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> In the Netherlands alone, these solar panels generate a power output equivalent to at least 25 medium sized nuclear power plants. Since this didn't pass the

> In the Netherlands alone, these solar panels generate a power output equivalent to at least 25 medium sized nuclear power plants. Since this didn't pass the smell test: the author is looking at nameplate capacity, which is a completely useless metric for variable electricity production sources (a solar panel in my sunless basement has the same nameplate capacity as the same panel installed in the Sahara desert). Looking at actual yearly energy generation data, this is more like 1.5 times the generation of an average nuclear power plant (NL solar production in 2023: 21TWh, US nuclear production in 2021: 778TWh by 54 plants). Which maybe puts more into perspective the actual risks involved here. I'm not saying there shouldn't be more regulations and significantly better security practices, but otoh you could likely drive a big truck into the right power poles and cause a similar sized outage.

epistasis 2y ago
You are talking about energy, which is not the same thing as power. TWh == energy, GW == power. The distinction is important, especially in the Netherlands, which has a capacity factor of only about 10%-15%, whereas most of the US will be at least 20%-25%, which is twice as high. I'm not sure of the typical number of reactors in the Netherlands, but using the US average of 1.6/power plant may not be the most representative comparison.
- delroth 2y ago
  I have no idea what you're talking about, since nowhere did I use solar capacity factor data nor did I look at number of reactors per plant.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    You are using both with your energy generated numbers. That's where they come from. Your solar TWh comes from 25GW at ~15% capacity factor, and to get your nuclear numbers you're looking at 1.6GW for each of nuclear "plants" when each reactor is usually about 1GW or less. There are ~90 reactors in the US, at 54 plants. The article is assuming 1 reactor per plant for the Netherlands.
    - ossyrial 2y ago
      > The article is assuming 1 reactor per plant for the Netherlands. Small addition that isn't mentioned in the English version of the article, but only in the original Dutch version: the article talks specifically about the Borssele power station [0] (which has a power output of 485MW). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borssele_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borssele_Nuclear_Power_Station
- kkfx 2y ago
  The point is about instant power injected, not energy, the point is that keep an AC grid at the right frequency it's a tricky business because energy production and consumption must match. Too much from production the frequency skyrocket, little production the frequency plunge. Now classic grids are designed on large areas to average the load for big power plants, this way those plant see small instantaneous change in their output demand, let's say a 50MW power plant see 100-300kW instantaneous change, that's something they can handle quick enough. With massive p.v., eolic etc grid demand might change MUCH more for big power plant, like a 50MW P.P. need to scale back or power up of 10MW suddenly and that's way too much to sustain. When this happen if the demand is too much the frequency plunge, grid dispatcher operators have to cut off large areas to lower the demand (so called rolling blackouts), when the demand drop too quickly the frequency skyrocket and large PP can't scale back fast enough so they simply disconnect. Disconnecting the generation fall and the frequency stabilize, unfortunately most p.v. is grid tied, if a p.p. disconnect most p.v. inverters who have seen the frequency spike disconnect as well creating a cascading effect of quickly alternating too low and too high frequency causing vast area blackouts. Long story short a potential attack is simply planting a command "at solar noon of 26 June stop injecting to the grid, keep not injecting till solar noon + 5'", with just "1 second or so" (due to eventual time sync issues) all inverters of a certain brand might stop injecting, making the generation fall, a bit of rolling blackouts and large pp compensate quickly. Than the 5' counter stop, all inverters restart injecting en-masse, while the large pp are full power as well, the frequency skyrocket, large pp disconnect causing most grid-tied inverter to follow them, there are large change an entire geographic segment of a grid fall. Interconnection operators in such little time do not know what to do and quickly the blackout might became even larger with almost all interconnection going down to protect active parts of the grid, causing more frequency instability and so more blackouts. Such attack might led to some days without power.
1053r 2y ago
