Sabotage Blacks Out Millions In Crimea 156
HughPickens.com writes: In a preview of what the U.S. may one day face with cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid, Ivan Nechepurenko reports at the NY Times that power lines in southern Ukraine that supply Crimea have been knocked down by saboteurs, leaving millions without electricity. Four local power plants, including two nuclear ones, scaled back production because they had no means to distribute electricity. More than 1.6 million people still lacked power on Monday morning, Russia's Energy Ministry said in a statement. Local power plants in Crimea, as well as backup generators, were being used to provide power to hospitals, schools and other vital facilities. The Crimean authorities declared Monday a day off for non-government workers and declared a state of emergency, which can last as long as one month.
It was not immediately clear who destroyed the main electric pylons on Friday and Sunday, but the blasted-away stump of at least one tower near the demonstrators was wrapped in the distinctive blue Crimean Tatar flag with a yellow trident in the upper left-hand corner. Tatar activists blockaded the site, saying they would prevent repairs until Russia released political prisoners and allowed international organizations to monitor human rights in Crimea. The activists claim that the 300,000-member minority has faced systematic repression since Russia annexed the peninsula in March 2014. In the meantime Russia is building an "energy bridge" to Crimea that officials hope will supply most of the peninsula's need and its first phase will begin operating by the end of this year.
Defending the power grid in the United States is challenging from an organizational point of view. There are about 3,200 utilities, all of which operate a portion of the electricity grid, but most of these individual networks are interconnected. The latest version of The Department of Defense's Cyber Strategy has as its third strategic goal, "Be prepared to defend the U.S. homeland and U.S. vital interests from disruptive or destructive cyberattacks of significant consequence."
It was not immediately clear who destroyed the main electric pylons on Friday and Sunday, but the blasted-away stump of at least one tower near the demonstrators was wrapped in the distinctive blue Crimean Tatar flag with a yellow trident in the upper left-hand corner. Tatar activists blockaded the site, saying they would prevent repairs until Russia released political prisoners and allowed international organizations to monitor human rights in Crimea. The activists claim that the 300,000-member minority has faced systematic repression since Russia annexed the peninsula in March 2014. In the meantime Russia is building an "energy bridge" to Crimea that officials hope will supply most of the peninsula's need and its first phase will begin operating by the end of this year.
Defending the power grid in the United States is challenging from an organizational point of view. There are about 3,200 utilities, all of which operate a portion of the electricity grid, but most of these individual networks are interconnected. The latest version of The Department of Defense's Cyber Strategy has as its third strategic goal, "Be prepared to defend the U.S. homeland and U.S. vital interests from disruptive or destructive cyberattacks of significant consequence."
Hm, yes, similar (Score:2, Funny)
Surely blowing something up is similar to a cyberattack!
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Could it be a revenge attack by these guys?
http://qha.com.ua/en/society/g... [qha.com.ua]
Re:Hm, yes, similar (Score:5, Funny)
It was not immediately clear who destroyed the main electric pylons on Friday and Sunday...
Maybe they were using networking over power lines, and somebody (evil hacker!) arranged a DDOS such that all of the packets arrived at that pylon at the same time, causing that pylon to explode?
Did anyone else have the image of the phrase "You Must Construct Additional Pylons!" (or the local equivalent) being repeated over and over all over Crimea after this happened?
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sigh, stupid filter ruining the feel of this post by forcing me to add lowercase letters...
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Plus, seriously, the U.S. is like Crimea? We have been invaded by a foreign power, with support from some citizens and opposition from others? I'm sorry, but there is literally no commonality between the two cases other than that both of them nominally involve the interruption of electrical power delivery. This isn't analysis: it's fear-mongering.
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Electronic warfare
journalists... (Score:2, Offtopic)
"all your news is belong to us" (yahoo, facebook, google...)
Yes, I am aware of the irony of using google in my link.
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What kind of Terrist-Fearin' FUD is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
"In a preview of what the U.S. may one day face with cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid"
What the hell does physical sabotage have to do with cyberattacks? Who's behind the spin on this story and what is their agenda?
Re:What kind of Terrist-Fearin' FUD is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell does physical sabotage have to do with cyberattacks?
