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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

How do you protect a power grid from state actors?

Directly, you don't. You hope that the adversary isn't able to strike hard enough or at enough targets, or is unwilling to go all in on war crimes by destroying civilian infrastructure. Iraqi and Yugoslavian grids were taken down almost entirely in days in the 90s and they only came back because there was a very careful use of weapons and tactics that didn't completely annihilate the gear. And modern equipment is far, far, far less field-repairable then whatever an average Iraqi substation had installed in 1990.

It's only going to get worse in conflicts where there's willingness to attack infrastructure because energy infrastructure is fixed in place, delicate, physically large and easy to detect and locate and vulnerable to even small drone-sized attacks, let alone missiles. And that's assuming you have to attack it physically at all and not just remotely disable it somehow.

If you have to harden the infrastructure, all you can do really is simplify hugely so you can repair it when attacked (fewer imported Infineon IGBTs, fancy Siemens PLCs, and networked UHVDC switchgear on 2 year lead times) and decentralise to minimise single points of failure and avoid cascading failures. Which is hugely inefficient in physical terms like wasted capacity and losses as well as the human effort required to keep it running, but some places might have some power.

Even then, in the next decades, against a state level adversary who could make and deliver, say, drones that can autonomously recognise and attack anything that looks like a ceramic insulator disk or a solar panel, if you can't threaten grave retaliation, you're back to the good old tutting about war crimes.

I fear such civilian attacks are going to become more commonplace over time. It is well hypothesized that should China invade Taiwan, Taiwan would destroy the three gorges dam and completely annihilate a good chunk of China. It is just as much a deterrent as nuclear weapons, probably worse in this specific case.

This is why you can't go for the throat of a regime anymore, even if you have overwhelming force. Because if you do then, well, you are already going to jail for war crimes anyway.

> if you do then, well, you are already going to jail for war crimes anyway.

realistically, only if you lose the war.

Or you're the USA

> destroy the three gorges dam

Through what non-nuclear means would they hypothetically destroy this massive concrete structure?

Cruise missile dives into water near dam base, creates a large bubble with slow explosives, and the subsequent collapse results in a water hammer against the structure.

No non-nuclear cruise missiles have the energy to pull this off.

I don't know, I think that's always been a possibility. Hitting massive civilian infrastructure has always been kind of a MAD thing. And hard to spin as anything other than a war crime - floodplains covered in civilian bodies looks bad.

What seems scarier to me is the newer possibility of a huge number of very small remote attacks that utterly devastate the fabric of civilian systems, but none of them individually look like egregious war crimes. With the right PR, they can be defended as "limited" and "surgical" attacks denying "dual-use" infrastructure. Put all the blame for "looking suspicious" onto the locals with advance warning. Solar panels on the roof? Just like a command post. Radio antenna, looks like a communications relay. Fuel tanks? Vehicle pool. You can even give notice of all the strikes, you don't need to bomb them personally, they'll be out of mind without food, water, sewerage, healthcare or heating. For bonus points, then you can blame the defending government for failures of governance when they can't organise, say, waste treatment any more.

Warcrime becomes increasingly a previous century thing. This century war itself is a crime and to counter it all means are on the table again.

Substations wouldn't be hard to protect against drones. Building reinforced concrete bunkers around them is something we know how to do. I'm surprised substation makers aren't offering Ukraine models with armored plates (or maybe they are?), a couple inches of steel is expensive but would stop small drones. The wires themself connecting to the substation are cheap enough to replace.

Of course the above all comes at a cost. It is much cheaper to put your substations in open air.

That's so completely impractical I don't know where to begin.

There are hundreds of thousands of substations in a modern country, and more transformers on top of that. And the bigger substations are huge. An urban 275kV substation could easily be 10 acres in size.

"Wires" are also not especially cheap or easy to replace either, even at "low" voltages like under 33kV. It's not a few feet of twin and earth and an h-clip.

And a couple of inches of steel will absolutely not stop small drones if they're designed from the ground up to be anti-materiel devices. Anduril are hawking these right now complete with their wierdly gleeful videos, and if they're the only ones in the world then short my secondary and call me a slagpile.

And that's ignoring weapons anyway in use like those tungsten filled rockets that just shred everything in the area. They'd go right though both sides of your armoured switchgear.

Credibly establish that for every strike they make against your power grid you'll make several against theirs.

In view of what others said here, that would be answering war crimes with more war crimes.