For the purposes of information security, the nameplate capacity is the correct number to consider for a very simple reason: we must defend as if hackers will pick the absolute worst moment to attack the grid. That is the moment when the sun is shining and it's absolutely cloudless across Netherlands, California, Germany, or wherever their target grid is. At that moment, the attacker will not only blast the grid with the full output of the solar panels, but they will also put any attached batteries into full discharge mode as well, bypassing any safeties built into the firmware with new firmware. We must consider the worst case, which is that the attacker is trying to not only physically break the inverters, but the batteries, solar panels, blow fuses, and burn out substations. (Consider that if the inverters burn out and start fires, that's a feature for the attacker rather than a bug!) So yes, not only is it 25 medium sized nuclear power plants, it's probably much higher than that! And worse, that number is growing exponentially with each year of the renewable transition. This was probably the scariest security expose in a long time. It's much much worse than some zero-day for iphones. A bad iPhone bug might kill a few people who can't call emergency services, and cause a couple billion of diffuse economic damage across the world. This set of bugs might kill tens of thousands by blowing up substations and causing outages at thousands to millions of homes, businesses, and factories during a heat wave. And the economic damage will not only be much higher, it will be concentrated.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  While I agree that the important metric to consider is peak output and not average output, I would still guess that in a country like the Netherlands that peak output is nowhere near nameplate capacity.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 2y ago
    You can get close to peak output just about anywhere, assuming the panels are angled rather than laying flat. You just can’t get it for very long in most locations.
eldaisfish 2y ago
you are splitting hairs about the wrong issue. When it is sunny in the netherlands, it is likely sunny everywhere in NL because of how small the country is. This is the situation where having so much solar power capacity (kW) is dangerous. The risk scales with energy output but it would not term nameplate capacity a "completely useless metric".
- hinkley 2y ago
  I dunno. I lived next to a small inland sea most of my adult life. The number of times someone on the other side of town asserted it was raining when in fact it was not was quite high. Every adult in Seattle eventually has to learn that if you have an activity planned on the other side of town, if you cancel it because it’s raining at your house you’re not going to get anything done. You have to phone a friend or just show up and then decide if you’re going to cancel due to weather. Now to be fair, in the case of Seattle, there’s a mountain that multiplies this effect north versus south. NL doesn’t have that, but if you look at the weather satellite at the time of my writing, there are long narrow strips of precip over England that are taller but much narrower than NL.
  - eldaisfish 2y ago
    clouds and rain do not behave the same as the sun. What point are you trying to make here?
    - hinkley 2y ago
      If you’re not talking about day and night, summer winter cycles, then the sun’s behavior is the inverse of the union of clouds and pollution. Do you know why microinverters exist? They exist because panels next to each other can see different light, and without the micro inverter the entire chain produces no power at all if one of the panels in series is generating no power. So we use microinverters to rescue power stranded by trees, debris, or partial cloud cover.
  - Aachen 2y ago
    "Sometimes it rained in a part of town only" does not disprove the person saying "it can be sunny virtually everywhere at the same time in a small country" For a simple demonstration, https://www.buienradar.nl/nederland/zon-en-wolken/wolkenradar/24uurs https://www.buienradar.nl/nederland/zon-en-wolken/wolkenrada... has been showing cloudless hours pretty regularly in the last month. Someone meaning malice can certainly keep an eye on that for a few days to find a good moment
hinkley 2y ago
If memory serves, and I’ll admit it’s pretty fuzzy, the US tends to make ridiculously large nuclear reactors and Europe has an easier regulatory situation so they make more of them and smaller. So in addition to the other stuff people mentioned, you might be off by another factor of 2 there. They also said “medium sized” so let’s call it 3.
- mandevil 2y ago
  This might have been true back in the 1970s, but at least as far as current development goes, is not. The only new (non-Russian) European design built in the past 15 years is the EPR at 1600 MW. The only new American design built in the past 15 years is the AP1000 which as the name suggests is 1000 MW (technically 1100). AP1000 uses a massively simplified design to try and be much safer than other designs (NRC calculations say something like an order of magnitude) but is not cost competitive against most other forms of power generation. Which is why after Vogtle 3 and 4 there are no plans for more of them in the US. It's not that EPR is any better- they are actually doing worse in terms of money and time slippage than Vogtle did. Flamanville 3 had it's first concrete poured in 2007 and still hasn't generated a single net watt! It turns out that the pause in building nuclear reactors in the