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Comment by civilitty | Hacker News Reader

> Since 2021, three eruptions have taken place on the Reykjanes peninsula, in March 2021, August 2022 and July 2023. Those three were located far from any infrastructure or populated areas.

Just another Friday in Iceland!

> Also nearby is the Svartsengi geothermal plant, the main supplier of electricity and water to 30,000 residents on the Reykjanes peninsula. It has contingency plans in place to protect the plant and its workers in the event of an eruption.

Anyone have any idea what those contingency plans would be other than emergency shutdown and hope something is left to save afterwards? Or do they actually go in and put dampers and stuff on turbines to make sure they don't bounce around unnecessarily?

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Yep. They installed remote controls for the whole plant 3 days ago, along with backup generators.

Interestingly, you can see the ~30-40MW dip in geothermal generation recently. Any webcams at the generation facility online and publicly available?

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/IS?wind=false&solar=fal...

Preventative safety work? I can imagine there’s going to be less demand from offices and industry if a significant portion of the nearby population are making emergency plans and preparations, and even without a dip in demand from that there’s usually some oversupply with electricity generators to avoid ramp up time problems during peak demand, so possibly they decided to shut down unused capacity to reduce the risk of it being damaged? Hard to say without knowing more details…

>there’s going to be less demand from offices and industry if a significant portion of the nearby population are making emergency plans and preparations

Not the case in Iceland. Only 15% of the demand is non industrial, and people still use electricity regardless of what they're working on. Grindavik itself isn't large enough to be more than a rounding error.

>even without a dip in demand from that there’s usually some oversupply with electricity generators to avoid ramp up time problems during peak demand, so possibly they decided to shut down unused capacity to reduce the risk of it being damaged

No, geothermal plants generally aren't ramped, and they produce at maximum output unless there is maintenance. They may have reduced overall output to enable individual turbines to be turned off for brief periods while installing new remote control devices. That is speculation however as I'm not at work so I can't say for sure.

hah, cool to see this, I'm responsible for this data being available.

As much as it would suck to lose a power plant (we are already on the edge of energy shortages), it is far worse to lose hot water supply to Keflavik. They'd have to quickly build up electric heating capacity, which will make energy shortages.

Wow, thank you for this! Are there any estimates on the probability of catastrophic failure right now?

Thank you for making this data source publicly available. The effort is appreciated.

So if this happened a week ago, then this would've been worse? What fortuitous timing.

The recent squall of earthquakes picked up October 27, along with magma entering underneath the chamber around 3 m^3/s and now up to 5.

There also GNSS and laser interferometers that watch for displacement of land.

Early warning and prep is key. And this isn't an 'emergency', yet. It's an 'Alert', to prepare people for the worst.

They likely installed the remote controls because there were already signs something was going on a week ago. If today's events happened a week ago, the whole timetable would just have been shifted a week.

I guess, why wouldn’t you just have them there all the time instead of only installing them for emergencies?

This being Hacker News and all I have to wonder - was this remote control system installed in a hurry, and is it thus potentially more vulnerable to remote attack than it might otherwise be? Hope not.

It's a geotermal plant, what is an hacker going to do to damage it that is worse than what's already going on

And even if they interrupt service it's not like they aren't expecting service interruptions anyway (given the whole imminent volcano eruption)

No, it is not remote in the 4g sense, but in that they can control the machines remotely via the national control room. that scada network is secure and air gapped.

> Anyone have any idea what those contingency plans would be other than emergency shutdown and hope something is left to save afterwards?

In addition to the remote-control setup that others have been talking about, they're also in the process of building defensive earthworks that will direct lava flows away from critical infrastructure.

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