From: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/raccoon-blamed-for-seattle-... at 2 min 50 s.
It turns out that the power grid doesn't like it when you connect 115 kV directly to ground. By the time the ground straps vaporized, the fluctuations caused all the generators in San Francisco to go offline, cutting power to a million people.
Bringing the power grid back up took hours. Among other problems, they discovered that the SCADA modems in several substations ran off AC without backup, so they couldn't access the substations remotely when the power was down. Oops.
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/System%20Disturbance%20Report...
I see it in the spirit of computer security research. "Here is a way evildoers could hack this system". Neither the form of attack nor the target need to be the most general to churn out such results.
Social media information warfare is happening and is novel. Institutions don’t have a good process do deal with it.
I definitely have to agree. Seeing papers with such blatantly clickbaity sounding titles gain a lot of traction is pretty disheartening.
A squirrel could bring power to a street down, or maybe a neighborhood. In the same way falling trees do
A very big outage in North America occurred from the cascading effects of a single breaker working as intended. The grid is a very complex system because it is dynamic and subject to states of vulnerability that may not be well understood.
This tactic of elevating your pet issue by linking it to a hypothetical catastrophe seems a bit unserious. A network model of how memes and beliefs spread is interesting, but they seem to adopt someone elses model in support of their idea. It's useful to apply extra skepticism to papers that link ideas to catastrophe, since it's likely using it as a vehicle.
However, an alternative interpretation from this is they may show it's possible to ascertain someone's political beliefs or alignment and select them for further investigation using their electricity consumption patterns, which if true, would be right out of the anti-smart-meter infrastructure conspiracies we encountered during SMI rollouts.