"Full speed reverse?" You could perhaps increase fatigue overtime. Some wind turbines can start spinning to get to a more favorable position in their power curve, I'm not aware of utility grade ones being able to do that, or go "full speed" enough to cause physical damage.

I have some experience with network access in a UK wind farm. They were extremely paranoid about network security.

if the API is literally foolproof, then great. But an API that can cause no damage does not make a lot of sense to be paired to a device that has poor network security.

Security in these systems are dedicated network circuits and firewalls configured to only allow access on a specific port, from a specific IP address on a specific port.

Old technology our fusion reactors all run TypeScript compiled down to WebAssembly with some Elm interop.

Mostly the Elm is there so our devs can go to conferences and look down on others for not using Elm, I mean why else would you adopt new technology if not for that?.

At that point, there ain't shit you can do to stop an attacker with software based security. A human being, sitting in front of the hardware, is going to win.

Also, it's not that easy to damage these things. There certainly are cases where you can add wear and tear, decrease life span, and if the weather is cooperating, cause catastrophic failure. But it's certainly not a sure thing, and in most of the failure modes they outlined, you'd have plenty of time to shut them down and get a tech on site.

A little bit of dynamite (or any sort of improvised explosive) is cheap, readily available, and requires the same physical access, only it happens to be a far more reliable way to cause failure...

Just want to point out that there's no such thing as turning on a wind turbine at full speed reverse. It's not a fan.

Potential mechanisms for damaging one include mucking with the brakes (as in the article), changing blade pitch, disabling some kind of cooling system, etc.

Big AC windmills actually are started up as fans with their blades set to 'coarse' for maximum torque. What happens is that the grid is used to get them up to speed, they become sync-locked to the grid (same frequency) and then any excess power the wind imparts to the machine will be passed off to the grid.

If the machine would drop slightly below the 0 line of power produced the power company would still operate it as a fan until this situation persists for too long and the losses accumulate, then the mill is set to 'coarse' if the pitch is variable and allowed to coast to a stop or some low RPM waiting for the wind to pick up again.

All kinds of trickery (variable pitch, DC systems, maximum-power-point-tracking) and so on is used to expand the useful envelope.

So yes, they're also fans. But mechanical safety is a big thing in windmill design and most likely some FPGA or other hardware lock-out would stop you from being able to command a typical windmill from becoming an 8 MW desk fan.

Hurricane on demand, the evil part of me now wants to know what would happen. At a guess it wouldn't do much because the mechanism is rated to produce an X amount of power so it likely can handle sourcing it as well as long as enough air flows over the coils of the generator. As soon as those get too hot the failsafe will kick in again and the mill goes flat (totally neutral blade setting, the machine won't be moved by the wind like that) and stops.

When the wind is blowing really, really fast the controller will change the pitch of the blades to prevent them from spinning too fast. Prevent that and it redlines, resulting in anything from worn parts to catastrophic failure of the structure.

If you take out one wind turbine: they break often enough that it doesn't matter. They assume a few will break for mechanical reasons and that is accounted for, it hurts profits a little but probably less than their worst case failure budget has planned for. They will fix it sometime in the next few years. If you take out a lot of wind turbines, things get hard, replacing each one will take time: factories are generally booked months in advance and crews that can do this job is also not readily available.

Don't forget though that everything you do creates an effect. Take our wind turbines and they will beef up security. You are taking the risk that they notice your activities and put in some security system that catches you.

This entirely depends on location. A lot of major WECC locations are remote and would take a crew a long time to get there.

> substations fail once in a while.

What do you mean by this? Usually substations are fed from diverse lines, so a single incoming line outage, or XFMR (usually N+1) failure is able to easily be absorbed.

I don't know how much redundancy they have. I know that my power went out for a few hours a couple months ago when a substation failed. I've seen the "ball of flame" (probably just a spark, it only lasted a second) that knocked out power for a small city.

Now that's a piece of civil disobedience history I'm never gonna forget.