west from about 1995-2005- both US (which actually was longer, from the early 1980's, after 3 Mile Island things still under construction were finished but nothing new was built) and Western Europe (after Chernobyl following a similar path) basically gutted the nuclear construction industries in both, and they haven't built back up. The Russians kept at it, and the South Koreans have moved in to the market (and China is building a huge number domestically, though I don't think they've built any internationally), but Western Europe and the US are far behind, and after Fukushima Daiishi I strongly suspect the Japanese are in the same boat. Without the trained workers you can't build these in any predictable way, and when you pause construction for a decade you lose all of the trained workers and it's really hard to build that workforce back up again.
cesarb 2y ago
> the author is looking at nameplate capacity, which is a completely useless metric for variable electricity production sources For solar panels, the nameplate capacity is usually also the power generated at the peak production time, which is the moment when an attacker turning off all inverters at the same time would have the most impact. That is: for an attack (or any other failure), the most important metric is not the total power produced, but the instantaneous power production, which is the amount which has to be absorbed by the "spinning reserve" of other power plants when one power plant suddenly goes offline.
- wiredfool 2y ago
  No, the nameplate capacity is what a solar panel will produce under perfect lighting, independent of the site where it's installed. The peak theoretical power output of a solar panel depends on where it's installed, inclination, temperature, elevation, and so on. The actual peak power is going to take weather and dirty panels into account. 1kw nameplate in Ireland (or the Netherlands) is never going to give you an instantaneous 1kw output -- you're going to be lucky to see 60% of that.
  - misiek08 2y ago
    But 60% of 25GW is less than 3GW? You need to take down more capacity than the buffer and power plants will disconnect from grid for fail-safe. Bringing grid up alone maybe will take days or few, but all the appliances out there will be down for weeks.. ClownStrike brought us pen-written boarding passes, glad we don’t install crapware on hospitals hardware
- preisschild 2y ago
  No. You will definitely not get peak capacity even in the sahara. They got those numbers under perfect conditions in a laboratory, not under real circumstances.
  - deanishe 2y ago
    Solar panels don't work as well when they're hot, do they?
bramblerose 2y ago
It's the power output that is relevant for the failure mode described in the article, not the yearly production. And in terms of power output, 20GW is an incredibly common number for peak solar production (see e.g. https://energieopwek.nl/ https://energieopwek.nl/ at the end of Jul this year) in summer. Borssele (the medium-sized power plant named in the article) has a 485MWe net output. So yes, we _are_ talking about >25 mid-sized nuclear power plants!
verisimi 2y ago
Not only that, solar is entirely misaligned with power requirements. Over the year it may be 1.5 over nuclear, but in the winter, when demand is highest, the amount of energy provided will be far less, on account of short days and low light - typically you get 1/10 of the energy in winter that you do in comparison to a summer day. So overproduction when unrequired, underproduction when required.
Aachen 2y ago
> (a solar panel in my sunless basement has the same nameplate capacity as the same panel installed in the Sahara desert). Isn't latitude taken into account by grid operators for determining their expected peak output? The owners would otherwise be installing bigger (more expensive) converters than needed, so they'd know this value at least roughly. Even smarter would be to include the angle etc. but not sure what detail it goes into compared to latitude which is a very well-known and exceedingly easy to look up value for an area I certainly see your point about it not being apples to apples, but on a cloudless summer day, the output afaik genuinely would be the stated figure (less degradation and capacity issues). The country is small enough that it's also not unlikely that we all have a cloudless day at the same time One might well expect some sun in summer and put some of the used-in-winter gas works into maintenance or, in the future, count on summer production of hydrogen— although hacks are likely a transient issue so I wouldn't foresee significant problems there
franga2000 2y ago
> but otoh you could likely drive a big truck into the right power poles and cause a similar sized outage I get your comparison and the following is probably obvious to most people, but I feel like it really needs to be said: this requires being there, having a truck and the willingness to risk almost certain jail time, whereas taking down all SolarEdge installations on the planet could probably be done by an anonymous teenager in a foreign country with nothing but a computer and TOR client. (I mention SolarEdge because I just had to deal with one of their systems and it pissed me off, I don't actually know of any vulns)

