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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

ENTSO-E is the successor organisation to UCTE [1], with its functions transferred to ENTSO-E in 2009. So if anyone has the data, it would be them. Interesting that the ucte.org website still seems to be online and frozen in time!

[1] https://www.entsoe.eu/news-events/former-associations/#union...

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While ENTSO-E does have a map [1], it's not as nice as the one described above.

[1] https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

Yes, does not compare, unfortunately.

I hate to commit red-herring but this is another example of how computing is worse today in some ways.

Yeah, I noticed that some years ago. They don't have that offer anymore. Interestingly, looking at the article, the cutouts are in the exact style of that former realtime map.

But static. Not living. That was once there, and available to the general public. Personally, I view that as artificial scarcity of information, regarding energy politics. 'Smokescreening' so to speak.

Is it possible it's no longer available for security reasons?

I don't know. I've thought about that. OTOH if some terrorist would like to know the choke points of the grid, he could deduce that from openstreetmaps also, where the transmission lines and substations are available for viewing.

Yes, and honestly someone determined to do damage like that would be the sort to be patient and methodical enough to find targets with or without the map. But I do understand the instinct to want to at least increase the barrier to destruction, the problem is that it ALSO increases the barrier to understanding (and so protection and enhancement). So, an understandable but bad trade off, IMHO.

I didn't see it from that point of view. It was just interesting to watch for me, out of the corner of my eyes, while doing other stuff on other systems and screens. I did that somewhere between 2005 and 2008, whenever I felt like it :-) With a focus on Germany in general, and my town especially. So I had it mostly zoomed just so that Germany was in view, with small parts of neighbouring countries visible. We didn't have that much solar and wind at the times. But sometimes one could see the direction of flow switch. From/to France for instance, or Denmark. And I think I've seen that to/from Poland and Czech also.

Anyway, you could get a feeling for how things were depending on time of year/day, weather, and so on. Intuitevely, because presented spatially and realtime.

And you don't get that spatial intuitiveness from the substitutes with (often delayed) charts & graphs.

Which makes it impossible to counter bullshit by politicians or other parties with vested interests when they are saying this and that, and you could have said: Ahem, that is not entirely correct, because there and then it was like so, and not what you say!

And the loss of that ability is making me angry!

edit: Regarding the 'intuitiveness' of spatial vs. bars & charts. Even when the possibility to filter for im/export between countries exists, it does not show over which lines it went. Which could be useful in discussions about extending/upgrading lines, or building new ones. It's just not there.

The physical layout of the transmission system is basically impossible to obscure, but does not necessarily give the attacker insight into power flows. Having access to real time power flow data would enable an attacker to design a cascading failure scenario, making an attack MUCH more effective. The last component would be knowing operational response procedures. Which seem to be fairly transparent in Europe? If so I'm surprised more care isn't taken to secure them.

It is probably right, but I have to say that I hate that kind of security through obscurity

Especially when there is this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromausfall_in_Europa_im_Nove... which was caused by switching this off, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/380-kV-Ems-Freileitungskreuzun... which is rather similar to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbekreuzung_2 :-)

Even if there are surveillance cameras on those masts, there aren't on the masts leading to it. So you could ride your bicycle there, have some fun with thermite, and finally enjoy the stars again!1!!

/me giggles (j/k)

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