Comments on: Cybersecurity and the smart grid http://knowledgeproblem.com/2009/04/09/cybersecurity-and-the-smart-grid/ Commentary on Economics, Information and Human Action Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:58:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: bartman http://knowledgeproblem.com/2009/04/09/cybersecurity-and-the-smart-grid/#comment-7912 Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:50:29 +0000 http://knowledgeproblem.com/?p=4339#comment-7912 Essentially, the “spy” story is about people hacking into the dispatch control systems and turning plants on or off without the correct authorization, thus creating chaos. In the past year, there have been a couple of cases (that I am aware of) of peakers “turning themselves on” without an explicit dispatch signal from any authorized source (ISO or owner).

Will the “Smart Grid” help? Well, if we have a large amount of distributed generation that does not have remote dispatchability, then yes, we are more secure. But that doesn’t have a lot to do with “smart grid”, which is all about optimizing the centralized utility systems that we currently have.

Any sentient person knows that those systems are not going to go away for a long time – in 50 years, we will still be meeting most of our power needs with large-scale centralized generation. A lot of uninformed laypersons think that if we all put solar panels on our roofs we can get rid of coal and nuke plants, but that is so far from the reality as to be laughable.

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