Time to Get Prepared? AI Cyberattacks Could Literally Turn off Our Electricity and Cause an Extended Blackout at Any Moment

We live at a time when we are facing a relentless wave of AI cyberattacks, and they are becoming insanely sophisticated. On Monday, refrigeration units in supermarkets all over Europe were successfully attacked. But I am not going to talk about that today. In this article, I am going to talk about the sort of AI cyberattack that could turn off your electricity for an extended period of time. This is not a theoretical threat. Hackers have been repeatedly attacking Internet-exposed programmable logic controllers in recent months, and a successful attack could potentially plunge a large portion of the country into darkness right in the middle of the winter.

Out of curiosity, how does your AC (heat pump) work? Some loads seem too high for solar.

I have a variable speed heat pump with a variable speed air handler. In other words, it starts up with a low demand, unlike my traditional A/C unit did before it was replaced. I tried installing a soft starter on my old A/C and my solar inverter wouldn't start it (back when I had just one inverter and trying a small solar system for a year before putting more money into it and converting my two nat gas appliances to electric). My two solar inverters together provide up to 18kW AC continuous power (16kW AC continuous in off-grid mode). For surge power (i.e. starting up appliances) they produce 50kW AC together the first 100ms, and 32kW the first 10ms. Thus, they easily start the variable speed air handler and variable speed blower. And my electric water heater is a hybrid water heater ("hybrid" doesn't mean sometimes use nat gas, it means I can put it in either normal heat strips mode at 4kW, or use the built-in heat pump that runs at 380W).

By the way, the answer to your question of the inverters being able to start the HVAC matter only when disconnected from the grid. When connected to the grid, the inverters pull whatever's needed from the grid for starting appliances or any other power need. But yeah, it's been nice to power my whole home (including running the HVAC) during the few times we've had grid outages here. There have been a couple of grid-down times that I asked my wife to hold off on power consumption luxuries like getting in the hot tub unless the home battery stack is fully charged and there's enough sun to give us excess for luxury power (beyond the necessities we were already running) and I check the telemetry to make sure adding the hot tub doesn't exceed the 16kW continuous AC power of our inverters (when in off-grid mode).

Also, do you think the solar inverters can be hacked remotely?

Admittedly they could be if I kept them online. I can at any moment protect myself from that if I remove the wi-fi attachments from the side of the inverters (the wi-fi dongles are external and plug into the side ports of the inverters).

For now I like getting the telemetry data and importing it into my SQL DB to analyze the throughput relative to my power consumption habits and how that changes with the weather and how much the power company says I pulled from the grid vs what my inverters say was pulled from the grid, etc.

That gives me detailed information on things like: on the summer days it's really hot here in Alabama and, thus, I have to run the A/C a lot (consume more power), on those days the sky is almost always very sunny and, thus, I get a lot of free power to run the A/C. Thus, even if I have multiple rainy days in a row and have little free power, usually the outside temp is mild on those days and I don't have to run my HVAC a lot. End result, the days I "lose the battle" and have to pull some power from the grid tends to be days I don't need much power anyway. And the days I "win the battle" and don't have to pull any power from the grid tend to be days the HVAC has to run a lot (which are the days I really, really want to win the battle). Thus, my solar and other upgrades to the house saves me a lot of money by winning the battle on the days that matter most (power consumption wise) even if concede and don't spend enough money to make my home off-grid and wind up pulling from the grid some (on days I don't need much power anyway).

I wouldn't have been able to put on my software/data engineer hat and make the upgrade to my solar after the first year that made the most sense for my situation without the data (wifi dongles). An argument could be made, though, that the mission is accomplished and I should disconnect it from the internet for security purposes.

Unfortunately, organizations expose their systems to the internet (or other forms of communications access) as a trade-off for the exact thing this article is warning about.

If you cannot monitor and control systems remotely, it means you will have to respond physically, and if there are no qualified personnel on site, then you are adding a lot of latency to your response times.

In other words, these systems are exposed to attack BECAUSE organizations want to reduce production down time.

Part of this is the fault of not paying for manpower though. Why would you want to pay a technician to be on site at all times at some remote sub-station, or have to wait while one travels to it, when you could just build in systems for remotely monitoring, rerouting, restoring/rebooting your systems from a central location?

