Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by DiggyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

DiggyJohnson·

The electric grid is much more important than most private sector software projects by an order of magnitude.

Catastrophic data loss or lack of disaster recovery kills companies. AWS outages do not.

View on HN

What if the electricity grid depends on some AWS service?

That would be circular dependency.

And?

The grid actually already has a fair number of (non-software) circular dependencies. This is why they have black start [1] procedures and run drills of those procedures. Or should, at least; there have been high profile outages recently that have exposed holes in these plans [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

It doesn't though? Weird what if

You'd be surprised. See. GP asks a very interesting question. And some grid infra indeed relies on AWS, definitely not all of it but there are some aspects of it that are hosted by AWS.

do you know for sure? And if not yet, you can bet someone will propose it in the future. So not a weird what if at all

This is already happening. I have looked at quite a few companies in the energy space this year, two of them had AWS as a critical dependency in their primary business processes and that could definitely have an impact on the grid. To their defense: AWS presumably tests their fall-back options (generators) with some regularity. But this isn't a farfetched idea at all.

I worked for an energy tech startup that did consulting for big utility companies. It absolutely does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com