"attacking electrical infrastructure is a war crime" is quite a woolly and interpretable thing. It's not blanket, there are questions of purpose and proportionality. If, for example, you strike a single civilian substation because by doing so you take out the power supply to a critical defence radar and are then able to attack an otherwise defended military target, then it's hard to argue that's a war crime. Any more than bombing civilian infrastructure like roads and railways.

Doing it as part of a deliberate campaign of terror whose main purpose is to harm and intimidate civilians is probably a war crime, although it's very easy to fig leaf it if there's any way that attacking the infrastructure impedes war production directly. Doing it proportionately in retaliation is less likely to be.

I suspect we may see a tit-for-tat rider added to modern warfare since the big guys no longer bother trying to live within the spirit of the Geneva conventions. Russia is literally raping and geocoding all through their controlled areas of Ukrainian territory. Saw a video just last week were they ordered POWs to lie on the ground and they just shot them for no reason, this is common place. Why should Ukraine just throw up their hands and say “nothing we can do!”

That is a big question, a few things you can do:

* Air gap EVERYTHING.

* Extremely careful screening of employees.

* Constant security training of staff.

* Anti air defence.

* Bury your cables.

The grid had some redundancy from Soviet planners, but has been optimized over 30 years.

It is now back to being overly redundant, with extra connections to the West

What Ukrainian engineers achieved by swiching to EU frequency is heroic [1].

I hope they were decorated.

[1] https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2022/03/16/continental-europe-suc...

This is a nice link share. I am surprised something like that did not make HN front page. Was Ukraine and Moldova previously 50Hz, but not synced with EU grid?

Yes, 50Hz but synchronized to the Russian or rather Soviet grid.

> Bury your cables.

This goes both ways. If the enemy can get a ground-penetrating missile to hit a buried cable, it's a huge issue to repair it, needing heavy machinery, and all the long while you're digging it out, presenting a juicy double-tap target.

> How do you protect a power grid from state actors?

I think one of the best ways is mutual destruction assurance. Ukraine should be given the capacity and clearance to also take down Russia's power grid.

It doesn't matter if they get the capacity and clearance - they are not stupid enough to do it. Modern war has done a lot of studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight. Ukraine wants to take out things that would make Russia less willing to fight on (or lacking that things that would make Russia unable to fight on)

> Modern war has done a lot of studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight.

Russia is pretty inclined to fight, so I'm not sure if I understand your point here.

For how long? Russia isn't doing a mobilization despite needing it because they are afraid of the blacklash.

They've been killing Ukrainians for almost 3 years.

So if they're not inclined to fight, they sure don't mind the killing and destruction of Ukraine, which is more of an entrepreneurial motivation than anything else:

- Some want to try to enrich themselves by killing Ukrainians;

- Others don't want that risk, but they're ok with it;

>"... studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight"

Is this why NATO did it in Yugoslavia? /s

Build large nuclear power plants and protect them with good layered Air Defense Systems

decentralization

and diplomacy

Have everyone take a chunk of nuclear fuel to keep in their home? That’s technically decentralization.

I got a SMR on my roof: Small Modular Receiver, for fusion energy.

Can be done up to some level, but you still need a stable source of ~50Hz frequency to keep everything synced.

50Hz is so low that peaks can be synchronized via atomic/GPS-sourced clocks if it were ever necessary to decentralize.

You only need to synchronize when you are connecting two different generators. If you house is getting 51 hz, or 50hz but out of phase you won't care because everything works anyway (some clocks will run too fast but otherwise you won't even notice). Only when you want to connect two grids (because one can't make enough power and the other is making more than they need) do you need to synchronize. Even then they only need to synchronize to each other, not the rest of the world.

Yes - but the point is, rather than tracking and synchronizing against an existing power sinusoid, you can track and synchronize against a global clock source and never deviate.

Which isn't hard. Many people in the US own something that could be used and we are not even under attack. While most home depot generators deliver dirty power the better ones can provide stable 60hz (US uses 60hz not 50) - those could be used to provide the 60hz to the grid (it wouldn't be worth everything needed to actually do this, but in theory could). there are a lot of "solar generators" that also can provide stable frequency. Many houses are off grid completely and have their own stable source of frequency when they want it (those most often those run on DC, they have the ability to provide AC for things they can't get a DC version of)

But: where do you start with those after a blackout (which I assume is pretty possible in a scenario where the grid is under attack). How do you sync them all in that case?

Can maybe be done via GPS timing, but hard to get that coordination going after you've needed it.

It's called a "black start" and it's difficult at the best of times when everything is in a known state and generally good repair.

