicking with the other, but also because they have no intention to made user-interesting solution in an open market...

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#62
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 represen…

I have no idea what you're talking about, since nowhere did I use solar capacity factor data nor did I look at number of reactors per plant.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#63
> 0.002 MW - Small set of technical standards, no diplomas or certificates required

Be careful with this language, especially when you're involving politicians and the non-technical.

The current atrocity of criminally negligent IT infrastructure right now is mostly created and driven by people with diplomas, including from the most prestigious schools. (And a top HN story over the weekend was one of the most famous tech company execs, turned government advisor, advising students at Stanford to behave unethically, and then get enough money to pay lawyers to make the consequences go away.)

And most of the certificates we do have are are individual certifications that are largely nonsense vendor training and lock-in, and these same people are then assembling and operating systems from the criminally negligent vendors. And our IT practices certifications are largely inadequate compliance theatre, to let people off the hook for actual sufficient competence.

My best guess for how to start to fix this is to hold companies accountable. For example, CrowdStrike (not the worst offender, but recent example): treat it as negligence, hold them liable for all costs, which I'd guess might destroy the stock, and make C-suite and upper parts of the org chart fear prison time as a very serious investigation proceeds. I'd guess seeing that the game has changed would start to align investors and executives at other companies. What could follow next (with growing pains) is a big shakeup of the rest of the org chart and practices -- as companies figure out that they have to kill off all the culture of job-hopping, resume-driven-development, Leetcode fratbro culture, IT vendor shop fiefdoms, etc. I'd guess some companies will be wiped out as they flail around, since they'll still have too many people wired to play the old game, who will see no career option other than to try to fake it till they make it at the new, responsible game (ironically, and self-defeatingly, taking the company down with them).

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#64
I don't remember when and where exactly (and didn't found it in a quick search), but there was already an incident, where an automatic update failed. I think it was something with the country code, so it was a bit isolated and not all over the world.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we preemptively moved everything into VPN'ed mobile network Unless your device itself is handling the VPN, I have bad news for you if you trust the mobile network to not open your devices up to malicious attackers: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/

We consider "they hacked the mobile network VPN's AND had time to reverse our protocol before being booted out of network" as too high a level to be resolved by us. If someone has enough resources to do this, he will also just hack into standard-level secured server at municipal office and there will probably be no one there to stop him or discover what went wrong.

Do you at least fuzz your software?

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#66

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?

In theory someone somewhere should be incentivised to spend money on building storage systems so that they then have to pay less money in the future in excess days.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#67
This article repeatedly cites the need for personnel to have diplomas, certificates, and other ceremonial bits of paper.

This focus on paper qualification to mitigate risk seems a very European approach. Not saying it is wrong - it is just not emphasized as strongly elsewhere. And while it seems like a good fit for a slow-moving industry with high expectations of safety, the solar/wind world is not a slow-moving industry.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#68
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, support is expensive, but what I am proposing will, if anything, reduce support. I'm imagining something where, if I opt into local control, I am giving up all rights to any support that is not related to the core functionality of the device. For example the solar panels/inverters in the article. If I opt in to local control, then the only support I am entitled to is the solar panels stop generating power or if the inverter stops inverting. Anything that is network related is no longer the companies problem, because I have assumed complete responsibility for that. I'd even be willing to agree that, in the case that I ever decide I don't want local control, and I want to switch to the cloud hosting, that I will pay for the support required to switch me back over.

So if my home network breaks, that is not their problem. And they don't need to set it up, they just need to make it possible for me to set up, including figuring out how to make it work with my potentially broken home network. If it requires a new router because mine doesn't provide some necessary functionality? Not their problem. Etc. Etc.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#69
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…

If we've learned anything from the security cam and baby cam scandals, then it's that convenience is king and we as a society would rather risk everything than be arsed to take few additional steps to setup/learn something to prevent such basic breaches. We (the society) don't even want to change the default password on most things.

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 putting together a piece of furniture. Or why the stupid device doesn't come with a randomly-generated strong password taped to it.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#70

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?

Solar power does get curtailed pretty often, but there isn't one uniform solution to the problem, different utilities / markets / grids have chosen different solutions to this.
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