British TV Show 'Blackout' Triggers Online LOLs

judgecorp writes "Britain's Channel 4 screened Blackout, a drama about a cyber-attack which crashes the national power grid. The show was silly enough, with a strong message about the dangers of lighting candles in such a situation, but the Twitter responses were even better. The show terrified some viewers who apparently didn't realise that their TV screen was powered by the grid."

Re:Who cares about battery life?

[gsslay]

If the grid goes down the whole network goes down with it. Towers, exchanges, switches, relays, the lot.

Your phone would become a tiny tablet without any connection to anything. Not entirely useless, but not much use. Then the battery would go.

Re:hey stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears that you are not taking the time to think through the problem that a power plants control center has.

> For the fine details of current usage the plant should just respond to voltage changes on the lines.

Yes the plant could tell how much power it is providing by monitoring the out put lines.

You think you know an algorithm that would provide the plant with the information on how to reliably and economically contribute to the power grid based only on the voltages of lines connect to the plant itself?

I suggest you consider a few unknowns from your air gaped power plant control center:

Grid topology is constantly changing with construction and maintenance outages.
Transmission line capacity, based on many things some of the larger factors including ambient temperature.
Costs for other plants to produce power, assuming you would be so kind as to only produce power when your plant is the cheapest.

And for the record there are monthly and weekly forecasts but the grid is run by much finer grained timescales.

Re:hey stupid

[Mousit]

Speaking as someone currently working in the electrical utility industry, I can tell you how my company does it. We use a combination of things, depending on what's most cost-effective, but the vast majority of our communications are done via microwave relay. We actually set up our own towers, get FCC licenses, and transmit private microwave signals to our substations and to our satellite control centers, as well as our generation plants. Some of it is proprietary serial protocol (DNP, very common in the utility industry) and some of it is standard TCP/IP based.

We run multiple networks over these microwave links (which ARE isolated from each other both in microwave frequencies and in physical equipment), as our satellite offices also get corporate network connectivity and Internet connectivity via microwave as well, communicating to our HQ and using its Internet hardline.

For locations where we couldn't set up microwave, we sometimes use private leased lines (direct, always-on, no-dial telephone connections, but these we only use if we have to because they're the most expensive). On a few occasions we use spread-spectrum radio, or as an absolute last resort we use GPRS radio over mobile networks. This last solution is NOT the same network as what a cell phone or other consumer access point goes through. We are basically leasing access to their mobile tower for a "private line" more or less.

In ALL cases, whether it's microwave, radio, leased line, or anything else, over-the-air communications are end-to-end encrypted, because yes we're totally aware that OTA stuff can be intercepted and eavesdropped, even point-to-point microwave links. It is also a closed, air-gapped network. As I said, the Internet and corporate network stuff to our remote offices goes over its own separate microwave channel with separate air-gapped communications equipment that's independent of the equipment talking to substations and the like.

So that's how we suggest you do it.