Re:Researchers Found They Could Hack Wind Farms
by Caveman_Coder on Thursday June 29, 2017 @04:38PM
(#14666674)
> they will have a temporary tower up in a few hours.
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.
Re:Researchers Found They Could Hack Wind Farms
by bluGill on Friday June 30, 2017 @12:26PM
(#14671754)
The transformer fails in a "ball of flame". The "flame" only lasts for a second (probably just a spark?), but it is visible for miles.
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.
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.