epistasis 2y ago

You are talking about energy, which is not the same thing as power. TWh == energy, GW == power. The distinction is important, especially in the Netherlands, which has a capacity factor of only about 10%-15%, whereas most of the US will be at least 20%-25%, which is twice as high. I'm not sure of the typical number of reactors in the Netherlands, but using the US average of 1.6/power plant may not be the most representative comparison.

delroth 2y ago
I have no idea what you're talking about, since nowhere did I use solar capacity factor data nor did I look at number of reactors per plant.
- epistasis 2y ago
  You are using both with your energy generated numbers. That's where they come from. Your solar TWh comes from 25GW at ~15% capacity factor, and to get your nuclear numbers you're looking at 1.6GW for each of nuclear "plants" when each reactor is usually about 1GW or less. There are ~90 reactors in the US, at 54 plants. The article is assuming 1 reactor per plant for the Netherlands.
  - ossyrial 2y ago
    > The article is assuming 1 reactor per plant for the Netherlands. Small addition that isn't mentioned in the English version of the article, but only in the original Dutch version: the article talks specifically about the Borssele power station [0] (which has a power output of 485MW). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borssele_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borssele_Nuclear_Power_Station
kkfx 2y ago
The point is about instant power injected, not energy, the point is that keep an AC grid at the right frequency it's a tricky business because energy production and consumption must match. Too much from production the frequency skyrocket, little production the frequency plunge. Now classic grids are designed on large areas to average the load for big power plants, this way those plant see small instantaneous change in their output demand, let's say a 50MW power plant see 100-300kW instantaneous change, that's something they can handle quick enough. With massive p.v., eolic etc grid demand might change MUCH more for big power plant, like a 50MW P.P. need to scale back or power up of 10MW suddenly and that's way too much to sustain. When this happen if the demand is too much the frequency plunge, grid dispatcher operators have to cut off large areas to lower the demand (so called rolling blackouts), when the demand drop too quickly the frequency skyrocket and large PP can't scale back fast enough so they simply disconnect. Disconnecting the generation fall and the frequency stabilize, unfortunately most p.v. is grid tied, if a p.p. disconnect most p.v. inverters who have seen the frequency spike disconnect as well creating a cascading effect of quickly alternating too low and too high frequency causing vast area blackouts. Long story short a potential attack is simply planting a command "at solar noon of 26 June stop injecting to the grid, keep not injecting till solar noon + 5'", with just "1 second or so" (due to eventual time sync issues) all inverters of a certain brand might stop injecting, making the generation fall, a bit of rolling blackouts and large pp compensate quickly. Than the 5' counter stop, all inverters restart injecting en-masse, while the large pp are full power as well, the frequency skyrocket, large pp disconnect causing most grid-tied inverter to follow them, there are large change an entire geographic segment of a grid fall. Interconnection operators in such little time do not know what to do and quickly the blackout might became even larger with almost all interconnection going down to protect active parts of the grid, causing more frequency instability and so more blackouts. Such attack might led to some days without power.

