Air gaps are not magical, they will not stop the flood. The electrical grid has to communicate with itself to load balance, so you can run dedicated wires with giant cut-me signs pointing at it, or you can use symmetrical key encryptors to route it over the intenet. You needed to use the encryptors anyway, so why not. If bad software gets in via thumb drives music disks etc (and it will of the flood is pointed at you) it can still do bad things. But so can a hunting rifle pointed at a transformer station. That nearly blacked out all of socal once.

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mike_hearn 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The electrical grid self balances, it doesn't require any IT systems to do that.

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galangalalgol 15 hours ago | parent [-]

If you look at my sibling post I explain that is how they used to do control, but they outgrew it. The spinnup times made it act like a spring damper system and it had bad control states even then.

	▲	mike_hearn 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, there's always been people phoning power plants and asking them to make bigger changes than the small automatic self balancing changes, but at the micro level the grid drags thermal power plants along with it via governers. Most control still works this way. See the postmortem on the Iberia black start. Renewables that were trying to do frequency following drifted out of sync and injected misaligned power into the grid. They couldn't even figure out where it was coming from their telemetry is so bad. Then they were asking the gas plants to spin up to add inertia but it was too late as the boilers were cold. IT and other smart grid ideas were conspicuously absent.

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what a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Weird, electrical grids didn’t exist before the internet?

	▲	galangalalgol 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They sent the data along the lines. Initially that was just the frquency. Drooped low? Ramp it up, running high, turn it down. That is effectively a spring mass damper system and it always had instability conditions that caused problems. They begand to modulate additional data, including voice, analog over the lines to add additional controls. As more people joined, and load became less predictable even that wasn't enough. Every endpoint now measures load at something like 30hz and that won't fit across the lines. They added separate dedicated fiber or microwave along towers. Those still get used. Probably sometimes unencrypted still. They are targets I'm sure. Then we have renewables and nuclear with their mostly inflexible power supply, that makes it harder to stabilize yet. The control loop stuff is often physically separate, but that is the older stuff and less secure. The data from all those houses still has to get onto the logically/physically isolated control network somehow, so that is a vulnerability too. Anyone with a zigbee radio cam see the encrypted packets.