Hacker News Reader

Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

The "turning the grid up to 11" attack isn't really possible. I know it seems like it is, but the inverters will only advance frequency so much before they back off, the inverters will only increase voltage so much. Etc. Sounds scary, isn't practical.

Turning everything off when the panels are at peak output? That lets frequency sag enough that plants start tripping offline to protect themselves and the grid and it'll cascade across the continent in just a few minutes. Then you have a black start which might take months.

There's an excellent video on how catastrophic a black start is. https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w?si=x0dA7X7-19CJm6Kf

View on HN

Months isn’t correct. Unless there was damage it could be recovered within a day.

Would love to know more about this. How would that happen? What's the process to bring it back up so fast?

The video has a lot of good info and seems compelling. During the Texas freeze many power company officials said the exact same thing, if the Texas grid went down it would have taken weeks to bring everything back online.

> What's the process to bring it back up so fast?

It's called black start (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start), and power companies plan for it, and the necessary components are regularly tested. It's not a fast process, it can take many hours to bring most of the grid back up. We had last year a large-scale blackout here in Brazil, and a area larger than Texas lost power; most of it was back in less than a day.

> if the Texas grid went down it would have taken weeks to bring everything back online.

The trick word here is "everything". Every time there's a large-scale blackout, there's some small parts of the grid which fail to come back and need repairs. What actually matters is how long it takes for most of the grid to come back online.

Inverters may be protected against changing settings, but if you can replace the firmware it can likely cause permanent hardware damage. Which the manufacturer, perhaps under pressure from its government, can do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com