1053r 2y ago

For the purposes of information security, the nameplate capacity is the correct number to consider for a very simple reason: we must defend as if hackers will pick the absolute worst moment to attack the grid. That is the moment when the sun is shining and it's absolutely cloudless across Netherlands, California, Germany, or wherever their target grid is. At that moment, the attacker will not only blast the grid with the full output of the solar panels, but they will also put any attached batteries into full discharge mode as well, bypassing any safeties built into the firmware with new firmware. We must consider the worst case, which is that the attacker is trying to not only physically break the inverters, but the batteries, solar panels, blow fuses, and burn out substations. (Consider that if the inverters burn out and start fires, that's a feature for the attacker rather than a bug!) So yes, not only is it 25 medium sized nuclear power plants, it's probably much higher than that! And worse, that number is growing exponentially with each year of the renewable transition. This was probably the scariest security expose in a long time. It's much much worse than some zero-day for iphones. A bad iPhone bug might kill a few people who can't call emergency services, and cause a couple billion of diffuse economic damage across the world. This set of bugs might kill tens of thousands by blowing up substations and causing outages at thousands to millions of homes, businesses, and factories during a heat wave. And the economic damage will not only be much higher, it will be concentrated.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
While I agree that the important metric to consider is peak output and not average output, I would still guess that in a country like the Netherlands that peak output is nowhere near nameplate capacity.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 2y ago
  You can get close to peak output just about anywhere, assuming the panels are angled rather than laying flat. You just can’t get it for very long in most locations.

eldaisfish 2y ago

you are splitting hairs about the wrong issue. When it is sunny in the netherlands, it is likely sunny everywhere in NL because of how small the country is. This is the situation where having so much solar power capacity (kW) is dangerous. The risk scales with energy output but it would not term nameplate capacity a "completely useless metric".

hinkley 2y ago
I dunno. I lived next to a small inland sea most of my adult life. The number of times someone on the other side of town asserted it was raining when in fact it was not was quite high. Every adult in Seattle eventually has to learn that if you have an activity planned on the other side of town, if you cancel it because it’s raining at your house you’re not going to get anything done. You have to phone a friend or just show up and then decide if you’re going to cancel due to weather. Now to be fair, in the case of Seattle, there’s a mountain that multiplies this effect north versus south. NL doesn’t have that, but if you look at the weather satellite at the time of my writing, there are long narrow strips of precip over England that are taller but much narrower than NL.
- eldaisfish 2y ago
  clouds and rain do not behave the same as the sun. What point are you trying to make here?
  - hinkley 2y ago
    If you’re not talking about day and night, summer winter cycles, then the sun’s behavior is the inverse of the union of clouds and pollution. Do you know why microinverters exist? They exist because panels next to each other can see different light, and without the micro inverter the entire chain produces no power at all if one of the panels in series is generating no power. So we use microinverters to rescue power stranded by trees, debris, or partial cloud cover.
- Aachen 2y ago
  "Sometimes it rained in a part of town only" does not disprove the person saying "it can be sunny virtually everywhere at the same time in a small country" For a simple demonstration, https://www.buienradar.nl/nederland/zon-en-wolken/wolkenradar/24uurs https://www.buienradar.nl/nederland/zon-en-wolken/wolkenrada... has been showing cloudless hours pretty regularly in the last month. Someone meaning malice can certainly keep an eye on that for a few days to find a good moment

hinkley 2y ago

If memory serves, and I’ll admit it’s pretty fuzzy, the US tends to make ridiculously large nuclear reactors and Europe has an easier regulatory situation so they make more of them and smaller. So in addition to the other stuff people mentioned, you might be off by another factor of 2 there. They also said “medium sized” so let’s call it 3.

mandevil 2y ago
This might have been true back in the 1970s, but at least as far as current development goes, is not. The only new (non-Russian) European design built in the past 15 years is the EPR at 1600 MW. The only new American design built in the past 15 years is the AP1000 which as the name suggests is 1000 MW (technically 1100). AP1000 uses a massively simplified design to try and be much safer than other designs (NRC calculations say something like an order of magnitude) but is not cost competitive against most other forms of power generation. Which is why after Vogtle 3 and 4 there are no plans for more of them in the US. It's not that EPR is any better- they are actually doing worse in terms of money and time slippage than Vogtle did. Flamanville 3 had it's first concrete poured in 2007 and still hasn't generated a single net watt! It turns out that the pause in building nuclear reactors in the west from about 1995-2005- both US (which actually was longer, from the early 1980's, after 3 Mile Island things still under construction were finished but nothing new was built) and Western Europe (after Chernobyl following a similar path) basically gutted the nuclear construction industries in both, and they haven't built back up. The Russians kept at it, and the South Koreans have moved in to the market (and China is building a huge number domestically, though I don't think they've built any internationally), but Western Europe and the US are far behind, and after Fukushima Daiishi I strongly suspect the Japanese are in the same boat. Without the trained workers you can't build these in any predictable way, and when you pause construction for a decade you lose all of the trained workers and it's really hard to build that workforce back up again.