That sounds really good, but is actually surprisingly ineffective, because you can't effectively protect the decentralized parts. You can put some Gepards or a missile battery around a nuclear plant. Good luck protecting 1000s of wind turbines or solar panel installations.

And this isn't just theory: the nuclear power plants are the pretty much the only thing still running in Ukraine.

Also, if you are thinking of renewables, those tend to have more centralized points of failure than you think, see:

The Gigantic Unregulated Power Plants in the Cloud

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-p...

Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292018

Devil in the details, as always. If every home has its own PV system, that's almost as hard to damage as the population itself.

But also yes, making the PV into an IoT system… as the saying goes, the "S" in "IoT" stands for "security".

The amount of missiles needed to circumvent even a quatuor of anti-missile equipment placed nearby a nuclear plant which produces at the very least 2% of your gridpower (France) and maybe up to 33% (Ukraine) is way, way lower than the amount of missiles needed to blast unprotected wind turbines or sonar panels producing a similar fraction of your gridpower.

Then your ability to repair various wind/solar sites also is very probably way better because few want to work on a damaged nuclear plant (especially with all local population running away as far as possible), spare parts (nuclear-grade) are less commonly available in other industries, the site may once more become a target because it isn't one-among-hundreds...

The amount of missiles you need to penetrate the defenses and actually get through the extremely hardened/resilient shell of a nuclear power plant is invariably more usefully spent elsewhere.

A group of terrorists once attacked a French nuclear plant. Admittedly only with an anti-tank missile, so smaller warhead, but apparently they had a hard time finding the scorch marks. The containment of modern reactors is designed to withstand an airplane strike, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the warheads of cruise missiles or tactical ballistic missiles.

Whereas you can probably take out solar panels with a hand-grenade, which you can lob directly or carry via drones. Don't even need to expend a suicide drone, just have it drop the grenade.

And once again: apart from actually not being well supported logically, your theory is also contradicted by the real world evidence on the ground.

> is invariably more usefully spent elsewhere

Doubt so. There are cases (for example when triggering a panic/exodus or condemning an area is useful) were attacking a nuclear plant is an adequate option.

> group of terrorists once attacked

It was a joke, it was done while the plant (Superphénix) was a work-in-progress, and didn't even scratch the concrete.

> The containment of modern reactors is designed to withstand an airplane strike, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the warheads of cruise missiles or tactical ballistic missiles

Nope, the containment cannot withstand any airplane strike, and many missiles (even without any nuclear warhead) have a way better concrete-penetration capabilities than a plane.

> take out solar panels with a hand-grenade

Indeed, however wherever solar provides a large fraction of power you will need hundred of thousands of grenades/drones. The efficiency (effects/cost) will be abyssal, especially new panels will quickly be deployed.

> your theory is also contradicted by the real world evidence

This is your mere opinion. The facts are well-known. Here is a sample: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-89-iaea... Quote: "Director General Grossi reiterated his grave concern about the situation at the ZNPP and that any military action jeopardizing nuclear safety and security must stop." Many other similar documents were published by this UN Agency in charge of nuclear civilian applications.

> didn't even scratch the concrete.

Exactly my point. Thanks for confirming. In general, attacking nuclear infrastructure with missiles is not considered funny.

But hey: give it a try! See how "funny" whatever anti-terror forces you nave in your country find it.

> The facts are well-known. [goes on to list an opinion of someone expressing "grave concern"]

My kind of humor!

Once again: nuclear is the pretty much the only power generation left in Ukraine, apart from Diesel generators. That is actual evidence.

Oh, and Ukraine is building new nuclear power plants.

> attacking nuclear infrastructure with missiles

Do you really consider a little rocket (RPG) as equivalent to a missile, or it a joke?

> See how "funny" whatever anti-terror forces

Not sure anyone considers them sufficient since quite a while (9/11, anyone?)

> list an opinion of someone expressing "grave concern"

He is the boss of the UN Agency in charge of nuclear civilian applications and the communiqué clearly describes the causes of his concerns.

> nuclear is the pretty much the only power generation left in Ukraine

Because they don't have any other industrial electricity-equipment, and therefore no other option (bar a nearly-permanent nearly-complete-blackout), as they didn't start their energy transition yet (for various reasons).

> Ukraine is building new nuclear power plants

Those now are bare approved projects. My point is about the risk, not about choosing nuclear (balancing the pros and cons, risk included, and doing so objectively) nor building then exploiting it as planned.

Nuclear plants have generally not been attacked. NATO and China have both strongly implied if there is nuclear anything attacked used they will jump in and force end this war in Ukraine's favor. We don't know for sure but it seems likely that would happen.