Um, maybe it's because a cyberattack IS a form of sabotage, and because in either case the grid goes down, with similar consequences. Just guessin'...
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The consequences in common are that the power goes out. Couldn't we have guessed that already? Perhaps the important discovery is that it'll mean a vacation day?
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What the hell does physical sabotage have to do with cyberattacks? Who's behind the spin on this story and what is their agenda?
Ask Hugh the nose picker... He's the one who invented it with the express intent to get people who didn't RTFA to draw conclusions that were never actually articulated.
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It does make some sense in a way: most, if not all, of the U.S. power grid is heavily interconnected and controlled by networked computer. If the computer network would be compromised, and this is much "safer" and easier than physically severing connections, it would actually be rather simple to induce a cascade failure that takes down a significant portion of the nationwide grid. It is even possible that the cascade could be designed to significantly overload substations and interconnects past what the bre
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Hmm those "preppers" (Score:2)
maybe there's something to those guys after all.
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Oh sure. The best thing to do in case of a power outage is to go alone into the woods with a hunting knife, a backpack, two guns, and no antibiotics. Then live the rest of your life in a cave.
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I'm not a prepper, but your characterization is amusing. Perhaps you'd find comfort in knowing that people like you are always welcome in Kim Jong-Un's paradise, where all your needs are taken care of.
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The Preppers are planning for something worse than a power outage. They are prepping for the time it doesn't come back on.
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The Preppers are planning for something worse than a power outage. They are prepping for the time it doesn't come back on.
I thought they were prepping for the time when the zombie apocalypse happens?
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Their reasons vary, and the effectiveness of their prepping certainly can be questioned, but it's all for something a bit worse than a power outage. Superplague, nuclear war, UN takeover, natural disaster.
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No.
Get a 4x4 (not a mall utility vehicle, a good one; Dodge, Toyota, Rover), a mountain bike, a backpack and contents to hike the back country.
Much more fun toy and much more useful 'shit hits fan' tools.
WTF is with the US utility tie-in? (Score:4, Insightful)
>> Defending the power grid in the United States
WTF is with the US utility tie-in? Did California declare war on Nevada overnight? Is the South risin' again?
The problem here is that there's a low-grade civil war brewing in Crimea after Russia's invasion. Wake me up when/if the US has a similar problem. Zzzzzz....
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>> Defending the power grid in the United States
WTF is with the US utility tie-in? Did California declare war on Nevada overnight? Is the South risin' again?
The problem here is that there's a low-grade civil war brewing in Crimea after Russia's invasion. Wake me up when/if the US has a similar problem. Zzzzzz....
It's an odd tie-in, but the point that the US has this kind of vulnerability is valid. Especially in the Southwest. California's environmental regulations are so strict that it is easier to build a power station just on the Utah border and then run the power line all the way to Los Angeles. Arizona has similar issues, where the power plants are in the north of the state, but supply power to the cities. In Arizona's case, they depend on that power for pumping water also. You would not have to sever many
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There was a kamikaze squirrel in my neighborhood last week who took out a transformer. The power was out for nearly 90 minutes.
The threat is real.
Was that attack connected with the Islamic Squirrels?
Re: WTF is with the US utility tie-in? (Score:4, Informative)
You don't want to know what utilities spend every year deterring and repairing after squirrels.
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I think the point is there are some major not very well protected long haul power lines outside some of our major population centers. Events of 2004 proved there isn't enough redundancy in the system overall and there exist some points of failure that would likely lead to large scale blackouts that could last days. The lead time on replacement of some large transformers is weeks to months as well.
A well researched attack that took out difficult to replace infrastructure like those transformers or perhaps
Re:WTF is with the US utility tie-in? (Score:5, Funny)
>> probably is within reach of some guys with truck bombs and suicide drivers
Like I said, then it's probably not something to worry about (i.e. fund excessively) in the US today. People with the ability to deploy truck bombs and suicide drivers are much more likely to target people instead. The kinds of conversations that would need take place to do the things you're talking about would only happen in an Austin Powers movie or Monty Python script.
