Satellite outage knocks out thousands of Enercon's wind turbines
reuters.comI’m kind of confused, the headline says they’re out of operation, the article says they’re in auto mode.
My understanding (prior to this article) was that turbines normally ran autonomously anyway, so is this “they’re generating power in automatic mode”, or they’ve gone to some kind of automatic safe-mode? (I do know that just turning it off/applying brakes is insufficient for a general “safe” mode, but that’s at “I saw it on tv once” level not any technical knowledge)
I'm also confused as to why there is no communication cable like a fiber optic line to each one of these turbines along with the power cables. Am I missing something?
I'm guessing it's because someone said (reasonably) "we need to be able to manage these turbines if a line is taken out", so they went "ok, lets add radio/satellite or something". The next thing you do is go "we have that connection, why are we paying huge amounts of money on cable for data when we already have a radio?"
The article makes clear the turbines are running on "auto mode", out of communication with the manufacturer, and that owners are making arrangements to communicate with their turbines by other means than satellite links.
So, it did not "knock out" the turbines, it only knocked out communication with them. That reasonably upsets Enercon, and maybe Enercon's customers, but appears not to reduce the power output from the turbines, so probably shouldn't worry the rest of us much, if they can re-establish contact without relying on the satellite link, which they should do anyway, and if it does not mean that somebody else can take over control of the turbines.
Knowing how equipment is built these days, it would be not at all surprising if in fact it were easy to crack into these turbines' control channels and make them destroy themselves. That doesn't seem to be what has happened here, yet. But sometimes, forcing somebody to go to a backup control method is a first step in breaking in, if the backup method is more easily cracked into.
I wonder why they use satellite. Wind turbines are high up so it seems like a very good candidate for point-to-point line-of-sight microwave links.
Wind turbine blades can interfere microwave links.
I worked a few years as a telecom engineer in France: wind turbine promoters have to consult telecom operators to prevent disrupting existant MW links with their projects. The usual rule was to observe a 500m clearance between MW line-of-sight paths (1st Fresnel zone) and future wind turbine installations.
Edit: you can read more about all this in this paper: https://castlerockmicrowave.com/wp-content/uploads/Wind-Farm...
Well yeah and they are hardwired to at least one physically wired network: the energy grid. Why they don't have decent cabled inter/intranet is beyond me.
I don't think satellite internet is that much cheaper but, I might be wrong. I am no network engineer. Anyone who CAN comment on that?
They’re often placed on the sides of hills so presumably that’s a problem. UHF/VHF (I can never recall which sorry) is used for the rural radio links in NZ so can probably handle such issues.
I suspect the real answer though is that satellite theoretically everywhere regardless of geography on the installation site, so you only have to build one type of unit rather than multiple variants. That probably makes life easier (cheaper) for everyone.
Obviously that’s assuming a country doesn’t decide to disrupt entire communication networks in a murder rampage into their neighbouring countries.
I wonder why the use 'radio' at all, since they need a cable anyway. Too cheap to have tossed a fiber along it?
I feel stupid for not even thinking about it but you're absolutely correct.
I've meanwhile read that they are networked very well, with fibre even, but only between each other when built in a park/farm. And often very remote, far from other inftastructure. The problem arises at the transfer/injection point from the utitility one level up. Not always, but sometimes, and in different ways. It can happen that there is no 3/4g at all there. It can happen that the other utility isn't networked(in a usable way). It can happen that the other utility doesn't want to network for whichever reasons, security, etc. And it can happen that you get 1Gb/s symmetrical there.
Apparently Enercon choose to offer its clients this solution as 'carefree package', to spare them the regulatory/bureaurocratic hassle of having to deal with this.
They didn't consult IT before deploying the project.
Does Enercon sell turbines bundled with some sort of MRR remote management/service plan in place?
It sounds like the satellite access is for manufacturer support (Enercon) but the day to day operation is done by the power companies that own them, via other comms.
Beware device phone-home maybe? Guess at least this case sounds like just a DoS not access.