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> Furthermore, you need to plaster a vast area in the desert with solar plants, which brings along all sorts of concentrated security risks This sentence seems

> Furthermore, you need to plaster a vast area in the desert with solar plants, which brings along all sorts of concentrated security risks This sentence seems to be at odds with itself. How does needing a large area concentrate security risks? If anything it seems to disperse them. Unlike a coal or nuclear plant, you can't just walk up to a critical part of a solar farm and blow it up. Any part that you damage is relatively isolated from the parts you don't damage. Thus, it takes considerably more effort to take the entire plant offline.

short_sells_poo 9y ago
Sorry I worded that sentence poorly. Let's assume two scenarios: a) We create a 200 square mile solar field in the Sahara, from which cables run to Europe to supply electricity. To take this plant out, one just cuts the cables. There, you just plunged Europe into darkness. b) We create a 20x 10 square mile solar fields in the Sahara, all dispersed over a very large area. Well, this is an engineering and construction project on the scale that dwarfs even the previous project. It is truly vast. Nevermind all the political issues again.
- antisthenes 9y ago
  I'm surprised to see this kind of simplistic reductionist thinking on HN. "Just cut the cables" isn't trivial. Have you ever seen a high voltage tower? Not only are they not accessible without professional gear, it's also going to require even more expensive gear to cut multiple inch thick conductors. In all likelihood he power to Europe will be transmitted via multiple undersea cables, the effort of disrupting which would be unavailable to all but state agents, in which case the security issue is irrelevant, as you are likely already in a state of war.
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    I'm not 100% positive that this is the right video, but I think it is. As part of the "overthrow a nation" plan, he talks specifically about destroying critical infrastructure, like electricity. The solution for taking out high voltage powerlines? A pair of Skilsaws hanging under a quadcopter. Drop down onto it and... something bad's going to happen! edit: I also missed the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA edit 2: I scrolled around a bit and it's near the 30 minute mark.
    - Retric 9y ago
      Damage that takes a few hours to fix is not going to destabilize a country. If you can scale it to keep up 24/7 disruption you already have an army and far more useful approaches like destroying ports.
    - antisthenes 9y ago
      Absolutely. The infrastructure is very fickle, but also enormous on the scale of countries. Since we're talking about hypotheticals, I could say these things are also true: 1. There are counter-drones deployed and patrolling air space above the towers. 2. There are hundreds of independent power lines with 2N redundancy, so cutting 5-10 high voltage lines would do nothing. 3. The undersea cable points are protected by state agents and have good security for amateurs to compromise. 4. Europe will have 24-48 hours worth of storage even if ALL the lines are cut from the Solar Generation plants. 5. Europe will have backup power generation capacity in the form of locally stored and operated fossil fuel plants. ____ In other words, there's absolutely no evidence that the future hypothetical solar installation is going to be more vulnerable than the infrastructure that already exists today, and surprisingly Europe doesn't plunge into darkness every week.
      - supergarfield 9y ago
        I don't think the main problem here is random terrorists cutting power to Europe by blowing up a power line tower. The real problem is that nation states that control the Sahara haven't proven to be stable (Syria, Egypt), or don't always have great relationships with Europe (Algeria in the 90s). As to points 4 and 5, although storage and some backup capacity is reasonably feasible, this would mean that Europe could very well be forced to go to war in short order to get their full power supply back if a rogue organization gained power in North Africa.
        chris1993 9y ago
        It might motivate Europe to improve relations with the region
  - mseebach 9y ago
    > the effort of disrupting which would be unavailable to all but state agents It's a good thing then that there is a long history of all state agents in northern Africa maintaining friendly and stable relations with European governments. (Yes, said Europeans also carry a great deal of responsibility for this situation, but that doesn't make the situation any more tractable).
    - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
      Almost like the natural gas pipelines that come into Europe from our best buddy Vlad.
    - thatcat 9y ago
      Wouldn't creating a partnership then help to stabilize that relationship?