Terrorist Leader: "OK, Ali. Your mission is to drive this truck full of explosives into the Great Satan's (duh duh duh) electrical transformer! Muh-huh-huh."
Ali: "Well...OK, and my sacrifice will kill off dozens of Satanic patients hooked up in the hospital in the next town over?"
Leader: "Well, no, because the Great Satan's critical infrastructure is already protected with its own batteries and generators. But you will (duh duh duh) inconvenience thousands of people trying to watch TV and open their garage doors remotely. Muh-huh-huh."
Ali: "Alright...so my sacrifice will inconvenience thousands of people for weeks, at least right? "
Leader: "Well, maybe for a couple of days anyway, since the Great Satan will probably reroute power and bring in replacement equipment under an armed guard that we probably can't disrupt. But it will (duh duh duh) make the evening news. Muh-huh-huh."
Ali: "Look, I don't think this group is for me. Can you recommend any other evil terrorist organizations that ARE a little more focused on my career goals?"
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Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://time.com/3949986/1977-b... [time.com]
In all, 1,616 stores were damaged in looting and rioting. A total of 1,037 fires were responded to, including 14 multiple-alarm fires. In the largest mass arrest in city history, 3,776 people were arrested. Many had to be stuffed into overcrowded cells, precinct basements and other makeshift holding pens. A congressional study estimated that the cost of damages amounted to a little over $300 million.
The blackout ultimately shone a s
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>> The blackout ultimately shone a spotlight on some of the city’s long-overlooked shortcomings, from glaring flaws in the power network to the much deeper-rooted issues of racial inequality and the suffering of the “American underclass,” as TIME dubbed it.
So...we need to spend ludicrous amounts of money keeping the lights and over-employing the "homeland security" sector to avoid race riots. Got it.
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Unfortunately it seems that way.
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If you took all the terrorists who died in 9/11 put them into trucks with bombs and had them all drive in to major substations across several major cities in the north east of the USA and blow them up they would have killed if indirectly a order of magnitude more people and done an order of magnitude more economic harm than they actually did.
You could easily put a major city like New York with out power for many months. There is simply not the "slack" in the supply of new transformers to replace them in wha
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I doubt very much anyone in this thread things thinks 'they' need to suicide bomb anything. If you are on the planning end of things though suicide bombers have some advantages:
1) Dead men tell no tales - they won't be caught later and give up any intel on where your group can be found or how you communicate.
2) Less effort there is no escape or extract part of the engagement to plan. Which may mean few assets, which is probably harder to detect. Consider attacking power infrastructure as that is the topi
we have enough hometown wackos to worry (Score:2)
like the goofs who shot up a transformer in California about a year ago. folks in northeast New Mexico that have nothing else to do late at night but take potshots at the high-tension line insulators. these issues are easily but expensively solved by putting the lines underground. as we have seen in New York City, they don't get upgraded on schedule and you tend to have duct explosions and fires.
as soon as they decide to take on the "smart grid" with its 4-character default admin passwords and no firewal
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The problem here is that there's a low-grade civil war brewing in Crimea after Russia's invasion.
There are no civil wars in Crimea right now, this disruption happened in Ukraine, outside of Crimea. Moreover this will harm more the faltering economy of Ukraine, that is paid for its supply of energy, than Crimea.
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It could have been done by Putin's little green men so that two-headed rat can claim he needs to protect the Crimea from terrorists.
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But it's a dirty war. False-flag attacks are entirely plausable. Consider what Putin's plan might be:
1. He has occupied new territory. It's not too hard to hold - the former power has other concerns, most of the population speaks Russian and a lot of them are loyal to Russia. But not all. There's a resistance, and it's getting in his way. So how to deal with them? He can't just start violently oppressing them, people would notice and there would be political fallout.
2. Ah, but what if the local people all h
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1. He has occupied new territory. It's not too hard to hold - the former power has other concerns, most of the population speaks Russian and a lot of them are loyal to Russia. But not all. There's a resistance, and it's getting in his way.
There's no resistance to speak of in Crimea, moreover joining Russia clearly was a decision by a vast majority of Crimean people. The issue is that the referendum was not in accordance with the Ukrainean legislation, hence it's not recognized internationally, but there's no debate that it was a popular decision of the Crimeans.