cesarb 2y ago

> the author is looking at nameplate capacity, which is a completely useless metric for variable electricity production sources For solar panels, the nameplate capacity is usually also the power generated at the peak production time, which is the moment when an attacker turning off all inverters at the same time would have the most impact. That is: for an attack (or any other failure), the most important metric is not the total power produced, but the instantaneous power production, which is the amount which has to be absorbed by the "spinning reserve" of other power plants when one power plant suddenly goes offline.

wiredfool 2y ago
No, the nameplate capacity is what a solar panel will produce under perfect lighting, independent of the site where it's installed. The peak theoretical power output of a solar panel depends on where it's installed, inclination, temperature, elevation, and so on. The actual peak power is going to take weather and dirty panels into account. 1kw nameplate in Ireland (or the Netherlands) is never going to give you an instantaneous 1kw output -- you're going to be lucky to see 60% of that.
- misiek08 2y ago
  But 60% of 25GW is less than 3GW? You need to take down more capacity than the buffer and power plants will disconnect from grid for fail-safe. Bringing grid up alone maybe will take days or few, but all the appliances out there will be down for weeks.. ClownStrike brought us pen-written boarding passes, glad we don’t install crapware on hospitals hardware
preisschild 2y ago
No. You will definitely not get peak capacity even in the sahara. They got those numbers under perfect conditions in a laboratory, not under real circumstances.
- deanishe 2y ago
  Solar panels don't work as well when they're hot, do they?

bramblerose 2y ago

It's the power output that is relevant for the failure mode described in the article, not the yearly production. And in terms of power output, 20GW is an incredibly common number for peak solar production (see e.g. https://energieopwek.nl/ https://energieopwek.nl/ at the end of Jul this year) in summer. Borssele (the medium-sized power plant named in the article) has a 485MWe net output. So yes, we _are_ talking about >25 mid-sized nuclear power plants!

verisimi 2y ago

Not only that, solar is entirely misaligned with power requirements. Over the year it may be 1.5 over nuclear, but in the winter, when demand is highest, the amount of energy provided will be far less, on account of short days and low light - typically you get 1/10 of the energy in winter that you do in comparison to a summer day. So overproduction when unrequired, underproduction when required.

Aachen 2y ago

> (a solar panel in my sunless basement has the same nameplate capacity as the same panel installed in the Sahara desert). Isn't latitude taken into account by grid operators for determining their expected peak output? The owners would otherwise be installing bigger (more expensive) converters than needed, so they'd know this value at least roughly. Even smarter would be to include the angle etc. but not sure what detail it goes into compared to latitude which is a very well-known and exceedingly easy to look up value for an area I certainly see your point about it not being apples to apples, but on a cloudless summer day, the output afaik genuinely would be the stated figure (less degradation and capacity issues). The country is small enough that it's also not unlikely that we all have a cloudless day at the same time One might well expect some sun in summer and put some of the used-in-winter gas works into maintenance or, in the future, count on summer production of hydrogen— although hacks are likely a transient issue so I wouldn't foresee significant problems there

franga2000 2y ago

> but otoh you could likely drive a big truck into the right power poles and cause a similar sized outage I get your comparison and the following is probably obvious to most people, but I feel like it really needs to be said: this requires being there, having a truck and the willingness to risk almost certain jail time, whereas taking down all SolarEdge installations on the planet could probably be done by an anonymous teenager in a foreign country with nothing but a computer and TOR client. (I mention SolarEdge because I just had to deal with one of their systems and it pissed me off, I don't actually know of any vulns)