My wife actually talked me into putting up the solar system, and it was one of the best things we ever did.

Not quite the same conversation here. LOL Decentralized solar was my idea and I had to talk my wife into it. But she's very glad we did with our $87/month power bills (avg over the past 12 months) for our all-electric, 2,300 sq ft home and charging our EV for about 1,400 miles per month on just home charged miles alone. Our total monthly energy costs = the $87 power bill + about 8 to 10 gallons of gas (what little we drive our gas pickup) + swapping out the small propane tank for gas grilling. Plus long road trips (either power or gasoline for whichever vehicle we choose to drive). And my wife likes the fact that when the power goes out we've had plenty of solar and/or battery power to keep virtually all of our house running (only two or three circuits aren't on the emergency electrical panel).

But please tell other FReepers it's not a one-size-fits-all plan. You must do your research to make sure it's feasible for your power consumption habits and climate. And don't neglect doing common sense energy saving changes to the house (insulation, sealing gaps, replacing old HVAC with variable speed heat pump if you live in a warm area, etc.). And even if the research says that you're a good fit for solar, use a small system for a year to try it. If you like it, add onto it later with the knowledge of what components (i.e. more solar and/or more inverter capacity and/or more battery storage) would benefit you financially (economies of scale) more than harm you financially (law of diminishing returns).

I have two Sol-Ark 12kW indoor solar inverters (working in parallel). I wish I had a dollar for every time my inverters beep and warn that it had to disconnect from the grid for a few seconds over dirty power. But usually not the slightest blip in lights in my home. The inverters act as a first line of defense between my house and the grid. They're hybrid inverters. That means that the electrical panels aren't in the line between the meter and the inverters (like normal grid-tied inverters). The inverters have multiple circuits coming out of them and act like a traffic cop directing all electrical "traffic" between each entity in my system:

1) DC solar power coming from solar panels to inverters,
2) DC circuit from inverters to/from battery array,
3) AC circuit from inverters to electrical panels of home, and
4) AC circuit from meter (grid) to inverters.

It looks like this (minus the backup generator):

My inverters have a jack for hooking up a backup generator and can start/stop a generator automatically. But that jack can't be used for both a generator and what my inverters call "smart load". I use the smart load feature to save me tons of money on charging the EV. It powers a small electrical panel intermittently, only when the home battery stack is charged to 80% (configurable by me). The idea being that if the home batteries are charged that much I'll almost certainly power the home through the night without pulling from the grid. Thus of the two EV chargers we have, we usually use the one that's powered intermittently (most of our miles driven are charged by free power). If we come home in the EV with less than 100 or so miles of range, we charge it with the constantly powered charger (always on, but not always free). Topping off the EV at 80% charged (recommended top) gives a range of about 230 miles. If we come home with more than 100 miles range we plug in the intermittent charger (may or may not get charge, and if we do it may not top the EV at 80%). So a good sunny day of a free EV charge is enough for a few days in a row of free driving even if the next couple of days are rainy (no free power to charge) before we decide to quit hoping for a sunny day and charge with constant power.

There's a bus array of 18 lithium batteries, each 5Ah LifePo4's. Total of 90kWh storage, and can handle total of 90kW input/output. (In other words, if my 20kW of solar was to all be going into charging the batteries on a sunny day in which my home load was practically zero, the batteries can easily handle 20kW coming in. The same for if I'm drawing 18kW from the batteries to power the home at night.) The battery array doesn't offer the UPS logic directly --- it's understood that the inverters have the UPS logic for when to pull from the batteries. Usually I have the inverters set to not act like UPS but more in the logic of saving my money. In other words, the inverters will drain the batteries at night or on rainy times down to 30% left on SOC (strength of charge) before pulling from the grid. However, if the weatherman predicts a storm I might change the inverter settings to more of an UPS mode (high priority of keeping the batteries charged and only when they're fully charged is incoming solar power used to reduce grid pull).

I didn't think about my metal roof being used to shield from emp. How do you provide connectivity through the walls to the ground? And is it needed anyway? I've seen tests in which even small/sensitive electronics like laptops survive Emp through the air (just need a reboot). It's Emp transmitted on the electrical line going into the home that tends to cause damage, if I understand it correctly.

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