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The problem here is that there's a low-grade civil war brewing in Crimea after Russia's invasion. Wake me up when/if the US has a similar problem. Zzzzzz....
I would not be too complacent about this. Clearly we are going to reasonably wonder "could it happen here?" and what would it mean. A valid concern, but the much greater issue as I see it is that it appears Putin has a new and serious challenge on his hands. How many more problems can Russia manage before something snaps? A breakdown in Russia could be a very big problem, especially if it is chaotic.
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Even Crimean Tartars are OK with that
You mean, the ones that are permitted to talk about it, as opposed to being banned from Crimea and otherwise prosecuted for "extremism"?
Of course, the very idea of holding up high the results of a referendum on secession in a country where merely distributing leaflets promoting "separatism" can land you in prison for several years is supremely ironic. At this point, it doesn't really matter what Crimeans think, because joining Russia is a one-way ticket - wanting to get out is a crime.
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As for the leaders of Crimean tartars - they are NOT nice people. They supported and encouraged the policy of "land grabs" (or "self-occupation" - "samozakhvat" in Russian and U
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Old political trick. Treat every piece of news as a potential terrorist threat. So we won't complain so much when they take away our civil rights.
Um, I think a story about blowing up electricity pylons is an actual piece of news about terrorism.
This is why we need alternative energy. (Score:1)
Solar, wind, etc...
Then you can have a highly distibuted generation/distribution system that will be more difficult to disrupt. Not impossible, but more difficult.
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We also need batteries with higher energy density per volume, and it would be nice if MPPT charge controller prices go down (where the most expensive part is likely the inductor coil for the buck/boost charging.)
Batteries would change everything. If a stable, long-life battery that holds even an order of magnitude less than what gasoline stores in unit volume, this would fundamentally change the structure of the power grid.
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Crimea is a small 10,000 square mile area (think 100x100 mile square). Unless you have a lot of local storage in every city (giant city sized UPS), this is not a good example of your point.
We *MUST* force Apple and Google to backdoor (Score:1)
Think of the Children in the dark.....
FBI-NSA-M-O-U-S-E first, please (Score:2)
put backdoors in all your servers, guys, let us know about it, and we'll see if you are right that it's not a problem.
don't see why this wasn't the FP: (Score:2)
Looks like Crimea needs to build more pylons
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Wait, cyberattacks what? (Score:2)
So powerlines were struck with explosives, and somehow this may be related to cyberattacks? I think this powercut is preview of what the U.S. may one day face with an alien invasion. Or zombies.
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Zombies don't target the power grid, but they may unintentionally cause outages by shambling into power equipment.
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Ukranian territory. (Score:1, Flamebait)
Sabotage Blacks Out Millions In the Ukrainian territory of Crimea
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No more than Taiwan is the territory of China. Russia may have been completely in the wrong by invading and conquering Crimea, but they did, and now it's theirs. Ukraine's claims to it are just that: claims, not possession.
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Those sanctions will remain in place until Putin submits, or his people depose him, and Crimea reverts to Ukrainian control.
It's not about Putin anymore. Joining Russia was promoted by local Crimean activists (yeah, there was an active brewing separatist movement) and popularly supported at a referendum. It might be naught from the international viewpoint, but it's something that cannot be ignored by Russia, regardless of who is its president.
In Washington State ... (Score:2)
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Local distribution is not the same as the grid.
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Most of our outages were due to transmission line faults (a.k.a. 'the grid'). The local power company also pulled the plug on a bunch of circuits to reduce load when they lost their transmission lines. Because they didn't want to pay wheeling charges to use parallel public utilities' lines that were still in operation.
Bad choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Cutting Crimea off from Ukraine is only going to strengthen Russia's hold on it (especially after Russia comes in to save the day with electricity). And if these people thought they were being repressed before, well, I'd hate to be a Tatar now that they're responsible for turning off everyone's electricity.
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Maybe that's the idea - the 'activists' could really be Russian agents staging a fake attack.
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Maybe that's the idea - the 'activists' could really be Russian agents staging a fake attack.
Clearly it's the Tartars pretending to be Russian agents pretending to be Tartar 'activists' staging a fake attack.
