full-disclosure - The Grid, Blaster v. Poor Security Engineering

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Message-ID: <200308160637.h7G6bAU9018896@caligula.anu.edu.au>
From: avalon at caligula.anu.edu.au (Darren Reed)
Subject: The Grid, Blaster v. Poor Security Engineering

In some mail from Myers, Marvin, sie said:
> 
> Not only is it ridiculous, it goes against everything that the power
> companies have been telling us for years. If anyone has ever stood
> outside during a thunderstorm and watched lightening bounce back and
> forth across wires and transformers, then they will know that this is
> bull. A single lightening strike while being able to cause significant
> damage has never been proven able to bring down such a large portion of
> the grid in the past. And if this were the case, they would be showing
> the damage as soon as possible to quell and or stop the conspiracy and
> doomsday theorists in their tracks. 
[...]

In 1965, I think it was, it was a single circuit breaker that
caused the entire NE grid to fail.  It didn't get damaged, it
just tripped and that then caused others to trip - like dominos.
I don't recall if it was faulty, but if you wanted to show what
happened on tv, there would have been nothing to show.  I don't
even think it was a lightning strike, the load for a particular
line just became too much, so that breaker tripped, putting all
its load onto another line that then tripped because it had too
much and....so on.  The original breaker that tripped did exactly
what it had been designed and built to do.  It's just that the
consequences of that were not fully and properly understood and
if this past week's events are any indication, it would appear
that 38 years later, the same lesson(s) need to be relearnt.

Whilst it takes less than a minute for power to go out everywhere,
it takes much longer to restore it, as, for example, you have
large generators that need to be restarted only when there is a
load there to take the power they generate.

The problem is in building the grid to deal with redundancy,
it doesn't properly isolate failures that cause further problems
(overload.)

Want to find a root cause?  Probably one too many air conditioners
being turned on to deal with the heat.

Darren