You make it mobile- aka nuklear barges or small nuklear power plants on trucks. Also there seem to be minimal - Tit for Tat rules of engagement - you do not hit the reservoir upriver of moscow, i do not blow up zhaporischia. But moscow is running out of hostages and time. All the dams are gone in ukraine- so moscow could be flooded, unless they take the nuclear power plants hostage. Which ukraine could do to btw- no reason why warcrimeas shouldnt go both ways, now that the west is betraying them

on the day trump pulls us support, the gloves come off and moscow gets it

They're probably both fighting at maximum capability already.

That said:

While we all know that Russia isn't fighting all of NATO, it does claim that it is fighting all of NATO.

Do they believe what they say? I don't know.

I think if Ukraine attempts Hail-Mary tactics, if you assume the hypothetical that Russia really does believe that Ukraine is only capable of such things with NATO support, it is still bad for NATO.

There's certainly Ukrainians who want nukes now, who think giving them up was a mistake. Some say it would only take them months to get nukes… and they said that months ago. If they do develop their own independent capability, and Russia just assumes it's an American or French or British nuke, that's still bad for the rest of us, even if Trump is shouting about how the USA didn't do it.

    > They're probably both fighting at maximum capability already.

Absolutely not. In my view, NATO should be supplying 1M+ artillery shells per month, so that UA can unleash scorched earth tactics on Russian positions inside UA territories.

> In my view, NATO should be supplying 1M+ artillery shells per month, so that UA can unleash scorched earth tactics on Russian positions inside UA territories

Sure, but that's not Russia or Ukraine, that's us as outsiders.

If Ukraine has secret weapons to fall back on in the scenario that — as per the comment I'm replying to — the US stops giving them weapons, why aren't they already using them? Likewise if Russia has any significant number of other weapons they could actually use*, why did they not use them already?

* while Russia may have plenty of unused submarines, they're not going to be of any significance beyond the handful of SLBMs that might spook the rest of the world into thinking it's World-War-Three-O'Clock

Because the US would withdraw weapons access immediately and - there was a tit- for tat situation implicitly, you attack my refinery, i attack your dam. But moscow has run out of tat. They have destroyed all they can destroy, after the 20th its payback time.

This expression is often misused, it seems. It sounds so cool, 'scorched-earth tactics'... like 'medieval', 'fire-and-brimstone', 'kill it with fire', etcetera.

Maybe read up on the specifics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth

And BTW, there just aren't any 1M+ shells per month to send. Maybe in 2028 or something. Production takes time to build.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-ammunition-ukraine/ (Aug-24)

Its russian colonial bias- none of the countries that start with "the" can amount to anything. All just farmers, peasants, runaway traitors. Its a sort of smear that ukraine CAN not do that alone.

    > nuklear barges or small nuklear power plants on trucks

Does this exist in practice, or only in theory?

Not even in theory, it's solidly science fiction. And since you presumably need to park up and plug them into something to actually use them, they'll always be an blindingly obvious target. They'll be the things surrounded by wires, pumping out megawatts of heat.

What are you talking about? It is already built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

Which would last how long in a conflict? You obviously can have mobile reactors, it's called a modern submarine or an aircraft carrier for a start, but a fleet of mobile reactors scooting ahead of incoming attacks providing power and moving off is pure science fiction and completely impractical.

It also weighs over 20,000 tonnes so that's a big old truck you'll need. Even a submarine reactor, the tiniest and most compact type ever made, running on essentially weapons-grade highly-enriched fuel, are around 100 tonnes just for the reactor itself, which is far from the only bit you need to generate power.

Hmm, pretty sure you are moving goalposts. You said it doesn't exist even in theory, when in fact it is there in flesh and blood. As any structure that exists on the face of the earth, it can be destroyed. Would it be quicker than hitting a stationary object which has a known static position, I think not.

> You obviously can have mobile reactors

It's not about having reactors in objects, it's about them supplying power to the world outside of their vessel.

Which is all completely and utterly useless in the context of hardening an electrical grid. Which is the topic at hand. It would take days to connect one and start it. For all intents and purposes, it's a static installation.

And truck mounted reactors really are science fiction, if for no other reason than they'd be a proliferation nightmare (also for, well, all the other reasons).

But I don't know why I bother since everyone round here seem to have terminal software brain and think you can just scale and deploy energy infrastructure like Kubernetes.

Brother I don't disagree with you nor claim anything that I cannot claim since I don't know the domain. You wrote one thing that was incorrect (that they don't exist) and I shared a link that might inform you otherwise.

Cheers.

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