4 ms·

The exact same thing that would happen today if some hacker ramped up production from a natural gas plant. Either the rest of the grid would respond by ramping

• FractalLP 8y ago
  Seconded. This isn't a new issue with storage, as SCADA is used everywhere. Look up the article from Wired on the Ukrainian Grid Cyber Attack. They got into the utilities operations center and started remotely opening circuit breakers and took out many key substations and then DDOS the phone systems so customers couldn't call in and let them know what was going on. Horrifying stuff.
• xg15 8y ago
  Makes sense. The one difference is see is the speed which you could ramp up the power and the amount of current you can draw. Even the fastest gas plant presumably needs a few seconds to power up - enough time for the network to react. Additionaly, the maximum power and current it can deliver is generally known. In contrast, the plan linked here basically proposes to build a giant distributed capacitor bank - with ever-growing capacity. From what I understand, purpose-built large capacitor banks are used to generate very short pulses of enormously large currents - e.g. to power experimental lasers, railguns or similar. Maybe my imagination runs wild here, but I see no reason a hacker with appropriate access couldn't do something similar - e.g. command all batteries to unload with the largest possible churrent at once and setup switches in such a way the current from all batteries is directed to a particular location. I'm don't know what you could do with the resulting pulse but probably nothing good.