Preppers’ PING!
ping
The damn sky is ffffalling too; wear a hardhat when you go outdoors!
I have a number of alternatives to getting juice from the usual outlets.
FYI
Sounds like “Marketing Your Documentary 101”.
Similar lesson to “Teasing your Local Newscast 101” — “It could be deadly, and it may be on your dinner table. News at 10.”
SnakeDoc
How? Wait for a Sunny and hot day. Shut down Smart Grid compliant AC units - then turn them all back on, at the same time. This will cause a "Brown-out", cascade the "Brown Out" across numerous nodes, such that any attempts to over-come the power surge are met with minimal power - this then becomes a "Cascading Power Failure".
It's what I would do, if I wanted to attack an infrastructure. However, this is an overt 'Act of War', but with Zero in charge - I suspect a mild written rebuke would be called for, and possibly followed by 20+ more slightly stronger worded rebukes.
hyperbole
But think of how much less coal we’ll burn when the grid goes down. /s
Since I work in the industry providing automation solutions to companies such as these I think I may be able to help reassure those that still at least have one foot on the ground.
Many of the companies that provide electricity to the grid are not running windows to power their systems, they are still running everything on UNIX. They simply cannot upgrade because they have a 100% up-time requirement.
Those that are running on Windows based systems are under a very rigid security requirement from the government. These security requirements are mandated, they have no choice. Even the USB slots on these machines are blocked out from use.
Such systems are NEVER on the greater internet. They are on a localized intranet and not accessible from the outside world. Someone would have to get in on the inside AND have administrator privs to infect anything.
So what is at risk? Perhaps 1% of the systems and thus the grid.
100% Certainty? Really?
I don’t have 100% Certainty that I’m going to take my next breat
I'm calling BS on this. No computer can have guaranteed 100% up time, I don't care how "critical" it is.
I've worked on high availability systems. Regular, rigorous, preventive system maintenance is an absolute part of a system like this. This is accomplished by having dual systems, shared, redundant, network attached data systems, etc.
Part of a system like this can be taken off line (and shutdown if necessary) for maintenance without affecting the rest of the system. "100% uptime" is a myth.
Let’s see. The electric company came out and installed one against my protest. A few says later my whole house electricity blew and I had to pay a thousand dollars to fix it So much smart meters.
The electric company forced me to have one installed. A couple of days later my my entire house had no electricity. It cost me a thousand dollars to fix it. So much for smart meters.
When this happens and it will you need an alternative energy source ready to crank up. Otherwise you will live in misery.
The EPA shutdown of coal burning generating plants will without question lead to rolling blackouts in parts of the country during the first heat wave this summer.
From a smart meter designer: 100% certainty of this article being 100% hyperbole.
There are many things that could take down the grid. Smart meters aren't among them.
The fool that wrote this screed isn’t even aware that the fuse has been invented, and broadly deployed.