      - petre 9y ago
        Partnerships with whom? Several different warring tribes that want to gain control over the other or achieve independence? Morocco or Jordan maybe, the rest of them most likely not.
  - gregmac 9y ago
    > "Just cut the cables" isn't trivial. Well, how many towers do you have to knock down using explosives before the lines fail?
    - candiodari 9y ago
      Just 1. The feet of the towers are simply accessible, so there's nothing stopping people from even just using a metal file. It wouldn't be safe, but you'd get the job done. Or just plow a truck into their feet. You only really need to bend one of the feet and the wind will do the rest.
  - encoderer 9y ago
    Or a single car bomb?
  - andrewwharton 9y ago
    The undersea cables don't need to be cut, they're perfectly capable of breaking on their own.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink#2015-2016_outage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink#2015-2016_outage
  - brokenmachine 9y ago
    > it's also going to require even more expensive gear to cut multiple inch thick conductors. I agree with most of what you've said, but cutting a few inch thick conductors doesn't seem all that hard. I think a single stick of dynamite would do it pretty easily. Two for good measure. This would still be an act of war of course.
  - ianai 9y ago
    I also think the location thing may be addressed in later solar technology. i.e. For our currently tech the sun really needs to be out. But as far as I remember, there's still a good amount of energy available on cloudy days (assuming it's not pitch black). As solar technology progresses so too will the locations it can be installed increase.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > I'm surprised to see this kind of simplistic reductionist thinking on HN. The thinking is in fact correct. The parent should have used a better, more serious, and guaranteed inevitable scenario: war. Bomb the concentrated infrastructure and take down all of Europe's power supply. It wouldn't take very high precision and it wouldn't take a vast number of hits: it would require a few, clumsy hits, which would be nearly impossible to stop. The present system, which tends to be far more distributed than not (to take down all the power in Europe today, you need to hit a lot of spread out targets), is vastly superior to extreme concentration.
  - MR4D 9y ago
    Why cut it? Explosives would be much easier (think IEDs), and could be improvised from simple sources like gasoline and petroleum jelly. No need for a tool to "cut" a power line, regardless of it being above or below ground.
  - eyko 9y ago
    Then "evil state" bombs cables, or power plant. The point is that the cost of defending such a crucial part of our infrastructure would not be trivial, and it's still hosted on foreign soil, so... politics.
  - petre 9y ago
    It has been done in Crimeea last year. Pro gear to cut HV cables = C4. How do you run an undersea cable through the desert?
- Retric 9y ago
  Renewable power is very much going to be a distributed more than our current power generation. Further, you want redundancy in power transmission so you can do maintenance anyway and many countries are already dependent on foreign sources for a significant chunk of there daily energy demand for economic reasons. Any actor that can destroy thousands of cables can cut the power systems we have now. Further, outside of city's you can generally get solar panels from a roof to provide power for the building under it making the grid a lot more redundant vs cutting cables.
  - kpil 9y ago
    Exactly, while Sahara is obviously sunny and the land is cheap, it might not be the best place to place solar plants, due to the logistics. I think that roof top solar is just as viable in more or less the whole Europe - even in the Nordics, at least the southern parts. The only thing that would make desert-sized solar plants a really good business would be really cheap low efficiency cells.
- Panoramix 9y ago
  "just cut the cables" Not that easy. Furthermore, it's the same for any large power plant of any type. This is a very poor argument against solar. It's also a stretch to imagine that Europe would rely on a single power plant for its sustenance.
  - hueving 9y ago
    The commenter is literally suggesting that it rely on a giant solar deployment.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Seems a lot easier to fix a cable cut than a sabotaged nuclear power plant. I mean if you are the point where a nation-state is detonating fuel-air explosives over solar farms then there's probably no power plant design that is going to survive.
- foxylad 9y ago
  > ...one just cuts the cables Isn't this a problem with any centralised electrical power source? In fact I've always thought that terrorists could cause far more disruption by taking out a couple of transmission line towers than blowing people up. And it would only take a decent sized spanner in many cases. The only solution to this (and to the massive resistive losses over power lines) is localising power production. And that's where solar, wind, small-scale hydro and local battery storage look very effective.
TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
You can't just walk up to coal or nuclear plant and blow it up either. If you wanted to take a power plant offline, solar included, you would target the grid connection wiring or the high volatage transformers.

short_sells_poo 9y ago

Sorry I worded that sentence poorly. Let's assume two scenarios: a) We create a 200 square mile solar field in the Sahara, from which cables run to Europe to supply electricity. To take this plant out, one just cuts the cables. There, you just plunged Europe into darkness. b) We create a 20x 10 square mile solar fields in the Sahara, all dispersed over a very large area. Well, this is an engineering and construction project on the scale that dwarfs even the previous project. It is truly vast. Nevermind all the political issues again.

antisthenes 9y ago
I'm surprised to see this kind of simplistic reductionist thinking on HN. "Just cut the cables" isn't trivial. Have you ever seen a high voltage tower? Not only are they not accessible without professional gear, it's also going to require even more expensive gear to cut multiple inch thick conductors. In all likelihood he power to Europe will be transmitted via multiple undersea cables, the effort of disrupting which would be unavailable to all but state agents, in which case the security issue is irrelevant, as you are likely already in a state of war.
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  I'm not 100% positive that this is the right video, but I think it is. As part of the "overthrow a nation" plan, he talks specifically about destroying critical infrastructure, like electricity. The solution for taking out high voltage powerlines? A pair of Skilsaws hanging under a quadcopter. Drop down onto it and... something bad's going to happen! edit: I also missed the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA edit 2: I scrolled around a bit and it's near the 30 minute mark.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Damage that takes a few hours to fix is not going to destabilize a country. If you can scale it to keep up 24/7 disruption you already have an army and far more useful approaches like destroying ports.
  - antisthenes 9y ago
    Absolutely. The infrastructure is very fickle, but also enormous on the scale of countries. Since we're talking about hypotheticals, I could say these things are also true: 1. There are counter-drones deployed and patrolling air space above the towers. 2. There are hundreds of independent power lines with 2N redundancy, so cutting 5-10 high voltage lines would do nothing. 3. The undersea cable points are protected by state agents and have good security for amateurs to compromise. 4. Europe will have 24-48 hours worth of storage even if ALL the lines are cut from the Solar Generation plants. 5. Europe will have backup power generation capacity in the form of locally stored and operated fossil fuel plants. ____ In other words, there's absolutely no evidence that the future hypothetical solar installation is going to be more vulnerable than the infrastructure that already exists today, and surprisingly Europe doesn't plunge into darkness every week.
    - supergarfield 9y ago
      I don't think the main problem here is random terrorists cutting power to Europe by blowing up a power line tower. The real problem is that nation states that control the Sahara haven't proven to be stable (Syria, Egypt), or don't always have great relationships with Europe (Algeria in the 90s). As to points 4 and 5, although storage and some backup capacity is reasonably feasible, this would mean that Europe could very well be forced to go to war in short order to get their full power supply back if a rogue organization gained power in North Africa.
      - chris1993 9y ago
        It might motivate Europe to improve relations with the region
- mseebach 9y ago
  > the effort of disrupting which would be unavailable to all but state agents It's a good thing then that there is a long history of all state agents in northern Africa maintaining friendly and stable relations with European governments. (Yes, said Europeans also carry a great deal of responsibility for this situation, but that doesn't make the situation any more tractable).
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    Almost like the natural gas pipelines that come into Europe from our best buddy Vlad.
  - thatcat 9y ago
    Wouldn't creating a partnership then help to stabilize that relationship?
    - petre 9y ago
      Partnerships with whom? Several different warring tribes that want to gain control over the other or achieve independence? Morocco or Jordan maybe, the rest of them most likely not.
- gregmac 9y ago
  > "Just cut the cables" isn't trivial. Well, how many towers do you have to knock down using explosives before the lines fail?
