On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 09:46:32PM -0400, dan@geer.org wrote:
Thanks for the note and the compliment.
I took Kelly Ziegler at her word (*) given that her role as an executive at NERC (Northamerican Electric Reliability Corporation).
--dan
(*) https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity10/grid-phd-smart-grid-cyber...
I would advise any cypherpunk that wants to keep their lights on to invest in a 48VDC system with (partial) battery backup. If your solar installer starts blathering about AC and inverters and batteries costing too much, get a new installer, or help me build some open-source hardware grid-tie inverters. If you have a say 5KW system, installers will try to sell you batteries to back up the entire 5kw. You only need a few hundred watts (and maybe 1 kilowatt-hour) of batteries. If you do it this way, it will cost less than buying electricity for the next 30 years. If there is a high-profile hack of some power grid device and utilities have to do a 'truck roll' to patch some magic utility box, then your solar payback time will probably drop to 5 years because you have to pay for the utilities insecurity.