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Comment by blackboxlogic | Hacker News Reader

From your first link:

"The [turbines] affected remain in operation and are producing clean renewable energy. ... they will operate in automatic mode and are fundamentally capable of self-contained and independent regulation."

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Sure, I'd hope for a heavily decentralized system to have some capability of autonomous operation. But in the medium and long term, it can't be good to not be able to remotely monitor for failures requiring manual intervention or on-site mechanical servicing.

Having to visit every turbine to replace a satellite modem doesn't sound like a super large challenge at nation-state scale.

That's assuming that there is enough personnel and spare hardware available, which is not a given even outside of an ongoing supply chain crisis.

The problem is once again our godawful prior government. Many tens of thousands of jobs in the wind industry have vanished over the last years [1] because the Conservatives oppose renewable power and impeded it wherever possible - if it is because of corruption, incompetence, fear of the far-right that outright demonizes anything not fossil or nuclear I don't know. In any case, we simply don't have the staff to visit literally thousands of wind turbines, a lot of which are actually offshore, simply to replace routers.

This situation is an unbelievable clusterfuck.

[1]: https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/windkraft-industri...

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