Comment by csecdaemon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csecdaemon | Hacker News Reader

While I don't disagree that transformers... let alone key transformer.. are critical. By disabling 9 transformers you cannot take down “THE GRID”. You could certainly cause havoc and perhaps take down sections of a grid, perhaps a large one such as new york city. But these would be localized. While ensuring that critical components are local and available is important much of this is being done in the energy sector. It’s not to say there simply are no replacements. However, the energy sector, including transmission, is made up of over 6000 separate organizations. Most of which are not federally controlled or controlled by the local government. Put simply they are for-profit companies. They are critical infrastructure and regulated by the gov, but not a part of.

Put short, this is a serious matter, but not in the way it is presented here. It would be a herculean effort to take out 1 let alone the suggested 9. Especially in a coordinated fashion. EVEN IF it was achieved.. This would only cause localized issues. Not takedown. “THE GRID”

This is a much larger discussion but a few things to consider:

1. There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way. There are thousands of generation and transmission companies throughout the US. They all maintain there own “grids”. There is connectivity to provide ways to connect grids to sell/buy/shed power. But these connections are controlled and can be simply… disconnected. 2. Without going on a major diatribe on the many different attack vectors and inherent vulnerabilities in the energy sector…. Suffice to say.. The easiest and most sure way to take out a transformer is physical. They would need to be destroyed or disabled. Digital/remote interference would require an immense effort and campaign… we are not talking breaching the 9 locations… we’re talking hacking millions upon millions of connected devices and coordinating load to take out a transformer or the grid as whole…. The coordination and effort necessary for either are staggering. 3. There are in fact spares and inventory… just not in the hands of the feds.

You seem to be assuming some sort of terrorist event. I would have thought the most likely reason for the whole grid to go down is another Carrington event.

I'm not assuming anything/anyone specifically but lean towards nation-state, anarchist, terror, etc. A natural disaster such as a flare, earthquake, fire, etc. are a different story. The radiation and electrical magnetic pulse from a solar flare could hamper equipment. However recent studies in the last few years by EPRI, INL, and ORNL actually show that much equipment would survive and equipment that did not would be localized.

Care to link to any of those studies? I'd love to read them.

Here is EPRI report - https://www.epri.com/#/pages/product/3002014979/?lang=en-US

Do we stress test our grid(s) core components with inputs that would be similar to that of a solar flare to write any of this off?

I feel like 5 months ago we’d be sitting here dismissing the notion that a face mask shortage is a trivial problem, all countries can just suddenly ramp up production. But we couldn’t.

There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way

This did not prevent "Northeast blackout of 2003" when bunch of states in the US and province of Ontario in Canada went without power for 3 days. I remember it quite clearly. Was not big fun. Luckily my friends and I with families went camping on the lake so did not really suffer other than some little disaster in a fridge ;)

From wiki

The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region.

How fragile we are.

That was a cascading failure where the instability of part of the grid tripped protection systems intended to prevent damage to equipment throughout the rest. The individual regions making up that grid were perfectly capable of operating independently, possibly with reduced capacity, even after the blackout. What they couldn't do is remain operational whilst unexpectedly being cut off, because that caused transient unbalances between generation and load. I'm pretty sure there's no failure of a small number of transformers that would leave the US as a whole, or any large chunk of it, without power for a prolonged period. There are probably scenarios where it could trigger a cascading failure where protection devices shut down the rest of the grid in order to protect the other equipment from imbalances caused by the failures, but that alone is not going to lead to 12-18 months of blackouts and the death of 90% of the US population.

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