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The population voted overwhelming to leave. You can claim the elections were fabricated but not the followup independent polls that showed better than 92% in favor of joining Russia.
They should have the right of self determination. On the other hand Ukraine should be under no obligation to supply Crimea with water, power sewer or any other service for which the people of Ukraine pay for. If I was the Ukrainian leader I would have cut the utilities ages ago without a significant and expensive payment from Ru
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Remember that Ukraine is in massive arrears to Russia for gas they never paid for. Meanwhile Crimea was/is paying Ukraine for electricity.
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Collective responsibility is not a part of the Russian mindset
Oh, really [wikipedia.org]?
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A mindset is not something that changes radically over 60 years.
And there have been plenty of cries along the lines of "Stalin was right" referencing the deportation of Chechens after wars with them in the 90s, and the associated terrorist acts.
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And looking at its direction in the past couple of years, it seems that it's falling back into its old ways (or rather an incoherent mix of old and even older, from Soviet and Imperial times both), which makes me question just where the problem has really been all this time.
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You're right, the new Russian state is authoritarian rather than totalitarian.
Which is to say, it's still shit, it just stinks a little bit less.
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Well, perhaps you have some nagging doubts about your patriotism, given what kind of things it would require you to support in the past couple of years?
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As it happens, I'm also a Russian, and my current whereabouts are close to Seattle... ~
And yes, I'm pretty sure that the US economy can accommodate us all - or at least the kind of people that you have listed. We have valuable skill sets, and we actually produce wealth - and we pay more in taxes off our income than most natural-born citizens, not to mention all the spending that also creates jobs. Furthermore, we integrate readily: we often marry locals, our kids usually speak English better than they speak
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Now to proceed with my answer, have you probably read "Guns, germs and steel" by Jared Diamond? In that book the author asks a question why different civilizations have developed differently by the time the world became global, and his answer is that very basically it boils down to geographic factors.
Yes.
In a similar manner it can be argued that for the foreseeable future Russia won't be a lucrative place to live for a young aspiring adult, because it is cheaper to produce new fantastic gadgets in the South Asia and it's more profitable to design them in the U.S. Russia falls in between, with the climate which increases the costs of production and the economy which does not allow for serious levels of irrecoverable costs (i.e. engineering labor). This pretty much means that the economy of Russia won't boom, and as a boomerang effect its middle class won't rise economically and aspire to claim political leadership.
Your analysis ignores the existence of states in similar, if not worse, predominant climatic conditions, that fare much better in terms of economy and (arguably, more importantly) quality of life. Canada, Finland, Sweden, Iceland... which of these have a problem with outflow of skilled labor?
Then again, the harshness of climate in Russia is also often overstated for effect. A good chunk of European Russia (basically, the lower 2/3 or so) has very reasonable climate. There are plenty of geographic benefi
Cyber trolls take over the world (Score:2)
This is one of the most outright blatant trolling attempts by an author of a summary I've seen in at least a week.
What happens after one month? (Score:2)
and declared a state of emergency, which can last as long as one month.
What happens after one month, then, if the situation hasn't changed? State of Emergency II: Electric Boogaloo?
Taters (Score:2)
Tatars gonna Tate! http://24.media.tumblr.com/tum... [tumblr.com]
May I be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
Crimea river.
But sabotage roof top solar first (Score:3)
The big lesson learned from the 2008 financial collapse is: fail big. Fail small, you need to pay for the cost of failure. Fail big, feds will pay for the cost of failure. So make sure that all failures are catastrophic, so that there is huge public pressure to "do something". The utilities will have contingency plans ready to hold the hat out for federal handout.
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Distributed power generation could provide a vital back up for such grid failures. So to protect the profit potential of utilities sucking the blood of captive customers we need to sabotage roof top solar first. If grid gets sabotaged, then we can get the feds to cough up money for doing all the maintenance work that were cut back for decades.
The big lesson learned from the 2008 financial collapse is: fail big. Fail small, you need to pay for the cost of failure. Fail big, feds will pay for the cost of failure. So make sure that all failures are catastrophic, so that there is huge public pressure to "do something". The utilities will have contingency plans ready to hold the hat out for federal handout.