  - candiodari 9y ago
    Just 1. The feet of the towers are simply accessible, so there's nothing stopping people from even just using a metal file. It wouldn't be safe, but you'd get the job done. Or just plow a truck into their feet. You only really need to bend one of the feet and the wind will do the rest.
- encoderer 9y ago
  Or a single car bomb?
- andrewwharton 9y ago
  The undersea cables don't need to be cut, they're perfectly capable of breaking on their own.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink#2015-2016_outage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink#2015-2016_outage
- brokenmachine 9y ago
  > it's also going to require even more expensive gear to cut multiple inch thick conductors. I agree with most of what you've said, but cutting a few inch thick conductors doesn't seem all that hard. I think a single stick of dynamite would do it pretty easily. Two for good measure. This would still be an act of war of course.
- ianai 9y ago
  I also think the location thing may be addressed in later solar technology. i.e. For our currently tech the sun really needs to be out. But as far as I remember, there's still a good amount of energy available on cloudy days (assuming it's not pitch black). As solar technology progresses so too will the locations it can be installed increase.
- adventured 9y ago
  > I'm surprised to see this kind of simplistic reductionist thinking on HN. The thinking is in fact correct. The parent should have used a better, more serious, and guaranteed inevitable scenario: war. Bomb the concentrated infrastructure and take down all of Europe's power supply. It wouldn't take very high precision and it wouldn't take a vast number of hits: it would require a few, clumsy hits, which would be nearly impossible to stop. The present system, which tends to be far more distributed than not (to take down all the power in Europe today, you need to hit a lot of spread out targets), is vastly superior to extreme concentration.
- MR4D 9y ago
  Why cut it? Explosives would be much easier (think IEDs), and could be improvised from simple sources like gasoline and petroleum jelly. No need for a tool to "cut" a power line, regardless of it being above or below ground.
- eyko 9y ago
  Then "evil state" bombs cables, or power plant. The point is that the cost of defending such a crucial part of our infrastructure would not be trivial, and it's still hosted on foreign soil, so... politics.
- petre 9y ago
  It has been done in Crimeea last year. Pro gear to cut HV cables = C4. How do you run an undersea cable through the desert?
Retric 9y ago
Renewable power is very much going to be a distributed more than our current power generation. Further, you want redundancy in power transmission so you can do maintenance anyway and many countries are already dependent on foreign sources for a significant chunk of there daily energy demand for economic reasons. Any actor that can destroy thousands of cables can cut the power systems we have now. Further, outside of city's you can generally get solar panels from a roof to provide power for the building under it making the grid a lot more redundant vs cutting cables.
- kpil 9y ago
  Exactly, while Sahara is obviously sunny and the land is cheap, it might not be the best place to place solar plants, due to the logistics. I think that roof top solar is just as viable in more or less the whole Europe - even in the Nordics, at least the southern parts. The only thing that would make desert-sized solar plants a really good business would be really cheap low efficiency cells.
Panoramix 9y ago
"just cut the cables" Not that easy. Furthermore, it's the same for any large power plant of any type. This is a very poor argument against solar. It's also a stretch to imagine that Europe would rely on a single power plant for its sustenance.
- hueving 9y ago
  The commenter is literally suggesting that it rely on a giant solar deployment.
jandrese 9y ago
Seems a lot easier to fix a cable cut than a sabotaged nuclear power plant. I mean if you are the point where a nation-state is detonating fuel-air explosives over solar farms then there's probably no power plant design that is going to survive.
foxylad 9y ago
> ...one just cuts the cables Isn't this a problem with any centralised electrical power source? In fact I've always thought that terrorists could cause far more disruption by taking out a couple of transmission line towers than blowing people up. And it would only take a decent sized spanner in many cases. The only solution to this (and to the massive resistive losses over power lines) is localising power production. And that's where solar, wind, small-scale hydro and local battery storage look very effective.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago

You can't just walk up to coal or nuclear plant and blow it up either. If you wanted to take a power plant offline, solar included, you would target the grid connection wiring or the high volatage transformers.