Power generation is already distributed across the country and regions in a diverse portfolio mix of technologies most appropriate for the geography. Sure, they're large generators, but it's presently the most cost-effective, safe, and reliable method of generating *and* transmitting energy. The problem is that we have three, huge interconnected grids in the United States in order to move that generated energy at the moment it's generated in precise equilibrium with demand. Failures in transmission, as this
Oh n0es, teh ph34r! (Score:2)
Just had to get the "ZOMG TWO nuclear power stations had to do a routine thing and we're all gonna die" angle in.
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decentralize power (Score:2)
the problem we have now is that the current power system is centralized and interconnected. it's interconnected nature is it's vulnerability so the obvious answer is to segment "the grid". the best answer would be to have everyone use solar+battery and only have people can't generate enough power actually stay connected to the grid.
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Economy of scale, though. One huge power station has a lower cost per watt of generating capacity than ten thousand tiny ones.
Cyber (Score:2)
LOL, no. Just... no.
Cyber attack??? (Score:2)
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And
"Power Grid Cyber Attacks Keep the Pentagon Up" at Night http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com]
Funny what reading does...you learn things...
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in NO WAY RELATED (Score:2)
So, if I cut the telephone lines going into people's houses, is that the same as hacking the telephone network?
If someone is in an auto accident and hits a phone pole, is that the same thing as hacking the car (and subsequently hacking the phone network?) And Horrors! Imagine if the auto accident was because the person was on the phone!
The only way this is similar is if "hackers" knock down the power poles with bulldozers, the old fashioned way. There's no "cyber" anything involved with this story, except i
From TV? Madam Secretary? (Score:2)
Or (more paranoid-ly) did Madam Secretary's script writers get early intel on what Russia planned?
Cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid .. (Score:2)
Except the power supply was knocked out by explosives blowing up the pylons [bbc.co.uk] and cyberattacks were not involved. And who in this day and age still connects their SCADA units directly to the Internet. Have a look at this from 2003 [time.com]. I do realize bur
Ukranian Territory. (Score:2)
Sabotage Blacks Out Millions In the Ukrainian territory of Crimea
Re:Main enemey to the US grid: NIMBY (Score:5, Interesting)
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Citations?
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Seriously?
There are people in Jail over it.
It should not be hard to find 100's of links.
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"The financial crisis was possible because of partial deregulation legislation instituted in 1996 by the California Legislature (AB 1890) and Governor Pete Wilson. Enron took advantage of this deregulation and was involved in economic withholding and inflated price bidding in California's spot markets."
One trader is heard on tapes obtained by CBS News saying, "Just cut 'em off. They're so f----d. They should just bring back f-----g horses and carriages, f-----g lamps, f-----g kerosene lamps."
"People were ta
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Indeed, thank you. And now ask yourself, why was Enron in a position to do all that... And the answer is: monopoly. California bungled the privatisation allowing Enron to hold all (or most) of the cards...
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Their whole corporate existence was emblematic of the modern economy of making money from doing nothing. Buying and selling stuff that they did not own, sitting in the middle and sweeping up profits. They did this with electricity, they had major plans to do this with water (pump it into aquifers in wet years in California then sell it at a profit in dry years), there were rumors they thought about stuff like this with air. Before they were "caught" they were hailed as geniuses in the business world beca
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Tatars in general — and Crimean Tatars in particular — are, probably, the most secular of Muslims in the world. They are certainly not seeking Sharia and this attack has nothing religious about it — the Tatars' movement is primarily nationalistic, rather than religious in nature. These people hate USSR/Russia with passion over the ethnic cleansing they suffered in 1944 [wikipedia.org]. They are quite loyal to Kyiv, be
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Sorta like the Palis? Crimean Tatars were removed from the Crimea in the 1940s, and relocated to Uzbekistan. So there is no reason for them to fight for any homeland. It's like the Pali claims of wanting to go back to 'Palestine', despite having lived for 2 generations abroad. When you're out that long, you might as well settle in the other country.
There is no unwritten rule that every ethnic group in the world has to have an independent country of their own. Or else, there are many who come to mind